Attorney General Michelle Rowland installed a career political insider to run the anti-corruption commission. Robert McClelland was the country’s top law officer under Kevin Rudd from 2007 to 2011, a federal circuit and family court judge appointed by the Coalition in 2015, and deputy chief justice of that court since 2018. Christopher Savundra has been named deputy commissioner. Both begin five-year terms on January 11, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Anti-Corruption Commission signed off unanimously, as the statute requires.
The instrument Rowland was appointing under deserves to be read on its own terms before it is judged. The National Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2022 (Cth) is a serious statute, written in the shadow of robodebt — the automated welfare-debt scheme under which an executive robbed vulnerable Australians and a public service concealed it. Its object is to enhance integrity in the Commonwealth public sector. It defines corrupt conduct broadly enough to reach misuse of office, breach of trust, and dishonesty by public officials. It gives the Commissioner powers of self-initiated investigation and public inquiry. And its load-bearing feature is mandatory: section 17 of the Act requires the Commissioner to investigate a “referred corruption matter” — a corruption matter handed over by a royal commission, a parliamentary committee, a law-enforcement agency, or another integrity body. Parliament wrote its design judgment into the text: when Parliament’s own inquiry produces the names, the commissioner does not get to decline. The Act’s appointment provisions build in a matching gate — the Attorney-General must refer the proposed appointment to the joint committee, and the committee reports whether it supports the appointment before it proceeds. Read cold, this is a well-built instrument. It was built to prevent exactly what has now happened to it.
It fails at one joint: the design assumes the gatekeepers are not the class being policed. The Attorney-General is a member of the cabinet the commission may one day investigate. The joint committee is composed of members of the parties whose conduct generates the referrals. The selection panel that interviewed McClelland — attorney-general’s department secretary Katherine Jones, former Federal Court judge Raymond Finkelstein, and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb — was drawn from the same legal establishment the commission oversees. Unanimous committee support is not evidence of independence. It is evidence that the process admitted no dissenter worth consulting.
The mandatory-investigation clause then got its first real test. The robodebt royal commission referred six people to the NACC. Those referrals are a referred corruption matter within the meaning of section 17: a royal commission’s referral is precisely the trigger the statute made compulsory. In 2024 the commission decided not to investigate any of them. It reversed the following year, after sustained public pressure. The word “must” in section 17 did its work only when outside pressure supplied the force the text alone did not.
The first commissioner’s exit displayed the same structure. Paul Brereton resigned in May, after criticism of consulting work he did for his previous employer, the inspector general of the Australian Defence Force, while serving as NACC commissioner. His resignation statement said the criticism was “drawing attention away” from the body’s purpose. Read as the document it is, the statement states the theory plainly: the commission is the purpose, and scrutiny of the commission is the distraction.
McClelland’s record is bipartisan in the way this audit requires. Rudd made him attorney general. The Coalition appointed him to the bench. Labor made him deputy chief justice. This is not one party capturing the instrument. It is the political-legal class collectively owning it — a symmetry that makes the capture harder to object to in committee and easier to celebrate in a press release.
The pattern is not Australian-specific. In the United States, the DOJ’s new fraud division has spent its first months in internal strife and stalled investigations, staffed from the donor class it was meant to investigate. McKinsey’s board overhaul after its own scandals ran the same logic: replace the leadership with leadership drawn from inside the house that produced the problem. The sequence repeats. Build an institution to address a problem. Staff it with people whose careers were made possible by the problem. Watch it underperform. Replace it from the same pool.
An honest version of this appointment exists. The Act does not forbid appointing a state anti-corruption investigator, a forensic accountant from outside government, or a journalist who covered the robodebt referrals. The recruitment pipeline simply never produces that name. McClelland’s record is instead a map of how the political class expects an integrity body to behave — its law officer, then its judge, then its deputy chief justice. He will run the commission competently, and competence is the point.
Section 17 says the commissioner must investigate the referrals Parliament hands over. The first commissioner made that word conditional. The second is a man whose résumé is a membership card in the class the statute was written to police.