Call him David. He is a contracts officer for an outer-Adelaide council who, in 2024, noticed the same supplier had won three tenders running despite submitting the least competitive bids each time, and that the manager signing off on the awards had once worked for that supplier. David is a composite, not a named complainant, but his dilemma is the one South Australia's integrity system is built to receive. He cannot investigate it himself. And under the law as it now stands, whether anyone with the power to compel documents and question witnesses ever looks at it at all is decided, first, by a screening office he has never heard of.
David's only path is to lodge a report with the Office for Public Integrity (OPI), a separate statutory body that assesses every complaint about a South Australian public officer and decides whether it raises a "potential issue of corruption" worth referring on. In the year to June 2025, the OPI assessed roughly 1,099 complaints and reports and referred just 120 of them to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) as potentially involving corruption — about one in nine (approx.) (Office for Public Integrity, Annual Report 2024-25, Oct-2025). That gatekeeping did not exist for the Commission's first eight years. It is the direct product of a bill that passed both houses of the South Australian Parliament, unanimously, within a single sitting day in September 2021 — a bill the Malinauskas Labor government did not write, but has spent every day of its own term deciding not to unwind.
What the government did
South Australia was the last Australian state to establish a standalone anti-corruption body. The Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Act 2012, passed under the Weatherill Labor government, created the office of Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, which commenced work on 2 September 2013 under its first holder, former Federal Court judge Bruce Lander. The Act gave the Commissioner broad reach: power to investigate not only corruption but "misconduct" and "maladministration" in public administration, power to open an investigation on the Commissioner's own initiative without waiting for a complaint, and power to conduct compulsory examinations of witnesses and public officers, mostly in private.
That model drew sustained criticism almost from the start, some of it from lawyers representing people under investigation. In 2018, barrister Michael Abbott QC told the Parliament's Crime and Public Integrity Policy Committee (CPIPC) — the standing committee overseeing the Commission — that Lander's process amounted to a "star chamber," conducted largely behind closed doors with limited scope for a person under scrutiny to respond publicly. The CPIPC undertook its own multi-year review. On 25 August 2021, SA-Best MLC Frank Pangallo, a committee member, introduced a private member's bill implementing its recommendations: the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption (CPIPC Recommendations) Amendment Bill 2021. It passed the Legislative Council on 22 September, passed the House of Assembly with further amendments the next day, and returned to the Council for concurrence — all completed within the single sitting day of 23 September 2021, with the governing Marshall Liberal government and the Labor opposition, then led by Peter Malinauskas, both voting for it. The changes commenced on 7 October 2021, months before Malinauskas became Premier at the March 2022 election.
The Act that resulted renamed the "Independent Commissioner" a "Commission," narrowed the statutory definition of corruption to specified offences under four Acts (the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935, the Public Sector (Honesty and Accountability) Act 1995, the Public Corporations Act 1993 and the Lobbyists Act 2015), and removed the broad catch-all that had let the Commissioner treat "any other offence committed by a public officer" as corruption. Jurisdiction over misconduct and maladministration moved to the Ombudsman. The Commission's own-motion investigative power was removed — it can now act only on a matter referred to it, chiefly by the OPI. Its ability to refer briefs of evidence directly to the Director of Public Prosecutions was removed in favour of a pathway through SA Police. Its ability to make timely public statements about ongoing or concluded matters was tightened, backed by confidentiality offences. And the same Act created a scheme letting MPs and public officers claim taxpayer-funded reimbursement of "reasonable" legal costs incurred responding to a Commission investigation.
The strongest case
A watchdog with real, documented process problems, reformed by the committee built to oversee it — not invented by the Malinauskas government
The pre-2021 Commission could spend years and significant public money investigating conduct that, once assessed, turned out to be a workplace grievance or an administrative failing rather than anything resembling crime — a mismatch between a coercive, criminal-style tool and much of what it was used on. It did this largely in private, with no requirement to give people it examined a timely public right of reply, and with power to comment publicly on unproven allegations that could end a career regardless of the eventual finding. Those are not manufactured grievances: they were aired for years by practising lawyers, examined at length by the CPIPC — a bipartisan committee, not a partisan taskforce — and acted on through an ordinary committee-derived bill rather than an executive power grab. Narrowing "corruption" to specific offences gives investigated people and agencies more certainty about what triggers the Commission's most coercive powers. Moving misconduct and maladministration to the Ombudsman, a body with a longer history of handling administrative grievances proportionately, is a defensible design choice on its face, not self-evidently a weakening. And a scheme letting officers who are investigated and cleared recover reasonable legal costs answers a real asymmetry between the state's investigative resources and an individual's own. None of this was the Malinauskas government's creation: the bill passed under its predecessor, with the Labor opposition's own vote, five months before Peter Malinauskas held the Premiership.
The evidence
The scale of the change shows up in the Commission's own numbers. In its first eight months of operation in 2013-14, the Commissioner received 752 complaints and was directly investigating 43 potential corruption matters. A decade later, under the post-2021 structure, the OPI — not the Commission — is the front door: it assessed roughly 1,099 complaints and reports in the year to June 2025, referred 120 to the Commission as potentially raising corruption, and recorded no further action on 59 per cent (approx.) of everything it assessed (Office for Public Integrity, Annual Report 2024-25). That 120 was itself a rise of roughly 90 per cent (approx.) on the 63 matters referred the previous year, 2023-24 (Independent Commission Against Corruption SA, Integrity State 2024-25, 31-Oct-2025) — evidence the pipeline is moving more matters, not evidence of how many genuine problems never reach it at all, since the Commission can no longer go looking itself.
The clearest sign of institutional strain is who has left. Ann Vanstone KC succeeded Lander as Commissioner on 2 September 2020, inheriting the broader powers, then spent her term operating under the narrower ones. She wrote to the Attorney-General and the government with proposed fixes; by her own account those approaches "fell on deaf ears." In July 2024 she announced her resignation, effective that September — barely four years into a seven-year term — saying the 2021 changes had "damaged" South Australia's anti-corruption scheme and did not serve the public interest; contemporaneous commentary described her as saying the Commission had effectively been "gagged." Stephen Pallaras KC, a former SA Director of Public Prosecutions, said Vanstone had been "forced to do a job with one hand tied behind her back," and made the bipartisan point squarely: "neither political party was serious in creating an ICAC that was going to be effective." The Centre for Public Integrity went further in a February 2025 submission to Parliament, calling South Australia's Commission "the weakest integrity body in Australia" against comparators such as the NSW ICAC and Victoria's IBAC, which retain own-motion powers, direct DPP referral and broader public-statement powers South Australia's no longer has.
A parliament that took one sitting day to strip its corruption watchdog of the power to open its own investigations has taken more than four years, and counting, to decide whether to give any of it back.
The critique
Judged against its own procedural claim — that this was measured, committee-derived reform — the record does not fully hold up. Academic analysis of the final Act has found several rollbacks were either absent from, or went further than, the CPIPC's own recommendations, meaning the bill diverged from the review process invoked to justify it. A reform that reduces scrutiny of the politicians voting on it, debated and amended within a single sitting day with no further public submissions on the final compromise text, is a process failure on its own terms — whatever the merits of individual provisions.
The substance carries its own costs. Removing the Commission's own-motion power converts the start of an investigation from an independent officer's judgment into a bureaucratic gate a citizen like David cannot see through: the OPI decides that roughly eight in nine assessments do not amount to a potential corruption issue worth sending on, and 59 per cent (approx.) end in no further action at all. Some of that is properly resolved — most complaints are not corruption. But a Commission that could once open a file on a pattern across multiple cases, a journalist's story or an approach outside a formal complaint no longer can, regardless of merit. Restricting public statements compounds this: a matter can now open, run and close without the public — including voters weighing the next state election — ever learning it happened, unless a prosecution eventually proceeds, a loss of the deterrent and public-confidence function an integrity body serves distinct from its prosecutorial one. The legal-costs reimbursement scheme, defensible in principle, was legislated by the same MPs it could benefit, inside the bill that reduced the scrutiny they would face — an optics problem contemporaneous commentary described bluntly as SA politicians "protect[ing] themselves from ICAC," and one the government has not revisited since.
That is where the audit of the current government begins, not ends. The 2021 changes were not the Malinauskas government's doing — they passed under its predecessor, with bipartisan votes cast before Peter Malinauskas held office. What belongs to this government is what it has done since: nothing. Vanstone's direct approaches to the Attorney-General went, on her own account, unanswered. SA-Best MLC Connie Bonaros introduced a crossbench bill in 2024 — drawn up in consultation with Vanstone — to restore the Commission's own-motion powers, its direct DPP referral pathway and limited public-statement powers, and to strip the legal-costs scheme from officers ultimately found to have acted corruptly. It cannot become law without government support. Premier Malinauskas's public position in mid-2024 was that the 2021 changes needed "to be distilled and contemplated" and that the government was "certainly not ruling out changes into the future." Two years, a full term and a re-election later, no government bill has followed. A government handed a ready-drafted, expert-endorsed fix has instead let the question sit.
The risk to the future
A landslide re-election just when scrutiny of the 2021 settlement matters most
The CPIPC is now conducting its own inquiry into the functions and operations of the ICAC Act, with Emma Townsend — appointed in December 2024 and, since February 2025, South Australia's first Commissioner who is not a former judge — expected to make her own submission. That inquiry is genuine cause for cautious attention. But the same committee process produced the 2021 changes in the first place, and the Malinauskas government, re-elected in March 2026 with an increased majority, now carries less immediate political pressure to act on integrity reform than at any point since Vanstone's resignation. If the Commission keeps operating on a narrow, referral-gated jurisdiction through a second full term, the "grey area" conduct that former commissioners and the Centre for Public Integrity say typically precedes outright corruption — undisclosed conflicts of interest, process shortcuts, favouritism in procurement of exactly the kind David suspected — will keep being resolved administratively, inside government, with no independent officer able to open a file unprompted and no requirement that South Australians ever be told. An anti-corruption system's deterrent value rests on the credible possibility that misconduct will be found and made known. On the evidence of its first term, a second Malinauskas term spent "distilling and contemplating" is a second term in which that possibility stays diminished, at the exact moment the political cost of fixing it has just fallen.