Revealed: Secret government plan to tackle organised crime
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A powerful new agency targeting organised crime and informed by Australia’s best criminal intelligence would be established within Victorian Police under the state government’s latest response to the Building Bad corruption scandal and amid mounting pressure on Premier Jacinta Allan.
Jacinta Allan is under increasing pressure regarding her leadership.Ruby Alexander
Allan will on Monday present to cabinet her government’s plans for an Organised Crime Agency to prevent and disrupt the criminal exploitation of major building sites and the firebombing turf wars between rival gangs over control of illegal tobacco and booze.
If approved by cabinet, it will put into motion key elements of Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush’s strategy to elevate the fight against serious and organised crime across Melbourne.
Allan will cite the proposed reforms as evidence that a royal commission is not required to address corruption on Big Build projects.
Allan is staring down further leadership rumblings within her party, telling colleagues Labor can still win the election and she won’t succumb to pressure to relinquish the leadership.
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While most MPs contacted by The Age believe the premier would no longer control the numbers in a caucus vote, her only viable challenger, Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, is refusing to move against her.
With only four sitting weeks remaining in this parliamentary term, a contested leadership ballot would require a vote of caucus and a ballot of party members.
“She has probably become more dogged in her determination to tell people creating mischief to bugger off,” one left faction MP said. “If there is a challenge and she digs in, that is complete chaos.”
The Allan government has become increasingly centralised, with the plans for the Organised Crime Agency tightly held between the Premier’s Private Office and Bush’s senior command.
The chief concern of Victoria Police, expressed privately by senior officers, is whether the Allan government can push through the complex regulatory work and deliver the resources required to make the proposed new agency a success. While the reforms could be announced as early as Monday, they will need to be completed by the next parliament.
Under Victoria Police’s proposed design, the new agency would work closely with relevant state government departments such as the Labor Hire Authority and Department of Justice and federal agencies including the Australian Federal Police and Australian Taxation Office.
A new inter-agency intelligence centre would be established to facilitate the sharing of sensitive intelligence about organised crime figures and activities. Regulatory changes would be required to unwind one of the recommendations of the royal commission into police informants and strengthen the capacity of Victoria Police to cultivate, register and protect the identity of human sources.
Under current Victoria Police rules, officers cannot guarantee to prospective sources that their identity will never be disclosed in legal proceedings. This has prevented Victoria Police from cultivating critical intelligence and collaborating with interstate agencies.
To effectively combat organised crime, the agency would need to hire specialist skills and have access to advanced technology. The Organised Crime Agency, while reporting directly to police command, would also be overseen by a cabinet committee.
Bush has expressed to the premier and senior government ministers that much of Victoria’s crime problems, including troubling levels of youth crime, are driven by the influence of organised crime.
A specialist team within Victoria Police, Taskforce Hawk, has been given the job of tackling corruption and criminal behaviour across the state’s construction sector following The Age’s ongoing Building Bad series spotlighting serious malfeasance on union-controlled construction sites for state government infrastructure projects.
But last month, the team’s leadership said the force was largely powerless to clean up the construction sector without legislative change.
Integrity experts, the opposition and even a growing number of Labor MPs believe a royal commission into Big Build corruption must be called to neutralise the issue and address community concerns.
But Allan remains opposed to the concept and argues, internally and publicly, a royal commission would take too long and fail to deliver cultural change.
The new agency and its powers to be put to cabinet Monday are an attempt to cut off this criticism and neutralise leadership speculation that continues to dog the premier.
A June push to replace Allan with Deputy Premier Ben Carroll fell over before going to caucus vote, but internal grumblings have worsened over the past five weeks as a growing number of MPs have become frustrated with the leadership team and warmed to the idea of Labor announcing a royal commission.
A senior government source said they had hoped to present the organised crime proposal to the Labor caucus retreat this week, but it was not yet finalised in time.
Three MPs, speaking anonymously to avoid repercussions, said they now believe the premier would not control the numbers in a caucus vote, but her enemies have not yet been able to organise a coherent strategy for a coup.
The premier’s allies maintain she will not step down even if urged by her colleagues.
Party unity has been fraying in recent weeks.
Health Infrastructure Minister Melissa Horne broke ranks earlier this month by writing to the state’s infrastructure authority about “serious allegations” about hospital construction contractors in The Age which Allan had already dismissed as baseless.
Police Minister Anthony Carbines also used caucus conference this week to deliver a frank assessment of the government’s fortunes in front of his colleagues, arguing they would be reduced to a rump in parliament if they did not address integrity concerns in the Victorian public.
Although he did not mention a royal commission into Big Build corruption, his speech implied heavily that the premier’s office had mismanaged the response to the issue.
Two Labor MPs said recent policy moves, including the organised crime commission, showed the government was scrambling from one issue to the next with no clear direction four months out from the election.
One said the premier’s office had hyped up an “AI week” of announcements, which were postponed repeatedly, only for policies made on Sunday and Monday about social media trolls and workplace monitoring to flounder.
Government MPs are frustrated that they have not received details about local election commitments, such as local infrastructure upgrades, that would give them confidence they will have positive messages to sell to their electorates.
A senior Labor source said the premier’s office was in “la la land” and couldn’t comprehend the scale of displeasure at the current leadership.
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Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.Connect via email.