The Integrity Commission

On a weekday morning at the Canberra Institute of Technology's Bruce campus, a first-year apprentice queues for a workshop that has run on the same ageing equipment for years. He has heard, vaguely, that the institute where he is training spent close to $8.7 million on outside consultants before he enrolled, and that it took the territory's anti-corruption watchdog roughly eight years — from the first contract in 2017 to the final adverse finding in 2025 — to say who was responsible. By the time the ACT Integrity Commission published its answer, the money was long spent, the executives involved had left their posts, and a new intake of apprentices had already queued for the same equipment. That gap, between when public money moves and when an independent body tells the public what happened to it, is the practical test of any integrity commission. It is a test the ACT's is only partway through passing.

What the government did

For the ACT's first three decades of self-government, the territory had no dedicated anti-corruption body. Oversight of the executive rested with the Auditor-General, who audits financial statements and program administration but cannot compel evidence or make corrupt-conduct findings; the Ombudsman, who investigates maladministration complaints but lacks hearing powers; and the unicameral Legislative Assembly's own committees. That changed after the 2016 election, when ACT Labor and the Greens signed a Parliamentary Agreement for the Ninth Assembly committing the government to legislate an independent integrity commission "broadly structured on those operating in similarly sized jurisdictions." A parliamentary committee inquiry examined models used elsewhere, and the Assembly passed the Integrity Commission Bill on 29 November 2018; the Integrity Commission Act 2018 was notified on the ACT Legislation Register on 11 December 2018. The 2018–19 Budget allocated $8.4 million over four years to establish the body — an investigative unit, hearing rooms with security glass and evidence storage, and a chief executive, for a public service numbering in the tens of thousands.

The Commission began accepting complaints from December 2019 (approx.) and opened purpose-built hearing premises soon after. Its jurisdiction covers serious and systemic corrupt conduct, substantial maladministration, and conduct posing a serious danger to public health, safety or the environment, across ACT directorates, statutory authorities and territory-owned entities such as the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT). Its first head, the Hon. Dennis Cowdroy AO QC, a former Federal Court judge, resigned within roughly a year of taking the role, in late 2020. The Assembly's Speaker then appointed Michael Adams KC, a former New South Wales Supreme Court judge, as acting Commissioner from January 2021 and substantively from 6 May 2021, a role he still holds.

The evidence

The record since 2019 shows a Commission capable of serious findings, run on a resourcing base its own commissioners have publicly called inadequate.

Those figures sit against a workload that has grown faster than the Commission's headcount. The ACT Ombudsman, who as statutory Inspector oversees the Commission's own conduct, reported a "relatively significant increase" in complaint volumes reaching the Commission, attributing it partly to a maturing integrity framework and partly to rising public awareness of its work. Operation Luna alone required the Commission to examine well over a million documents (approx.) covering six consultancy contracts, a scale of task that outstripped the Commission's original design: Commissioner Michael Adams has said publicly that the Commission is under-resourced and "lacking the tools it needs," including the power to intercept telecommunications or draw on Australian Federal Police intelligence holdings that a comparable state body could access. The Commission's own procurement has not escaped scrutiny either. In September 2023, the Ombudsman found that a $150,000 contract ACTIC awarded to its own outgoing chief executive, without a competitive process, appeared to breach that officer's statutory duty to avoid conflicts of interest, and that the procurement lacked the probity controls needed to withstand public scrutiny. The Commission disputed that any law was breached; the Assembly's own Standing Committee on the Integrity Commission and Statutory Office Holders was less generous, saying the watchdog needed to be "exemplary, not simply 'adequate'," in its own compliance.

The government's own review has already opened the more searching version of that debate. A discussion paper on the Commission's purpose and jurisdiction, issued as part of a statutory review of the Act, canvassed narrowing its remit further so that non-serious matters are triaged out entirely, on the model later adopted for the Commonwealth's own body, and separately considered how far back its retrospective powers should reach. The ACT was administered directly by the Commonwealth until self-government began in 1989, and the paper weighed whether investigating conduct from that far back is workable given how much evidence and how many witnesses are lost after three or four decades. Both questions cut the same way: a commission already short of staff and legal capacity is being asked whether it should do less, not more, even as the government it oversees approaches a quarter-century in office. No legislative response to the discussion paper's options had been enacted by the time of writing.

The critique

Put together, the record supports four criticisms — not of the Commission's people, but of the system the Assembly built around them.

First, resourcing has trailed the job by design, not accident. An inaugural Commissioner who resigned within a year publicly warned the government that a commission without "critical mass" and "genuine teeth" would become "just a complaint processing organisation." Three budgets later, his successor was still describing the Commission as under-resourced. A $940,000 top-up in 2023–24 helped, but it followed, rather than anticipated, a workload that had already forced the Commission to comb through well over a million documents for a single investigation into one government-owned institution. A government that fully funded the body it promised in a Parliamentary Agreement would not need its own Commissioners to keep making that case publicly, budget after budget.

Second, the Commission's jurisdiction stops well short of everyday integrity. By design, it investigates only serious and systemic corrupt conduct, substantial maladministration, or conduct that endangers health, safety or the environment — a threshold similar to the one later adopted for the Commonwealth's National Anti-Corruption Commission. That is a defensible design choice for a small territory that cannot resource an ICAC-scale body. But it means the ordinary texture of prolonged single-party administration — recurring conflicts of interest, informal lobbying, favoured contractors, decisions that are merely poor rather than corrupt — is left to internal agency processes and an Ombudsman with no hearing powers, in a political environment where one governing bloc has set the Assembly's agenda for over two decades.

Third, the Commission has struggled to hold itself to the standard it applies to others. The Ombudsman's 2023 finding that ACTIC awarded a $150,000 contract to its own departing chief executive without competition, and that the process lacked adequate probity controls, is a serious matter for a body whose entire authority rests on demonstrating that public power is being exercised properly. That the Commission publicly disputed any breach of law, rather than accepting the finding, and that its own oversight committee felt compelled to demand it be "exemplary, not simply 'adequate'," suggests an institution still learning the discipline it exists to enforce in others.

Fourth, and structurally, the ACT has none of the countervailing checks that soften these problems in bicameral states. There is no upper house to independently compel documents, hold estimates hearings, or refer matters without the government's cooperation; the Legislative Assembly is also the territory's only layer of elected government, so there is no separate local-council tier providing an additional, independently elected set of eyes on service delivery and procurement. Political donations above $1,000 must be disclosed, but the ACT has no cap on how much may be donated, and the register that governs lobbyist access to ministers and public servants exists only as a continuing resolution of the Assembly, alterable by ordinary majority vote rather than legislative amendment — in an Assembly one governing bloc has controlled without interruption since 2001, across three Chief Ministers and seven consecutive elections, including a seventh term won in 2024 with the Greens providing confidence and supply rather than holding the Cabinet seats they had held the previous term.

In a jurisdiction with one governing bloc and one chamber, the strength of the integrity commission is the strength of the entire accountability system — there is no second body to fall back on.

Every one of these gaps could be closed inside the current structure; as at the time of writing, none had been.