The corrupt Victorian Labor Party

The Age reports:

The anti-corruption commission’s interim findings – contained in a draft report of Operation Watts sighted by this masthead – reveal that Andrews is among senior Labor figures to have privately conceded that “significant cultural reform is required within the ALP” to rid the party of a culture that encouraged the misuse of public funds, nepotism and other wrongdoing.

IBAC interviewed 26 witnesses, including the premier, in private and seven witnesses in public hearings. It concluded in its draft report that cultural failings within Victorian Labor were systemic and had been condoned or even encouraged by party leaders for many years.

So an independent watchdog has found Victorian Labor is systemically corrupt. The value of independent watchdogs!

While IBAC found it could not definitely conclude that all Labor’s factions had engaged in the same wrongdoing as Somyurek’s Moderate Labor, the evidence it gathered made it “highly likely the misuse of publicly funded staff” and “employment of family members and factional allies for party or factional purposes and nepotism has occurred for a much longer period and is much more widespread [across Labor] than Moderate Labor”.

“The unethical cultures exposed in Operation Watts are not confined to the [Moderate Labor] faction. These unethical practices are embedded within the [Victorian Labor] branch and are systemic to all of the factions,” the report found.

They were all at it!

The investigation uncovered evidence that money raised at fundraising events attended by state and federal Labor MPs was siphoned off to pay for fake ALP memberships as part of the branch-stacking operation. IBAC also concludes that jobs in state and federal MPs’ offices in Victoria were handed to factional operatives or their relatives in the knowledge they would not be required to show up to work.

“Evidence found that many of these employees did not perform their public duties either because their role had been given to them as a sinecure or because they were performing factional tasks instead of their public duties. As such, constituents were deprived of the support and services that should have been available to them.”

There should be people in jail for this.