Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Police Failure and Campbell and Nixon

Not the garden variety of police, but those charged with the responsibility of maintaining an effective legislature by preventing corrosive corrupt praxis. There is an expectation that those at the highest levels of our institutions are able to prosecute their talents to their fullest. Yet that is clearly not the case. The problem is chiefly to do with transparency of process within government. We don't know what we need to know, and so the boundary between privacy and public gets lost.
I write as a private person, and so I reveal relevant aspects of myself so my readers may be able to gage how they should respond to what I write, I describe my agenda even as I prosecute it. I have had friends that are gay, although I am not gay. I am not homophobic. I have no special problem with Campbell being a minister and a gay man. Only Campbell hasn't been rolled for being gay, although that has been said by some special interest groups spokespeople. Neither was Campbell rolled for being bisexual. Campbell was rolled for risky sexual behavior for which he may have been blackmailed. At the end of the day, that may well have been the result when he was exposed by a channel 7 news reporter who apparently took umbrage at Campbell after a former lover, and mother of one of his three children, was exposed for incompetence. The affair is entirely sleazy. Campbell is the father, of two adult children, and a long time marriage partner of his wife. That he may have difficulty explaining things to them is not my fault, nor the publics, nor the reporter for channel 7. It is entirely his choice. Apparently it was an open secret in parliament, only the voters, and Kenneally, did not know.
Christine Nixon's abysmal performance during the forest fires which took many lives and her subsequent attempts at cover up are not localized either. She should never have been given the top job as she clearly wasn't capable of handling it and she shouldn't be enjoying the continued support she still does. However, those who put her in power had their reasons, and clearly they had nothing to do with her ability to prosecute the role. Now it has been released that she has lied to those who were challenged to ask the difficult questions about the deaths, and we are faced with a state premier spinning wildly over how to find the person who leaked the finding.
Nixon should never have been Chief of Police. Campbell should never have been Minister in government. The fact they were highlights a failure of governance .. and of policing. In the Campbell case, why weren't the ICAC on top of this? Why haven't they performed a risk assessment and limited the risk? Why is it that a journalist asking basic questions finds out the issue when anti corruption police charged with preventing corruption were caught flat footed? Why weren't other journalists asking the same questions earlier? Once the journalist knew, why did they have to have hard evidence and why did they have to go outside standard operating procedure?
A young woman (a former student of mine) died the other week. She had been apparently lured to her death by someone promising her that she could be able to serve others by helping hurt wildlife. What a contrast with Nixon and Campbell, who have prospered in service positions where they failed to serve. As with Paluzzano, we know that some things have not happened the way they were supposed to. The culture of secrecy in ALP governments has ruined the transparency needed to assure the public's confidence in governmental process. And not even the tragic loss of a young life casts much light in showing what is rotten.

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