CCC finds serious misconduct risk in using electorate officers for campaign work but MPs to escape sanction

The routine use of electorate officers for political campaign work is a serious misconduct risk but lax time-keeping means Labor politicians will escape a formal sanction by WA’s graft buster. The Corruption and Crime Commission on Monday morning released a report into the misuse of electorate officers who are paid from the public purse and should not be doing party political activities. The CCC warned that the WA taxpayer could be on the hook for “thousands of hours of publicly funded campaigning”. The inquiry was sparked by Sanja Spasojevic, who worked in then-deputy premier Roger Cook’s electorate office in Kwinana. “During the course of her evidence, Ms Spasojevic said two startling things,” the CCC report states. “The first was that she was explicitly tasked by Mr Cook with fast-tracking the Good to Go (G2G) pass applications of Labor Business Roundtable members and their families to facilitate their travel into and out of Western Australia.” The roundtable program is a political fundraiser for the ALP under which business people get access to politicians in return for a hefty membership fee. The G2G process regulated travel during the pandemic. “The second, was that electorate office staff provided to members of Parliament often performed party-political work during the hours they were publicly paid as electorate officers,” the CCC said. The CCC found there was no evidence that the State Government acted corruptly in the administration of the G2G program. “In the commission’s assessment, there is no evidence that any MPs or their electorate officers attempted to use their public position to expedite or procure a G2G pass for any corrupt or improper purpose,” the report states. But the commission was scathing of the way electorate officers were put to work for the ALP. “Electorate officers are not permitted to engage in party-political activities or be involved in electioneering during paid working hours,” the report notes. “Their time while at work is a government resource.” Witnesses told the CCC that electorate staffers made up for time on the campaign trail by staying back and working weekends. But there was no evidence this was the case because time-keeping records were poor or did not exist. “The lack of time recording made it impossible for the commission to identify what was and was not being done on the public purse,” the report states. “There is no evidence to contradict the explanation given by the witnesses that they made up for time spent campaigning by performing their public duties outside office hours.” The CCC nodded to similar inquiries on the east coast. Then Victorian premier Daniel Andrews was probed over the so-called “red shirts” scandal, so named because of the colour of the shirts worn by electorate staff when they were campaigning. The Victorian Ombudsman, police and Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission all launched inquiries. “Having considered the evidence, the commission finds itself in the same position as the VO (Victorian Ombudsman) in the red shirts report, and IBAC and the VO in Operation Watts,” the CCC notes. “The commission is not able to be positively satisfied in either the affirmative or the negative that the electorate officers are routinely undertaking party-political work or active campaigning for their MP during times they are paid as electorate officers. “This cannot be ruled out, but nor can it be satisfactorily proven. Therefore, the commission has formed no opinion of serious misconduct with respect to this allegation.” The CCC made a series of recommendations to tighten protocols, warning the use of electorate officers for campaign work was rampant. “If those hundreds of hours a week of party-political work took place each week in the lead up to an election, that would equate to thousands of hours of publicly funded campaigning,” the CCC states. “Those efforts would directly benefit the private partisan interests of MPs to get re-elected.” The CCC urged MPs to keep time records. “It is the experience of this commission that systems based on trust alone are vulnerable to exploitation,” the report notes. “In the commission’s opinion, if an MP does not utilise a time recording system in their electorate office, their failure to do so is a serious misconduct risk.”