In May 2014, Steve Pearce sat in the witness box of a Sydney hearing room while television cameras carried his testimony live into the state's loungerooms. He was the Deputy Commissioner of the NSW State Emergency Service, and the Independent Commission Against Corruption was investigating claims of favouritism and reprisal inside the organisation. When ICAC's report landed that same month, it found his boss, SES Commissioner Murray Kear, had engaged in corrupt conduct. It made no finding of corrupt conduct against Pearce. The clearance came after his name had already run beside the word "corrupt" in headlines for weeks, and Pearce later said publicly that the process left him feeling "crucified." His case sits at the centre of an argument New South Wales has been having with itself for nearly four decades: a corruption watchdog with genuine power to expose the state's public life must also decide what it owes the people it investigates but, in the end, does not condemn.
New South Wales built that watchdog first, in 1988, and every other Australian jurisdiction has since copied some version of it. It has forced the resignation of two premiers, sent a Cabinet minister and a Labor powerbroker to prison, and in 2023 made its most consequential finding yet, against a third former premier, upheld on appeal in 2024. It has also become the subject of a genuine argument about who pays for it and how fairly it treats people it never actually finds did anything wrong — arguments that matter because NSW governments of both major parties control tens of billions of dollars a year in grants, contracts, rezonings and infrastructure decisions where corrupt conduct is genuinely possible, and ICAC is the primary mechanism built to catch it.
A commission forged by scandal
ICAC was created by the Independent Commission Against Corruption Act 1988 (NSW), under the Greiner Coalition government, after a decade in which NSW public life had been rattled by the "Age tapes" revelations and the 1987 conviction of a former Labor minister, Rex Jackson, for selling early prison release to inmates' families. It was the first standing anti-corruption commission in Australia with the power to hold public hearings, and its model of public hearings, coercive powers and published findings naming individuals has since been adapted by every other state and by the Commonwealth's National Anti-Corruption Commission. It has proved, from its first years, willing to turn on the government that created it.
In 1992, ICAC found that Premier Nick Greiner himself, along with a minister, had engaged in corrupt conduct by appointing a rival MP, Terry Metherell, to a senior public service role to engineer a by-election. Greiner resigned within days of the finding, then successfully challenged it: in August 1992 the NSW Court of Appeal, 2-1, ruled ICAC had exceeded its jurisdiction under the Act's original definition of corrupt conduct and quashed the finding. Two decades later, in July 2013, ICAC's Operation Jasper found that Eddie Obeid — a former Labor minister and factional powerbroker — and former minister Ian Macdonald had engaged in corrupt conduct over a coal exploration licence at Mount Penny in the Bylong Valley, arranged to benefit land the Obeid family secretly held. Both men were later criminally convicted of misconduct in public office: Macdonald was sentenced in 2017 to ten years' imprisonment with a seven-year non-parole period; Obeid was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to seven years.
The Liberal-National side of politics has had its own reckonings. In April 2014, Premier Barry O'Farrell resigned after ICAC's Operation Spicer heard evidence — including a handwritten thank-you note — that contradicted his sworn denial of ever receiving a $3,000 bottle of 1959 Penfolds Grange from a company executive; ICAC made no corrupt-conduct finding against O'Farrell personally, but the "memory fail" ended his premiership within a day. The most significant recent finding is Operation Keppel: on 29 June 2023, ICAC found that former Premier Gladys Berejiklian engaged in serious corrupt conduct by failing to report her suspicion that her secret partner, then-MP Daryl Maguire, might be engaged in corrupt conduct, and by taking part in funding decisions for his electorate — including a $5.5 million grant to the Australian Clay Target Association — without disclosing their relationship. Berejiklian challenged the finding; on 26 July 2024 the NSW Court of Appeal dismissed her case in a 2-1 split decision, upholding ICAC's finding, with the dissenting judge finding she should have succeeded.
What the Minns Government has done
Chris Minns became Premier in March 2023, three months before the Berejiklian finding was released, and his government has largely operated as custodian of a watchdog it neither built nor chose. It kept John Hatzistergos, a former Labor Attorney-General appointed Chief Commissioner in August 2022 under the previous Coalition government, in the role for the balance of his five-year term. After years of ICAC and the NSW Auditor-General warning that Cabinet-set budgets for the agencies that scrutinise it create an inherent conflict of interest, the Minns Government published a Treasurer's Direction on 6 August 2024 establishing a "Charter of Independence" for five integrity agencies — the Audit Office, ICAC, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, the Electoral Commission and the Ombudsman — giving them direct access to Cabinet's Expenditure Review Committee during budget preparation. Parliament followed on 18 September 2024 with amendments to the Government Sector Finance Act 2018 requiring parliamentary committees to examine the five agencies' budget bids and the Treasurer to publicly explain any shortfall. Real money came with it: an additional $228.6 million over ten years for the five agencies, starting in the 2023-24 Budget, plus a $20 million contingency fund.
The Government has also been on the receiving end of ICAC's attention. In December 2024, a NSW parliamentary committee — over Labor members' objections — referred to ICAC a report questioning whether Minns had properly disclosed his relationship with a figure connected to the proposed redevelopment of Rosehill Racecourse; ICAC decided not to open an investigation, and the Government's formal response in March 2025 committed to greater ministerial-diary transparency and a review of the Thoroughbred Racing Act 1996. Separately, ICAC has spent much of the Minns Government's term investigating School Infrastructure NSW, the agency that builds and maintains public schools. Its April 2026 report on Operation Landan found the agency's former chief executive and a senior HR adviser had engaged in corrupt conduct between 2017 and 2024 — spanning both the previous and current governments — by rigging recruitment and contracts to benefit friends and associates, in what the Commission called "a clear case of cronyism" that saw $344 million in school-building funds diverted to contingent staff, including one role paid around $644,000 a year. Mandatory referrals of suspected corrupt conduct to ICAC from NSW Government agencies and councils, required under section 11 of the Act, rose from 728 in 2018-19 to 1,311 in 2024-25 — a trend ICAC links to both a genuine rise in reporting culture and the tightened grants-administration rules the Minns Government says it has introduced.
The strongest case
A watchdog with real teeth is why NSW keeps finding what other states miss
The strongest argument for ICAC is the roll-call above. No comparable body in Australia has forced the resignation of two premiers and secured the criminal conviction of a Cabinet minister and a party powerbroker; NSW's willingness to give ICAC public hearings and coercive powers is why the Obeid, Macdonald and Berejiklian findings carried enough evidentiary weight to survive scrutiny. The 2024 funding reforms are a genuine, and rare, example of a government legislating against its own future temptation: no earlier NSW Government had given integrity agencies direct Cabinet access or a legislated right for Parliament, not just Treasury, to examine their budgets. The Minns Government did not have to accept ICAC's and the Auditor-General's case for structural funding reform; it did, and backed it with $228.6 million over a decade. The rising rate of section 11 referrals — up roughly 80% in six years — is the mark of a system working as a deterrent and a reporting culture, not one merely producing occasional headline scandals: agencies increasingly report suspected corruption themselves, before ICAC has to go looking for it. A weaker commission, without ICAC's hearing powers, would likely still be investigating Mount Penny.
The evidence
Four landmark findings across thirty-six years, against premiers and ministers from both major parties, are the clearest evidence that ICAC's public-hearing model works roughly as designed: it has been as willing to investigate the government that created it, and the Labor governments that followed, as it has any opposition. The rise in section 11 referrals tells a complementary story beneath the headlines — a steadily increasing rate of agencies and councils reporting suspected corruption on their own initiative, well before it reaches a public hearing.
The 2024-25 Budget appropriated $49.1 million directly to ICAC for the year (approx.) — money that, as a matter of budget-paper mechanics, is still appropriated through the Premier's own portfolio, even after the 2024 reforms. Set against that is the scale of what ICAC's own investigations have found is at stake: the School Infrastructure NSW inquiry alone identified roughly $344 million in contingent-worker spending drawn from school-building budgets — a single case worth close to seven times ICAC's entire annual budget.
The critique
The 2024 funding reforms answer part of the case ICAC itself made in a May 2020 special report, The need for a new independent funding model for the ICAC, but not all of it. That report, and a subsequent NSW Auditor-General assessment, argued that having Cabinet set the final budget of the agency that investigates Cabinet members "presents threats" to its independent status, and recommended a genuinely arms-length model — an independent, parliament-appointed budget assessor whose recommended figure would go straight to a vote, bypassing Executive government. What the Minns Government legislated in 2024 is a real improvement: a formal seat at the Cabinet expenditure table, a parliamentary reporting requirement, and a Treasurer obliged to publicly explain any shortfall. But Cabinet still makes the final call, and ICAC's money is still appropriated, on paper, through the Premier's own portfolio. The reform changes how the conflict is managed. It does not remove it.
The fairness question cuts the other way. ICAC's own jurisdiction has been successfully challenged twice at the highest level available — by Greiner in 1992, and by Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen in 2015, when the High Court found the Commission had misread its own Act and had no power to investigate her conduct at all, forcing Parliament to rewrite the statutory definition of "corrupt conduct" within weeks. The Kear/Pearce case shows that cost runs beyond the people ultimately cleared: a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the reputational impact on people adversely named in ICAC investigations ran through 2020 and 2021, weighing submissions for and against a formal "exoneration protocol" that would let ICAC issue a clearing statement to people who are acquitted, never charged, or never adversely named after a public hearing has already run their name through the press. No such protocol has been legislated. Even the Berejiklian finding — the Commission's most significant of the past decade — was upheld by only the narrowest possible margin, 2-1, with the dissenting judge finding ICAC had exceeded its power in how the final report was prepared. When judges on the state's own Court of Appeal cannot agree on whether ICAC's process was fair, the case for treating that question as settled is hard to make.
ICAC has felled a Liberal premier and a Labor powerbroker with the same process — the unresolved argument is whether that process is fair to everyone it touches, not only the guilty.
The risk to the future
A funding fix untested by a hostile budget, and a fairness gap nobody has closed
The 2024 funding reforms have not yet been tested by a NSW Government that actually wants to squeeze ICAC's budget in a lean year — they were legislated by a government with every political incentive, this term, to be seen backing the watchdog that had just found a Liberal premier corrupt. The real test comes when Treasury is short of money and a Cabinet under pressure has to decide whether to fully fund a Charter of Independence it built for itself, with no constitutional guarantee behind it. Meanwhile, the absence of a legislated exoneration protocol means the next Steve Pearce — named in a public hearing, cleared months or years later — still has no formal mechanism to give that clearance the same public weight as the original headline. Neither risk is hypothetical in a state that, as the School Infrastructure NSW findings show, can run a $344 million cronyism scheme inside a single agency for seven years before anyone catches it. A watchdog that is squeezed in a lean year, or one the public no longer trusts to be fair to the people it clears as well as the people it convicts, is not a watchdog that catches the next Mount Penny early. It is one that catches it years late, the way this one did.