It is a Tuesday in November 2018, and a mid-level contracts officer in Victoria's health department is looking at a probity checklist she cannot honestly complete. Weeks earlier, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded a contract worth more than $1 million to train health workers to a body called the Health Education Federation, without running the competitive process her own procurement rules require. She flags it. Her concerns are noted, then quietly set aside — her managers, she later learns, had formed the view that awarding the work to anyone else would displease the minister's office. She is not imagining the pressure. Eighteen months later the Victorian Ombudsman would find evidence that ministerial advisers had leaned on department staff to secure exactly that outcome, and refer the matter to Victoria's anti-corruption commission. When the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission — IBAC — finally reported on what it called Operation Daintree, years after her uneasy Tuesday, its investigators confirmed almost everything she had suspected: improper intervention by ministerial advisers, senior executives who withheld frank advice from their minister, and a struggling contractor kept in place partly because dropping it risked embarrassing the Premier's office. Then the report delivered its central, deflating line. None of it met the legal definition of corrupt conduct, because Victorian law requires proof that a criminal offence occurred, and none had been established. The facts, IBAC said, were substantiated. The conduct, under the only name the law recognises, was not corrupt (IBAC, Operation Daintree special report, 2023).
What the government did
IBAC is Victoria's standing anti-corruption commission, created under the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Act 2011 by the then Coalition government of Ted Baillieu, and beginning operations in 2013. It investigates serious corruption and police misconduct across the Victorian public sector, refers matters for possible criminal prosecution, and reports its findings — sometimes to Parliament, more often confidentially to the agencies involved. Every Labor government since 2014, including the Allan government since September 2023, has inherited this structure rather than built it, and inherited too the definition written into the founding Act: conduct is only "corrupt conduct" if it would, if proven, amount to a criminal offence. The commission can only hold a hearing in public — a "public examination" — if it finds, under section 117 of the Act, that exceptional circumstances exist, that a public hearing is in the public interest, and that holding it would not cause a person unreasonable damage. All three tests must be satisfied before any hearing is opened to public view (Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Act 2011 (Vic), s.117).
The Andrews government did make one significant change to that inherited structure: a 2016 amendment removed the requirement that conduct be "serious" before IBAC could investigate it, and added a new category, misconduct in public office, widening the commission's jurisdiction — a genuine reform, not something Labor was forced into. What has not changed since 2016 is the section 117 threshold for public hearings, or the criminal-offence definition of corrupt conduct that closed off a formal finding in Operation Daintree. On funding, the Allan government has continued a pattern set under Andrews: budget allocations that IBAC's own former Commissioner said had remained largely static since the commission's creation, even as complaint numbers and case complexity grew. A parliamentary inquiry into whether that funding is adequate — covering IBAC, the Victorian Ombudsman and Integrity Oversight Victoria — reported in May 2026, with the government's formal response due by November 2026.
The strongest case
A deliberately narrower commission, built to avoid trial by hearing
Put the design choices at their strongest, and IBAC was never meant to be a Victorian version of the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption, and that was a considered decision, not an oversight. When IBAC was established, Victoria's Parliament could see how the NSW model operated in practice — public hearings held as a matter of course, and a definition of "corrupt conduct" broad enough that in 2015 the High Court of Australia had to intervene. In Independent Commission Against Corruption v Cunneen, the Court unanimously found ICAC had exceeded its own jurisdiction by treating conduct that merely changed how an official exercised a function — rather than corrupted the probity of that function — as corrupt conduct, casting doubt over a string of earlier ICAC investigations and public hearings that had already run their course. Victoria's drafters built section 117's three-part test as a deliberate check against exactly that kind of overreach: a public hearing, and the reputational damage it can cause, running ahead of a legally sound finding.
On funding, the government can fairly point to a genuinely crowded integrity landscape: IBAC does not stand alone. The Victorian Ombudsman, the Auditor-General, Integrity Oversight Victoria and, since 2022, a dedicated Parliamentary Workplace Standards and Integrity Commissioner all draw on the same state budget to perform overlapping oversight functions, and Victoria funds all of them, where many jurisdictions fund only one or two. The 2016 broadening of IBAC's jurisdiction was an expansion the government did not have to make, and the 21 recommendations from Operation Watts were accepted by government in full inside three months of the report landing — evidence that findings against the government's own party were not simply absorbed and ignored.
The evidence
Three IBAC investigations, spanning the terms of both Labor premiers, show what the commission's model produces when it does confirm wrongdoing. Operation Sandon, tabled in Parliament on 27 July 2023, examined how planning decisions in Melbourne's outer south-east were manipulated by property developer John Woodman; IBAC found Casey councillors Sam Aziz and Geoff Ablett had promoted Woodman's interests in exchange for payment and in-kind support, and repeatedly failed to declare the conflict — findings serious enough that the state government had already dismissed the entire Casey Council in 2020, in part because of concerns the investigation raised. IBAC made 34 recommendations on planning integrity, political donations and lobbying regulation. Operation Watts, tabled on 20 July 2022 and the first-ever joint investigation by IBAC and the Ombudsman together, found the "blatant and extraordinary" misuse of electorate-officer and ministerial-adviser positions to run factional branch-stacking for the ALP's Moderate Labor faction — unqualified people hired into public roles to do party work, forged signatures, and attempts to influence government grants. It made 21 recommendations.
Operation Daintree, at the centre of this piece's opening story, shows the other side of the ledger: the same commission, working the same statutory model, producing a fully substantiated account of ministerial interference that nonetheless could not be labelled corrupt conduct, because none of it constituted a proven criminal offence. That gap is not an isolated technicality. Academic comparisons of the two commissions have found that in IBAC's first five years, 2012 to 2017, it held five public examinations; NSW ICAC, operating under a public-interest test alone, held around 30 in the same period (approx.) — roughly a sixfold difference in how often either commission put its findings before the public as they were being made, rather than only in a final report. On funding, IBAC's own former Commissioner, Robert Redlich KC, said publicly that the commission's budget had remained largely static since its creation in 2012, even as its workload grew; the 2023–24 Annual Report recorded a budget target of $63.4 million that year (approx.), and the following year's report recorded 1,590 complaints and notifications about the public sector — a 9 per cent rise on the previous three-year average — against 41 preliminary inquiries and investigations opened and 39 completed, leaving 29 still open at 30 June 2025.
The critique
The government is entitled to say Victoria's model was a deliberate choice, not an oversight, and that Operation Watts shows findings against the government's own party are not simply buried. It is harder to defend how consistently that model produces the same outcome: serious, substantiated wrongdoing that the public record cannot describe as corruption, because the law defines the word too narrowly to fit it. Operation Daintree is not a one-off; it is the clearest illustration of a structural feature Robert Redlich, IBAC's own former head, named directly, telling reviewers that the criminal-offence threshold turns IBAC into a "safe haven" for the class of misconduct — undisclosed pressure, captured procurement, political favouritism — that damages public trust without ever crossing into crime. A commission that can only call something corrupt once a criminal offence is proven will always find and report less corruption than a commission, like NSW's, that can find conduct corrupt on a lower, non-criminal standard.
The pattern recurs beyond Daintree. In March 2018 the Ombudsman's "red shirts" investigation found roughly $388,000 (approx.) of taxpayer-funded electorate-office resources had been used to run a 2014 campaign field-organiser operation involving 21 Labor MPs; Victoria Police's fraud squad investigated and laid no charges. Two years later, Operation Watts found a strikingly similar misuse of public electorate-officer roles for factional branch-stacking — and again the outcome was breaches of parliamentary and ministerial codes of conduct, not criminal charges or corrupt-conduct findings against the individuals involved. Twice in less than a decade, investigators substantiated the misuse of public resources for internal party purposes at real cost to taxpayers, and twice the process ended in policy recommendations rather than consequences with legal teeth. That is not evidence the misuse did not happen; every report says it did. It is evidence that Victoria's integrity architecture is better built to describe misconduct after the fact than to make it costly enough, in real time, to deter the next branch-stacking operation or the next captured procurement.
Funding compounds the gap. A commission whose own former Commissioner says its budget has been static since 2012 is not well placed to keep pace with a 9 per cent rise in complaints in a single year, let alone to expand the proactive, prevention-focused work IBAC says it wants to do. The Allan government did not invent this squeeze — it inherited a decade of it — but it has now had almost three years, since September 2023, in which to change course, and its own appointed parliamentary committee has told it, in a report tabled in May 2026, that funding-model proposals IBAC and the Ombudsman first put to government back in 2022 still had not been responded to four years later.
IBAC's investigators could establish exactly what happened inside Operation Daintree. The law would not let them call it corruption.
The risk to the future
A watchdog that can describe corruption but rarely name it
The Allan government has a concrete, dated test in front of it: its formal response to the Integrity and Oversight Committee's May 2026 report on integrity-agency funding is due by November 2026, and that response will show whether a government that fully accepted Operation Watts' 21 recommendations against its own party will also accept structural funding and jurisdiction reforms that are harder to sell as a one-off political clean-up. The risk is not that IBAC stops finding wrongdoing — its 2024–25 annual report shows a commission still opening dozens of investigations and making dozens of formal recommendations a year. The risk is that it keeps finding wrongdoing it is structurally unable to name as corrupt, inside hearings the public is structurally unable to watch, funded at a level its own former Commissioner called inadequate more than five years ago, while complaint volumes keep climbing and the gap between what IBAC can prove and what it can call corruption becomes the quiet, permanent shape of accountability in Victoria. A state that has now had two branch-stacking scandals, a corrupted council, and a procurement matter its own investigators could substantiate but not condemn, and has answered each one with recommendations rather than a rewritten evidentiary threshold, is choosing — whether by decision or by drift — a system built to document misconduct rather than one built to stop it before the next special report is tabled.