In March 2018, ratepayers in the City of Perth — the local government that runs Australia's oldest capital city centre, its courts precinct and much of its CBD — woke up to find they had no elected council. The state government had suspended the Lord Mayor and every councillor and installed a panel of appointed commissioners to run the municipality instead. Nobody had been convicted of a crime. The trigger was a finding by the Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) that the Lord Mayor had "signally failed in her duties" by accepting, and never declaring, a travel package worth around $31,000 (approx.) to the 2008 Beijing Olympics from a mining company, along with other undisclosed gifts from private firms. The Commission judged this "serious misconduct," a formal category just short of corrupt conduct. No court tested that judgment before the council was dismantled. For close to two years, one of the state's most important local governments was run by people nobody had elected. That is what Western Australia's integrity system looks like in its rawest form: slow, unglamorous, and capable of ending a career and remaking an institution on the strength of a report, not a verdict.
A commission built for a resources state
The CCC was established under the Corruption and Crime Commission Act 2003, commencing operation in 2004 and replacing an earlier, weaker Anti-Corruption Commission. Its founding statute, since renamed the Corruption, Crime and Misconduct Act 2003, gives it coercive powers no ordinary agency has: it can compel witnesses to answer questions that would otherwise incriminate them, hold hearings in private or in public, and use telephone intercepts and surveillance in serious cases. It does not lay criminal charges itself. Instead it forms an "opinion" — that a person's conduct amounted to "serious misconduct," or, in the more serious tier, "corrupt conduct" — and it can recommend the Director of Public Prosecutions consider charges. It sits over every part of the state's public sector: ministers, MPs, the public service, local government, universities and WA Police.
Since 1 July 2015, most of that workload has been split. A separate agency, the Public Sector Commission (PSC), took over "minor misconduct" — conduct that falls short of the serious-misconduct threshold — for most public servants, so the CCC could concentrate on matters serious enough that, if proven, they could reasonably end someone's career. But the PSC has no jurisdiction over WA Police officers or over elected members of state or local government. For a councillor, an MP or a minister, there is no minor-misconduct pathway at all: every complaint, however small, funnels into the same CCC process built for the state's most serious cases.
That structure sits over an economy unusually dependent on discretionary government decisions about a small number of very large industries. Iron ore alone generated an estimated $8.8 billion (approx.) in state royalties in 2025–26, and total mineral royalties reached roughly $10.8 billion (approx.) — more than a fifth of the state's general government revenue of around $50 billion (approx.) for the year. That money is not automatic. It flows through ministerial approvals, native title and heritage clearances, and local government planning and procurement decisions — exactly the kind of concentrated, discretionary money that corruption watchdogs exist to police. Roger Cook became Premier in June 2023, taking over a Labor government first elected in 2017 that has never faced a strong parliamentary opposition. That is the government the CCC now audits.
The strongest case
A watchdog that has ended careers and uncovered a decade of hidden corruption
The strongest argument for the CCC is that it has repeatedly done exactly what it was built to do, against Labor and non-Labor governments alike. The City of Perth finding cost Lisa Scaffidi her career and led directly to the 2018 suspension of the entire council. In 2018 the Commission tabled a report finding corrupt relationships between public officers and private contractors inside the North Metropolitan Health Service had gone undetected for up to a decade, recommending prosecution of three former senior executives and identifying misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance and service contracts. In 2022 a CCC report on local government procurement found "systemic weaknesses" across the sector and called for stronger external oversight of the discretionary spending decisions councils make every day. And the Commission has shown it will turn that scrutiny on the government of the day currently in office: in November 2024 it investigated allegations, made by a former electorate officer of Premier Cook, that taxpayer-funded electorate staff were being directed to do party political work, including fast-tracking pass applications for donors. It found no evidence that any public officer had engaged in serious misconduct or corrupt conduct — but only after compelling evidence and publishing a report that found electorate officers were, in fact, "routinely" doing party campaigning during paid hours, with no system in place to check it. A commission with weaker coercive powers, or one reluctant to point them at the government that funds it, would likely never have surfaced that finding at all.
What the record shows
The CCC's own figures give a sense of both the scale of its workload and how much of it ends without a finding against anyone. In the 2024–25 financial year, the Commission received an estimated 2,980 (approx.) reports and notifications of alleged serious misconduct and police misconduct. In the 2023–24 year, its published figures show it assessed roughly 1,165 (approx.) allegations, of which about 446 (approx.) met the threshold of "suspected" serious misconduct warranting further work — and of those, around 119 (approx.) resulted in a sustained finding. On those figures, roughly one in ten notifications ends in an actual finding against a person or agency. That is not unusual for a watchdog handling many low-grade complaints alongside a few serious ones — but it means the handful of public findings, like City of Perth and North Metropolitan Health Service, carry an outsized share of the system's credibility.
The procedural fairness problem
The same powers that make the CCC effective are the reason it draws genuine, serious criticism about fairness — and that criticism deserves to be taken on its own terms, not dismissed as the complaints of people caught out. The Commission's findings are opinions, formed on the balance of probabilities in proceedings that do not carry the same protections as a criminal trial, yet they can be as career-ending as a conviction: Lisa Scaffidi was never charged with an offence, and the finding against her still ended her mayoralty and triggered the dismantling of an elected council. That is by design — Parliament built the CCC to expose conduct quickly and publicly, on a lower threshold than a court would apply, precisely because criminal prosecutions are slow and often fail to capture conduct that falls short of a chargeable offence but still betrays public trust. The tension is real: publish fast and expose misconduct that might otherwise never surface, or protect the accused with full natural justice and risk letting serious misconduct go undisclosed for years. Western Australia's Parliament has built a permanent structure to referee that tension: the Joint Standing Committee on the CCC, and an independent statutory officer, the Parliamentary Inspector, who audits the Commission's own conduct and reports directly to Parliament.
That oversight structure had to do real work in 2024. On 21 March 2024, the Parliamentary Inspector, Matthew Zilko SC, tabled a report — titled, without much subtlety, "Going Rogue" — finding that a CCC officer had corruptly used her position between early 2020 and early 2023 to conduct "an extensive and intimate relationship" with one of the Commission's own human sources, an informant the officer was meant to be managing at arm's length. The Parliamentary Inspector made five separate findings of serious misconduct against the officer and found the breaches had gone undetected for up to three years inside the Commission's own Human Source Team — the unit built specifically to prevent that kind of compromise. The Joint Standing Committee was sufficiently unconvinced by the CCC's own account of having fixed the problem that it commissioned a formal follow-up, tabled later in 2024, to check whether the Commission's management of its own misconduct risk had actually improved. A body that makes career-ending findings against other public officials on a lower evidentiary threshold than a criminal court, while running an undetected corrupt relationship inside its own most sensitive unit for up to three years, gives fair-minded critics of its process real grounds to ask how much confidence the rest of its findings deserve.
Is the backup strong enough?
Put the accountability record and the procedural fairness limits side by side, and the harder question is not whether the CCC works — the record above shows it does, more often than critics sometimes allow — but whether it is a strong enough check on this particular government, at this particular moment. Labor's dominance of the WA Parliament is not a marginal fact. It won 53 of 59 Legislative Assembly seats in the 2021 landslide, reducing the Liberal Party to just two seats and leaving the Nationals, on five, to hold official opposition status alone. Even after losing ground in the 8 March 2025 election, Labor still holds 46 of 59 seats — a supermajority facing an opposition now split between 7 Liberals and 6 Nationals. The Joint Standing Committee that oversees the CCC is drawn from that same lopsided Parliament; convention protects its independence, but a chamber this imbalanced gives the government outsized influence over which committees get scrutinised and how hard.
In a Parliament where the government holds close to four seats in five, the Corruption and Crime Commission is not one check on power among several — it is close to the only one the government does not also control the numbers on.
The November 2024 electorate-officers finding illustrates the gap precisely. The CCC did its job: it investigated a serving Premier's office, compelled evidence, and published a finding that taxpayer-funded staff were "routinely" doing party political work with no system to catch it. But because the conduct fell short of serious misconduct, the practical consequence was a recommendation to update a handbook and start recording staff time — a low-cost fix that leaves the underlying practice of using public resources for party advantage essentially unpunished. Multiply that pattern across a jurisdiction where the Public Sector Commission cannot touch a single elected official, and where roughly nine in ten notifications never reach a sustained finding, and the CCC starts to look less like a single powerful check and more like the state's only check, stretched across everything from a councillor's undeclared gift to a corrupt relationship inside its own ranks — with a parliamentary numbers advantage sitting behind the government at every stage.
The risk to the future
When nearly all the checking runs through bodies the government funds and appoints
Western Australia's practical accountability, for as long as Labor holds a supermajority this size, runs almost entirely through statutory integrity bodies rather than through contested parliamentary numbers: the CCC, the Auditor General, the Ombudsman and the Parliamentary Inspector. Those bodies have real records of finding serious wrongdoing — City of Perth, North Metropolitan Health Service, the local government procurement report — but the Going Rogue episode shows they can also fail from the inside, and the roughly one-in-ten sustain rate shows most complaints never become findings at all. None of that is a reason to weaken the CCC's powers; it is a reason its funding, appointments and legislative mandate need protection that does not depend on the goodwill of the government it audits, which currently controls the numbers in the Parliament that decides all three. The next resources boom will bring the next round of large discretionary approvals and local council contracts. Whether WA's integrity system catches the problems in that boom the way it eventually caught North Metropolitan Health Service, or misses them the way its own internal misconduct went unseen for three years, depends on a set of institutions this government funds, staffs and can choose not to fully back — in a Parliament with almost no numbers to make it do otherwise.