Kennett, the cornered rat

by Marcus Browning

Like a cornered rat, Jeff Kennett is desperately looking for a way to save 
his political hide. The level of his desperation to stay in government 
reached fever pitch last week when he hinted that he might set up a 
judicial inquiry into the granting of the contract for the ambulance 
service communications system.

The Government also might consider restoring the power of the state's 
Auditor-General said Kennett.

All this hypocrisy and play acting is to win the votes of two of the three 
independents who hold the balance of power; Russell Savage, Susan Davies 
and Craig Ingram.

The ALP now has 41 seats, Kennett's care-taker Government 43 plus a by-
election still to come for the seat of Frankston East.

Kennett stripped the Auditor-General's office of the means to examine the 
activity of government and public officials in order to cover up precisely 
the kind of corrupt deals that took place in the contracting out of the 
ambulance emergency dispatch system.

The operations of the Auditor-General were themselves contracted to private 
auditing companies whose connections with the corporations who have 
dealings with the government meant these private sector auditors were not 
going to expose corrupt deals, and are in fact part of the system.

Prior to the State election the Government took out an injunction to 
prevent the release of a report on a police investigation into the process 
which saw the contract go the Intergraph company in 1995. In a hearing a 
fortnight ago the Supreme Court called the injunction "part of a course of 
concealment" and an "abuse of process".

The Intergraph deal was as usual when the private sector gets its grubby 
paws on public assets: rotten right through. Despite the "commercial-in-
confidence" laws and the undermining of public accountability there was so 
much muck that some of it oozed to the surface anyway. Grant Griffiths, for 
example. 

As the head of Griffiths Consulting he was signed up by the Metropolitan 
Ambulance Service in 1994 to conduct a financial review of its operations. 
It transpired that at the same time he was doing this consultancy work 
Grant Griffiths was also part of the review process that awarded the 
contract to Intergraph.

And while he was still working for the Ambulance Service he became chief 
executive of Intergraph in February 1995.

Then there was the bogus company Griffiths set up in which he was an equal 
partner and to which Intergraph paid $730,000. In addition Griffiths, who 
left Intergraph in July 1996, was paid $1,340 per day by the Ambulance 
Service over a two-year period, amounting to a cool $1.5 million.

Back to the present and the cornered rat. One of the findings in the police 
report was that the Government had illegally suppressed briefing notes that 
carried heavy political and legal implications for it and some of its 
associates. The notes have disappeared.

When quizzed last week the former Health Minister who was in the box seat 
at the time, Marie Tehan, denied seeing said notes.

Kennett went one better: "From time to time I lose documents at home ... 
it's not beyond the realms of possibility at all that documents can go 
astray."

It was perhaps only a coincidence that Kennett and his staff shredded 
hundreds of documents as the elections results became clear.

The independents have called for a new inquiry, including an investigation 
into the role of the Department of Public Prosecutions which recommended 
that no action should be taken against the public servants involved.

They are also demanding that the powers of the Auditor-General be restored.

"It's obvious some form of additional inquiry is warranted", said Susan 
Davies. "I have had to sit in Parliament and listen to what was obviously a 
lot of patent nonsense from the Government and I don't think the people of 
Victoria will take kindly to that either."

The bottom line is that the communications system should never have been 
contracted out. The Intergraph contract is typical of the entire period of 
the Kennett Government — the scrapping of all means of accountability, 
secret and corrupt deals, wholesale privatisation and utter contempt for 
democracy and the people of Victoria.

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