By Professor AJ Brown, Chair of Transparency International Australia

The anti-corruption watchdog’s long-awaited findings provide some answers, but raise even bigger questions about what exactly the body is for.

Disappointed reactions to the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s long-awaited robodebt report say a lot about what many Australians have been expecting from the almost three-year-old NACC. And also, what they should expect.

The NACC’s new findings that the dishonest failures of duty of two of six public officials did amount to corrupt conduct, as suggested by the Royal Commission into Robodebt, help set an important new bar. They reinforce when, how and why public servants need to act with integrity, even under the most difficult circumstances.

According to the NACC, there was little excuse for why the Department of Human Services business integrity manager, Mark Withnell, knowingly misled fellow officers and ultimately the Cabinet’s Expenditure Review Committee, about the legality, accuracy and ethics of the disgraced debt recovery scheme.

There were also many other red lights the royal commission found that should have been acted upon. But that deceit was crucial in the chain that saw the scheme established and defended, as everyone proceeded to rely on what was, in the end, incomplete and manipulated advice.

In fact, Withnell’s only excuse was that he caved in to bullying and oppressive behaviour by the department’s deputy head, Malisa Golightly, who died in 2021. From all the evidence, it seems clear that if Golightly was still alive and fit for trial today, she is the one who would most likely be facing criminal charges.

There are even fewer excuses for why Serena Wilson, another departmental deputy head, intentionally misled the ombudsman in 2017 by concealing legal advice that the scheme was unlawful. As a former ombudsman investigator, this still chills me to my bones.

So where does responsibility lie?

Several whose conduct was not found by the NACC to reach the same “corruption” threshold – including departmental secretary Kathryn Campbell, and then minister Scott Morrison – relied on the fact that it was Golightly and her brow-beaten underlings who failed the public and the government, not those who made the formal decisions.

But while the NACC’s investigation disagreed with some of royal commissioner Catherine Holmes’s conclusions regarding personal culpability of individuals, this reinforces the difference – and the limitations – of an anti-corruption inquiry.

The royal commission found that Campbell, Morrison and others “should have known” better than to blindly accept and not check what was incorrect and dishonest advice, given the controversial and sensitive nature of the whole proposed new scheme – if indeed, that’s all that happened.

The fact remains that Golightly’s behaviour, and that of other senior policymakers, was indicative of a public service leadership culture with increasingly diminished policy capacity, and compromised independence and ability to hold the line against a government pursuing socially dubious objectives without regard for fairness, ethics or as it turns out, legality.

These have been worrying trends under successive governments.

So what has been done to address these fundamental problems?

The transparency afforded by the royal commission, and now the NACC, confirms that individual officers who fail in their duties, even under these massively difficult circumstances, may have indeed acted criminally, and abused their office enough to be identified as “corrupt”. Even in the absence of direct personal or political gain.

This strengthens the massive wake-up call that Robodebt presented, for the need to reinforce and rebuild the integrity of policymaking processes and public service conduct. But it has always been wrong to look to the National Anti-Corruption Commission to provide all, if any, of the final answers on accountability for the program. Even under a definition of “corruption” as broad as the NACC Act, relatively few of the egregious failures in Robodebt involve the level of deliberate or knowing dishonesty central to our concepts of corruption.

However, it is still disappointing the NACC has continued to assess that it has nothing further useful to say – beyond the royal commission, the Australian Public Service Commission or other responses – about what if anything remained to be done by way of justice for victims, or ensuring this type of dishonest behaviour never happens again.

Australians can rightly ask themselves, is this good enough? There are plenty of signs that the fundamental problems of public service capacity, independence and effective whistleblower systems have not gone away. It’s fair to ask then whether, millions of dollars later, there wasn’t more the NACC could have said about what reform is needed, for the sake of justice, integrity and future protection against the type of very difficult corruption that it found.

Perhaps that’s the difference between the “integrity” commission that many originally wanted, and the narrower, law enforcement vision that can easily, but not always, befall any Australian anti-corruption agency.

The NACC is proving it is good at the technical job of anti-corruption investigations. It’s how it addresses its wider purpose, and builds a better relationship with the public, which remains the big challenge confronting this young, vital and hard-won institution.

This article was first published in The Guardian 12th March 2026.