The findings of a corruption probe into the role of Premier Daniel Andrews and some of his advisers in awarding two grants to a Labor-linked union will be revealed on Wednesday.
The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s Operation Daintree investigation centred around grants worth $3.4 million, which were awarded to the Health Workers Union on the eve of the 2018 state election.
The Age revealed in November that government grants were given to the HWU to train hospital staff to deal with violence against health workers, despite objections from Department of Health bureaucrats.
Sources familiar with the investigation said IBAC was told the Andrews government awarded a $1.2 million contract to the HWU on the eve of the 2018 election, bypassing the bureaucracy with specialist knowledge of health programs.
Seven days earlier – and before the tender had been finalised – Andrews publicly announced an additional $2.2 million election promise for the same training program, while standing alongside HWU boss Diana Asmar.
A critical meeting between Andrews, Asmar and others in early October 2018, had been a particular focus of IBAC investigators. The investigation also focused on whether advisers from the offices of the premier and then-health minister Jill Hennessy pressured departmental officials to sign off on the contract.
In an email to state MPs on Monday afternoon, the deputy clerk of the Victorian Parliament said the special report on Operation Daintree would be tabled on Wednesday.
“The IBAC acting Commissioner has today advised me of his intention to table a report when the House is not sitting,” the email, obtained by The Age, said.
Operation Daintree is the fourth known IBAC inquiry that has privately interviewed Andrews, but the first known to specifically examine his actions.
He was questioned in Operation Richmond, into Labor’s dealings with the firefighters’ union during Andrews’ first term; Operation Sandon into allegedly corrupt developers in Melbourne’s south-east; and Operation Watts that exposed a rotten culture and rampant nepotism inside Victorian Labor.
The report is expected to expose what former IBAC Commissioner Robert Redlich has previously described as “grey corruption”, questionable behaviour and decision-making that benefits a person’s associates without amounting to criminal conduct, The Age has previously reported.
It is also expected to highlight the way the Andrews government operates and how the size of the ministerial advisers, as well as staff in the Premier’s Private Office, has ballooned under Andrews.