ANALYSIS: Michael Riches was in his garage at home on Tuesday morning, quietly carving a wooden box as parliamentarians a few kilometres down the road in the big white house savaged each other during the last week of sittings before August’s election, accusing one another of all sorts of heinous things including corruption, lying, cheating, and putting themselves ahead of Territorians.

It was odd that the current Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, the man who has yet to make his mark on the role after three years, was calmly and methodically engaging in woodwork while the people he was hired to investigate wrapped up their last week of sittings with the most important investigation of his tenure as commissioner hanging over Parliament.

The next night, a little after 8pm, that report – the major investigation into Labor’s misuse of public funds for its 2020 election campaign – was tabled in Parliament.

What Riches delivered was what we’ve come to expect from him. A boring, lazy, confusing and half-baked “review” into serious corruption allegations that have tremendous repercussions for our democracy, but in which he made no adverse findings against anyone.

In fact, after three years investigating, he made no findings at all. There may have been misconduct, he implied, but he really couldn’t say for sure.

It was another of his navel-gazing exercises, filled with contradictions and head-scratching lines, some minor self-flagellation concerning unclear issues with the Act governing his role, with all of it raising more questions than it answered.

What else would we expect from a man who proclaimed in last year’s annual report that it was personally “pleasing” to him to discover after two years in the job that there is “no systemic corruption” in the NT public service, while then proceeding to highlight all the broken systems and process failures that ultimately lead to widespread corruption and his seemingly wilful blindness to the problem?

The problem this time, is that Riches’ sluggish performance and refusal to even do a half-arsed version of his job will have dire consequences for our system of government and the public’s faith in the electoral process, while providing another tacit indication there will be no consequences for corruption.

The report, titled “Operation Jupiter”, is a complete abrogation of responsibility and outright dereliction of duty, which may make Riches complicit in the misconduct that has transpired, or at the very least, a passive observer who has admittedly looked the other way when serious transgressions backed up with hard evidence were raised.

He wrote at one point that in order to make a finding of “improper conduct” against former chief minister Michael Gunner and Territory Labor that he would have to “do so on the basis of my assessment of all of that evidence”, adding, “where evidence was conflicting, I would have to weigh that evidence in order to determine, to the relevant standard, where I think the truth lies”.

No shit. That’s his job. Don’t let us stop you, Michael.

Instead of undertaking the most crucial aspect of his role, he decided it was best not to entertain the notion of determining who was lying and who wasn’t and where the facts led. Some people were lying, that’s for sure, and there appeared to be a clear incentive for those who had perpetrated wrongdoing to share a few furphies.

This is problematic for many reasons, but if anyone wants a single explanation for why he needs to resign immediately, this is it.

Imagine a judge at a high-profile trial suggesting he just didn’t feel like assessing who was lying and who wasn’t and examining all the facts before making a judgment. This is what Riches did this week and did it in the open on the most important investigation of his career.

Of course he probably concluded that the obligation to assess facts and examine all aspects of evidence isn’t specifically defined in any “ambiguous rules” in his job description. But it is something we expect from the anti-corruption commissioner when he is investigating serious matters that go to the heart of our democracy.

For the same reason we expect politicians and their staffers will not steal public funds to win an election.

As Gerard Maley correctly pointed out this week, politicians shouldn’t need rules telling them not to steal public money to run an election campaign. Riches shouldn’t need to be told that we expect him to review all the documentary evidence, carry out interviews or interrogations and reach an informed conclusion on what has occurred, in the best interests of our democracy.

But according to Riches, politicians will need it spelled out in enshrined legislation as bluntly as “do not steal taxpayers money” and until that happens, the message is everyone can go ahead and steal whatever they want without fear of consequences. There is no longer an incentive to even introduce that kind of legislation now and will cast doubt over how August’s election plays out.

The delays and lack of findings’ effect on our democracy

“Notwithstanding that I have not made findings, I have determined that it is in the public interest to prepare this report, because the circumstances giving rise to this investigation are an appropriate vehicle to highlight improper conduct risks and to make recommendations aimed at addressing those risks,” Riches wrote in his report.

But really there was no point in releasing it at all, after taking three years to draw no conclusions, three months out from this year’s election.

The money was stolen in August 2020 and used to help Labor and Gunner campaign in close electorates they were afraid of losing. This is a fact backed up by documentary evidence.

Riches has hamstrung everyone by delaying the release of the report for close to three years. There was no time for debate on it in Parliament, no time to make changes to those “ambiguous rules” and essentially nothing anyone could do to prevent this from happening again, except for Riches’ own suggestion – and this is not a joke – that politicians pledge in writing not to use taxpayer money for their campaigns.

He offered that as part of his seven “voluntary” recommendations.

In another bizarre manoeuvre, Riches flagged a second secret report, this one solely into the Office of the Chief Ministers’ staffers’ conduct using public resources for party political activities at the 2020 election.

He said he will provide that report to current Chief Minister Eva Lawler by June 30, which makes about as much sense as Riches referring those same allegations to Michael Gunner himself to investigate – which he did back in 2021.

The report shows Riches gave Gunner three months to investigate his own staffers for misusing taxpayer money – including Gunner’s brother-in-law/deputy chief of staff and noted flight booker Ryan Neve – and was surprised when Gunner wrote back 90 days later to say “there is no evidence of improper conduct”.

Three months after that response, and while investigating the more than $40,000 in outright travel rorts (plus more, we’re informed), Riches then determined to investigate staffers’ alleged wrongdoing, but it is unlikely to include the relationship between Gunner and Neve, who was brought into the Chief MInister’s Office a year out from the election campaign.

Again, what is the point of providing the findings of this secret report exclusively to the Chief Minister on June 30? It’s too late for anything to be done concerning whatever possible misconduct he’ll outline in that document that she is under no obligation to make public. And why would she, despite her claims she might release parts of it, ahead of an election that would show Labor breached the public’s trust?

Chances are that report will be whittled down by Riches to a crudely drawn sketch depicting the Territory taxpayer getting the proverbial throbbing Labor member up the arse, with the words, “Who cares?” scribbled across it.

The only assurance taxpayer money won’t be used for party campaigning this time comes from Lawler – who could not bring herself to condemn the 2020 election rorts this week – but who introduced minor updates to ministerial staff guidelines recently, that aren’t legislated so have no real force behind them, and which were completed before she and her chief of staff Mark Nelson know what misconduct the staffers, which includes one of her own current staffers as well as a couple current candidates, got up to at the last election. (Riches states that Lawler’s office was apparently provided a copy of a general report he had circulated to witnesses some months ago that informed these new staff guidelines, which may not have adhered to the ICAC Act – more on that another time).

One thing is certain, and even the ambiguous rules back this up, it is the minister’s responsibility to ensure public money is properly expended, not the staffers.

By letting Gunner off the hook for this, Riches has declared that ministers aren’t responsible, which means nobody is, even the head public servant at the time who was responsible for expenditure during the caretaker period.

Riches inexplicably ruled some flights were ‘proper’, failed to grasp the politics of the situation

Riches chose only three Labor flights to remote communities to focus on, determining that another three were conducted for “proper reasons” but provided no evidence as to how he formulated that opinion. (He also appeared to miss a line in an email from Gunner to party people in his own report that showed Gunner had door-knocked while on a taxpayer-funded trip to Katherine during the caretaker period).

Riches failed to grasp that those three trips he did examine were to remote polling booths in marginal electorates Labor was afraid of losing.

The party knew how the bush seats were tracking and where they needed votes. Emails show one of Gunner’s staffers lobbied the electoral commissioner the month before the election to change locations of remote polling booths, seemingly to assist the party politically.

But Riches ignored that and concluded that he could not assess whether the trips benefitted Labor as the party lost both Mulka and Daly.

That is not the point. Whether they failed to win those electorates is irrelevant, the fact they tried with taxpayer money is the problem – another notion Riches did not contemplate during his investigation.

He appeared to suggest he believed Gunner when he told him the trips were necessary as the chief minister to meet with community leaders and accept accolades for his handling of the COVID pandemic because polling days in the tiny remote communities were the predominant time the whole community would be together, despite Gunner’s own diaries only mentioning polling station visits and never which community leaders he was scheduled to meet with.

Riches didn’t bother assessing why a chief minister who was days away from possibly losing an election needed to conduct “community engagement” so urgently for the public good at the same time polling booths were open.

He found it was just too darn hard to perceive what is a “political purpose” for a trip and a “public purpose” and that “ambiguity”, he said, was why he decided not to “record findings in this report”.

He also claimed that public trips would have a political element to them by nature of a politician attending. Which is true and fine if this were any other time than the caretaker period, when everything is political and the rules clearly state that public money cannot be expended on party political activities. The fact he did not even contemplate this is astonishing.

We didn’t need a criminal conviction on this matter. What we needed was someone to investigate it properly, show voters how the fraud was carried out before this election to prevent it from happening again and take necessary steps to ensure those who stole public money for campaign purposes were held accountable. That did not happen.

Riches is so busy as the ICAC and crying about a lack of funding, that he is currently undertaking a masters degree in “corruption and governance” at a pompous British university, apparently for life after the NT ICAC role. He would have earned a fail for this report.

Masters students are required to assess evidence and draw conclusions, using facts to formulate a position. Riches has shown he is incapable of that.

That wooden box he was studiously crafting in his garage on Tuesday morning was most likely a casket for what is left of the Northern Territory’s democracy that he just helped bury.

Christopher Walsh is the editor of the NT Independent and formerly held roles as senior political reporter at the NT News and investigations producer at ABC Darwin. He is also co-author of ‘Crocs in the Cabinet: An Instruction Manual on How Not to Run a Government’, named by Nicole Manison as one of Territory Labor’s most favourite books of all time