The first casualty in the restructure of the renamed Corporate Management Group was Assistant Commissioner George Davis. A former police cadet and a graduate of the FBI National Academy, he served as assistant commissioner (traffic) from July 1997 to December 1998 and was assistant commissioner (crime) until his early retirement on 4 January 2002. In 1999 he oversaw a significant restructure of the crime department that included the establishment of an Armed Offenders Squad to replace the original Armed Robbery Squad. His decision to leave the force prematurely came after Nixon told him that his five-year contract, due to expire in May 2002, would not be renewed.
Davis was at the helm during the early days of the gangland murders, including that of Mark Moran, and his retirement coincided with the beginnings of Operation Ceja, the genesis of which was Operation Hemi. Ceja was created by the ESD to investigate allegations of criminality against some members of the Drug Squad, and investigators ultimately arrested thirteen offenders, including seven police, some of whom were part of an international drug syndicate. The most prominent of these was Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Strawhorn. A popular and highly regarded Drug Squad detective who ‘got results’, he was the architect behind a dubious but very successful investigative unit known as the ‘chemical diversion desk’. For his part in this imbroglio Strawhorn was gaoled for seven years for trafficking a commercial quantity of pseudoephedrine. Such was the polarisation and depth of feeling within some police circles over the work of Ceja that task-force members were subjected to threatening telephone calls, abuse and ostracism, including bullets engraved with their names being sent to them through the post.
On 13 December 2001, just days before Davis officially retired, Nixon dropped a bombshell when she disbanded the Drug Squad and replaced it with the Major Drug Investigation Division (MDID). Comprised of hand-picked investigators, the integrity of the MDID suffered an early setback when it was discovered that two corrupt members of the former Drug Squad had transferred into it. Vested with a strong anti-corruption focus, the restructure also included the appointment of a new assistant commissioner (crime) and the promotion of assiduous anti-corruption investigator Commander Terry Purton. Nixon averred that ‘major drug investigations were a top priority for Victoria Police’ and was justifiably pleased with the MDID’s efficacy. In its first year of operations it was ‘successful in targeting a number of drug manufacturing and distribution rackets in Victoria, including twenty-seven clandestine laboratories: 182 people were arrested’.50
Nixon’s other early foray into the realm of the Crime Department was another legacy of her New South Wales connections; it did not end anywhere near as well as she had anticipated. At the instigation of a former New South Wales assistant commissioner and a former colleague of her father’s, Nixon met with well-known criminologist Kerry Milte, who purportedly had information about crime and police corruption in Victoria. Following a meeting with him on 8 February 2002, Nixon accepted his recommendation of Commander Rod Lambert and Wayne Strawhorn ‘as officers he would trust to work with’. By-passing standard operating procedures, she deployed Lambert and Strawhorn on a secret operation dubbed Operation Clarendon, with a brief to investigate Italian organised crime and any links to police. A short time later she was given an interim report on the Ceja Task Force and learned that Strawhorn was a key target of Ceja investigators. She scrapped her secret task force immediately but several years later, when Milte was the subject of police interest of a different nature, details of Operation Clarendon emerged and Nixon’s role in setting it up was questioned. Ruing the ill-advised exercise as something that caused her ‘great grief’, she maintained that she had ‘acted appropriately’ but also candidly confessed that ‘Clarendon was a mistake’.51
Nixon was active on many fronts and Davis’s departure was soon followed by others, paving the way for her to put together a leadership team of mostly younger officers, including women and civilians in senior management positions. The first significant clutch of changes occurred in October 2002, following ‘a rigorously fair process’. Two independent selection panels, including senior Victoria Police representatives and people from government, education and the business sector, interviewed sixty applicants in a process that was open to both Victoria Police and interstate applicants. Five new regional assistant commissioners were appointed, together with an assistant commissioner for crime and a director of human resources. The regional assistant commissioners were all male, and all were career members of the Victoria Police.
The new director of the Human Resources and Development Department was Sanjib Roy. A graduate of both the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, he had extensive senior management experience, including service as CEO of the Metropolitan Ambulance Service (MAS). His selection by Nixon was, however, called into question when it was revealed that he had knowingly sworn a false affidavit before the MAS Royal Commission.
None of this first wave of appointments was a woman, but under Nixon the selection of female managers gradually ensued, beginning with the engagement of a cadre of civilian executives. These appointments included Anne Tibaldi (Director of Organisational Development), Valda Berzins (Chief Information Officer), Sue-ellen Zalewski (Assistant Director of Human Resources) and Jenny Peachey (Director of Corporate Strategy and Performance). It was a trend that was referred to by some as ‘the rise of the administrators’. Two significant police appointments were the transfer of Sandra Langlands to the position of commander (Organisational Wellbeing Division) and the promotion of Sandra Nicholson to assistant commissioner (Region 2). Tertiary-educated and highly regarded as a criminal investigator, Nicholson was the first female lecturer at the DTS and the first female assistant commissioner appointed in Victoria since Bernice Masterson in 1989; later, she was the recipient of the 2005 Most Outstanding Female Leader award, conferred by the Australasian Council of Women and Policing (ACWAP).52
The new assistant commissioner (crime) was Simon Overland. Following the announcement of his selection by Nixon on 30 October 2002, he started in the position on 3 February 2003. Aged forty, he was a former member of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on secondment as project manager with the Australian Crime Commission implementation team. He had served in operational and management positions and had been attached to the special task force investigating the 1989 murder of AFP commissioner Colin Winchester. In 2000, he was AFP general manager (finance and people management) before being appointed to the position of chief operating officer. This role made him responsible for corporate leadership and management, including human resource management and development, financial management, policy and strategic planning, industrial relations, information technology, and learning and development. He held a Bachelor of Law with first-class honours from the Australian National University, and a Bachelor of Arts (Administration) and Graduate Diploma in Legal Studies from the University of Canberra.
Nixon’s selections of Roy and Overland were her first senior executive appointments. Significantly, they were both ‘outsiders’ and it was perhaps unfortunate that, like Roy, Overland came to the position in clouded circumstances, again involving, in part, a problematic affidavit. In a discipline case concerning another AFP officer, Federal Court judge James Allsop had censured Overland for both his evidence and conduct. Despite this matter and despite his having relatively limited experience of the inner workings of a crime department in a major Australian police agency, Overland was chosen by Nixon as head of the Crime Department. It was a decision that generated some enmity within the force, especially among those officers with high aspirations, and Overland found himself on the back foot before the first ball had even been bowled. It was suggested in some sections of the media that Nixon distrusted the Crime Department, believing that it was ‘insular, inbred, resistant to change and harbouring corruption’, but Nixon rejected this notion.
In such a climate, Overland’s first brief was to ‘sort out the Crime Department’ and the force’s ‘response to organised crime’. In essence, he was interposed as a change agent and circuit-breaker between Nixon and the department. Undaunted, he entered the fray and quickly set about putting his own stamp on his new portfolio. Meeting with detectives, civilian experts and support staff, he made it clear that they would always be consulted on the reasons for change, but he would have the last word. He fostered information sharing, criminal intelligence gathering and the nurturing of new methods and technology. He also stressed the need for greater flexibility within divisions and squads. In time, his restructure included the scrapping of a number of the traditional squads, including the Fraud, Casino, Asian Crime and Organised Crime squads, which were replaced by ‘crime theme desks’. One such victim was the Homicide Squad Cold Case Unit. First formed in 1993, it was rebadged and modified several times before a new stand-alone Missing Persons Squad was established in September 2015.
Nixon and Overland both believed in using outside consultants, and in accordance with this corporatised ideology, during their time at the top they engaged more than a hundred consultancies. The most notable of these was the Boston Consulting Group, which was paid $1 million for a ‘major crime management model’ and $2.42 million for the design and implementation of an ‘investigative model’.53
While reorganisations of this nature occupied much of Overland’s time, none of them bore the sense of urgency that was triggered by the maelstrom that became known as the gangland war. A precursor to the war was the slaying of Preston criminal Gregory John Workman on 7 February 1995, when he was allegedly shot by self-styled gangster Alphonse Gangitano. A member of the ‘Carlton Crew’, Gangitano was then shot and killed in his Templestowe home on 16 January 1998, reputedly by Jason Moran in company with old-school Melbourne crime patriarch Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh.
In a complicated web that was the hallmark of this eclectic illicit-drug imbroglio, a trail of sixteen bodies—including standover man Mark Moran, half-brother of Jason; police killer Victor George Peirce; and vampiresque gigolo Shane Chartres-Abbott—preceded the murder of Jason Moran on 21 June 2003. Before the carnage ended, the ‘gangland war hit list’ numbered thirty-four lives. Nixon became a hostage to fortune in February 2006 when she prematurely announced to the media that the ‘gangland issue’ was under control. It wasn’t quite over, though, and more notorious gangland members were to lose their lives. Carlton Crew crime don Mario Condello was shot dead in the garage of his East Brighton home on 6 February 2006 and then, after an uneasy hiatus, the penultimate death was that of Desmond ‘Tuppence’ Moran, who was shot and killed on 15 June 2009 in a Moonee Ponds cafe at the instigation of gangland matriarch Judy Moran. The postscript to twenty years of gang warfare was the murder of Carl Williams—bludgeoned to death with a metal seat stem from an exercise bike by his ‘trusted’ cell mate Matthew Johnson, inside the high-security Acacia unit at Barwon Prison on 19 April 2010.
Spanning two and a half decades, the nature of these homicides was such that it was not at first evident to investigators that a number of them were linked. For that reason, they largely went unnoticed by successive crime commands mostly comprised of experienced former detectives. The first thirteen of the slayings occurred during the Comrie years, between 1995 and 2000, while a further nineteen added to the death toll during Nixon’s commissionership from 2002 to 2006. The assistant commissioners responsible for the Crime Department during this era, preceding Overland, were, consecutively, Neil O’Loughlin, Graeme Macdonald and George Davis. For a time Trevor Thompson was the acting assistant commissioner (crime). By the time Overland arrived on the scene the gangland death toll already stood at fifteen, and before the year was ended a further ten deaths were added. Resorting to a well-known football idiom, Overland later observed: ‘We had dropped the ball’.54
Investigators who shared Overland’s view and who had kept an eye on the main game included the head of the Homicide Squad, Detective Inspector Andrew Allen, and experienced homicide investigator Detective Senior Sergeant Phillip Swindells; Swindells later conceded: ‘We had no intelligence, and we didn’t know anything about most of the major players’.55 Frustrated with the lack of results, their initial proposal for a task force was rejected by police command, but, soon after, Swindells was placed in charge of a small investigative group named Rimer. Initially consisting of only a handful of detectives and an analyst, Rimer had a strong focus on gathering criminal intelligence and was tasked with looking at the connection between a series of underworld killings. The victims in these cases included Dino Dibra, Nikolai Radev and Paul Kallipolitis, and the prime suspect was flyweight boxer and wannabe gangster Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin. But Veniamin was punching above his weight. A member of the so-called ‘Sunshine Crew’ and a reputed ‘gun for hire’ who had carried out seven contract killings, he was finally outgunned: shot and killed on 23 March 2004 in a back room of the La Porcella restaurant in Carlton. The shooter in that instance was former boxing heavyweight Mick Gatto. A confidant and friend of many of those in Melbourne’s netherworld, Gatto claimed self-defence and, after a Supreme Court trial, was acquitted of the charge of murdering Veniamin.
Rimer hadn’t long been in existence before it morphed into the much larger Purana Task Force on 17 April 2003. Led initially by Swindells, it was he who selected the Hindu-inspired name Purana. He was succeeded by Allen, and by June that year the original group of six detectives had been expanded to a team of thirteen. As the tally of unsolved underworld killings increased, Purana grew exponentially to number fifty-five investigators.
Although not all the murders were demonstrably linked, the names of some key players in the illicit Melbourne amphetamine industry rose to prominence: notable among them were Carl Anthony Williams and Antonios Sajih ‘Tony’ Mokbel. The list featured victims, killers and illicit-drug-industry players. High on the list was standover man Jason Moran, who on 13 October 1999 triggered much of the violence. During a pre-arranged daylight meeting in a suburban park and accompanied by his half-brother Mark as back-up, he shot Williams in the stomach. Until then, Williams had been a little-known small-time crook and amphetamine manufacturer with the sobriquet ‘The Fatboy’. He had skirted under the police radar, and respected Melbourne crime journalist John Silvester later observed, ‘Police underestimated Williams and his power base. He was ruthless, cashed-up and had recruited a loyal gang of reckless young drug dealers driven by drug money, wild dreams and illegal chemicals’. The Moran family, too, fatally underrated their plump, moon-faced adversary, whose lust for revenge would in time all but wipe out the Moran clan.56
Despite the ongoing travails confronting the Purana team, the gangland murders continued unabated and Allen lamented that the police were constantly ‘playing catch-up footy’. It was not until the murders of Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro on 21 June 2003 that there was a palpable shift in the police mindset. These deaths served as a bloody tipping point, precipitating more underworld bloodshed and an unprecedented police response that eventually saw an end to the drug cartel turf war. Moran and Barbaro were shot execution-style in front of nine children, including Moran’s own twins, as they sat in a van parked at the rear of the Cross Keys Hotel in Essendon. The two men were ambushed and totally off guard at a Saturday-morning children’s football clinic: it was a cowardly and callous slaying that horrified a violence-weary populace and fomented high levels of public disquiet.57
Evidence that the tide was turning emerged when after-dark hot-dog seller and drug dealer Michael Marshall was fatally shot in the presence of his five-year-old son outside his South Yarra home on 25 October 2003. Marshall was gunned down by two killers working for Williams. But unbeknown to them they had been placed under electronic surveillance and their every move was being monitored by Purana detectives, including a call from the shooters to Williams crowing: ‘that horse has been scratched’. Events had been moving so fast that Purana detectives were unable to prevent the shooting, but within hours the two gunmen were arrested by the SOG in nearby Elsternwick. Charged with murder, they eventually became crucial police witnesses. The outcome in this case was clear evidence that the Purana team was finally in the game and its investment in intelligence gathering was paying dividends.
If the Marshall matter fuelled guarded optimism among the Purana team and its followers, Operation Lemma was the turning point that heralded the beginning of the end for Melbourne’s feuding drug cartels. Lemma was established to investigate a conspiracy by Williams and two others to murder Mario Condello. And, in what Purana detective inspector Gavan Ryan described as ‘the most intense ten days of [his] policing life’, Purana crews were also investigating a contemporaneous conspiracy by Condello and two others to kill Carl and his father, George Williams, and their bodyguard. The alleged conspirators in both cases were arrested on 9 and 18 June 2004 respectively, moving Ryan to observe, ‘For us Operation Lemma was the turning point. It was the first time we were in front of the game’.58
Amid this mayhem, the view was often expressed by crime aficionados that police were not giving these investigations their best shot: the aficionados postulated that it was a tit-for-tat case of crooks killing their own kind. Overland was quick to dispel this notion and strongly asserted, ‘The first duty of a police officer is to preserve life and property, and central to our system of government is the application of the rule of law. That includes absolute respect for and equal valuing of life. Implicit in the suggestion that we don’t investigate organised crime murders with rigour is the assumption that we do not, or ought not, have regard for the value and equality of life. That assumption is wrong. In short, murder is wrong’. It was an articulate and measured observation that saw him emerge into the limelight as the public face of the Purana Task Force.59
Finally galvanised into a heightened level of action, Nixon, in consultation with Overland, made the decision to dramatically expand the police operation. With the backing of the premier, Steve Bracks, this included substantially increased funding to expand Purana’s activities, and the granting of unprecedented coercive questioning powers to combat organised crime. It also highlighted the benefits that accrued to all law enforcement agencies when they partnered in a multi-agency approach. In the case of Purana, the agencies involved were the Chief Examiner, Office of Public Prosecutions (OPP), Australian Crime Commission, AFP, Australian Customs Service (now Australian Border Force), Australian Taxation Office, and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Crucially, this multifaceted approach underscored a paradigm shift away from the facile notion that there was such a thing as ‘honour among thieves’. It was a culture shift that saw key players in the gangland war display a willingness to ‘do deals’ with police and betray their co-accused in the hope that they might get lighter sentences.
Integral to this changed climate was the role of the chief examiner, Damien Maguire, who was appointed in January 2005 pursuant to the Major Crime (Investigative Powers) Act, which was enacted as a direct response to the gangland war. The role of the chief examiner involved ‘the effective implementation of unprecedented coercive questioning powers granted to the Victoria Police so as to assist in combating organised crime’. In essence, it cracked the underworld’s code of silence and was the beginning of the end of a murderous phase in the ongoing battle between the forces for good and the purveyors of evil. The driver of much of this activity was Overland, who was largely responsible for introducing a number of innovative investigative approaches that not only helped shape the course of the Purana Task Force but, in the words of Nixon, also ‘helped create a new type of detective hero—meticulous, methodical, fair, and ruthless’.60
One matter that hung like a cloud over this archetypal picture of the quintessential detective was the role that police corruption had played in creating a toxic climate in which the gangland war was able to flourish. A number of Drug Squad detectives, in particular, betrayed their oaths and swapped sides, electing to be criminals of the sort they were supposed to be working against. Wayne Strawhorn headed this list but he was not alone, and at one point twenty-three serving and former Victoria Police members stood charged, awaiting trial on corruption-related offences. Gaoled miscreants included Stephen Paton, Stephen Cox, Glenn Sadler, Ian Ferguson, Matthew Bunning and Malcolm Rosenes, the latter of whom was working as a go-between for a supplier of ecstasy and an Israeli drug syndicate.61
Perhaps one of the blackest days for the Victoria Police erupted as the gangland wars drew to a close, when drug-dealer-turned-police-informer Terrence Hodson and his wife, Christine, were murdered in their Kew home on 15 May 2004. Hodson had been a registered police informer since 6 September 2001, and his police ‘controller’ was Detective Senior Constable David Miechel of the MDID. His ‘informer controller’, in turn, was Detective Sergeant Paul Dale, who was then in charge of a drug operation named Operation Galop. Both Miechel and Dale were former members of the disgraced Drug Squad who had been accepted into the MDID ruefully.
On the evening of 27 September 2003, AFL grand final night, Miechel and Hodson were arrested, allegedly in the course of burglarising an illicit drug storage house in East Oakleigh that was scheduled to be raided by the MDID as part of Operation Galop. When interviewed by ESD investigators, Hodson implicated Dale in the burglary, but with the death of the Hodsons, the case against Dale collapsed. On 18 August 2006, Miechel, who stood trial alone in the Supreme Court charged with burglary and serious drug offences, was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. As a consequence of these machinations, Dale was arrested on 13 February 2009 and charged with the murders of the Hodsons. He was remanded in custody and spent almost seven months in the Acacia unit at Barwon Prison. One of the principal witnesses in the case against Dale was Carl Williams, also in the Acacia unit, but following his death on 19 April 2010 the murder charges against Dale were formally dropped on 4 June 2010. An inquest into the murders of Terrence and Christine Hodson delivered its findings on 31 July 2015. The state coroner, Judge Ian Gray, found that the murders were ‘unsolved’ and could be re-opened if new evidence came to light.62
Purana Task Force detectives—led at various times by detective inspectors Philip Swindells, Andrew Allen, Jim O’Brien, Gavan Ryan, Bernie Edwards, Mick Roberts, Ken Ashworth and Andrew Gustke—eventually made 217 arrests, laid more than more than five hundred charges, and seized more than $44 million in property. By any measure Purana was a gargantuan exercise, conducted on a scale not previously seen in Victoria. In the course of its investigations it used listening devices to ‘bug’ suspects for 53 000 hours, conducted 22 000 hours of physical surveillance, and intercepted 836 173 telephone calls. At one point, 75 per cent of the force’s electronic surveillance capacity was devoted to Purana. An indication of the effectiveness of this multi-agency investigation was the involvement of the Australian Taxation Office, which served taxation bills totalling $120 million, of which Mokbel’s liability was $9.8 million.
Purana was a copybook example of how a unit that was suitably resourced and staffed with exemplary investigators, working in partnership with other agencies, could achieve outstanding results. The Williams drug empire was obliterated. On 7 May 2007, in the Supreme Court before Justice Betty King, Carl Williams pleaded guilty to the murders of Jason Moran, Lewis Moran and Mark Mallia, and of conspiracy to murder Mario Condello, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He had previously been found guilty by a jury of the murder of Michael Marshall and was implicated in a number of other homicides, including the death of Mark Moran, who was ambushed by Williams outside his suburban Aberfeldie home on 15 June 2000.
But the stewardship of Purana did not end there. Over more than a decade, the task force worked through a number of phases that included changes to both personnel and operational focus. Detective inspectors Bernie Edwards and Jim O’Brien both headed Purana during the ‘Mokbel phase’. Prominent Melbourne drug baron and reputed billionaire Antonios ‘Tony’ Sajih Mokbel, aka ‘Fat Tony’, while on trial for a federal cocaine importation case, absconded on bail on 20 March 2006. In absentia he was found guilty of trafficking in cocaine, for which he was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. In an elaborate escapade, he fled to Greece aboard a private yacht that he had purchased for $323 000 and fitted out especially for the trip. Purana detectives, working in company with the AFP and Greek police authorities, tracked him to the seaside town of Glyfada. Greek-speaking Detective Sergeant Jim Coghlan was Purana’s man on the ground in Glyfada. He was familiar with the locale and, despite Mokbel’s notoriously dodgy wig, he was also familiar with ‘Fat Tony’. Mokbel was apprehended in Glyfada and, after protracted legal proceedings, extradited to Melbourne—flown to Australia on a special charter flight at a cost of $450 000. On his return, more courtroom machinations followed. A Supreme Court jury found him not guilty of the murder of Lewis Moran, and the OPP elected not to proceed with a charge of murder in the case of Michael Marshall. Mokbel had, however, amassed a small fortune from his illicit-drug empire and was charged with trafficking in large commercial quantities of drugs. At the Supreme Court in Melbourne on 3 July 2012 he was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, with an effective total non-parole period of twenty-two years.
The Mokbel arrest and extradition demonstrated clearly that, even for a cashed-up, savvy gambler like Mokbel, fleeing overseas while on bail was a long-odds bet, especially if the Purana team was on your trail. The arrest of Stephen Asling on 4 November 2015 for the 2003 murder of Graham Kinniburgh, followed by the discovery on 22 January 2016 of a body in a junkyard grave at Thomastown, suspected to be that of co-offender Terrence Blewitt, was a stark reminder that time had not diminished the perspicacity of Purana.63
In contrast to the plaudits deservedly bestowed on the Purana detectives by Nixon, the hard men and solitary woman of the Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) were doing it hard. The genesis of the AOS lay in the Armed Robbery Squad (ARS), which had been created in 1971 as an anti-robbery team within the Consorting Squad. The late 1960s had witnessed an escalation in the incidence of armed robberies, spawned in part by the burgeoning illicit-drug trade. Early lucrative targets of the bandits were banks, totalisator agencies and armoured cars, but as those businesses responded by tightening their security, the robbers flocked to softer targets, such as shops, pharmacies, service stations and hotels. A disturbing trend was the increased preparedness of armed robbers not only to carry firearms but to use them to evade apprehension. In many respects it was an unequal fight, where the eponymous sobriquet ‘the robbers’ applied to ARS members as well as their adversaries. Driven in large measure by a compelling sense of ‘noble cause’, the ARS was not strong on technology but was deeply ingrained with its own brand of toughness.
In its heyday the squad, like most criminal investigation units of that era, did not have the benefit of DNA profiling, CCTV, computerisation, mobile telephones, sophisticated electronic surveillance gear or the other aids to investigation that are stock-in-trade for investigators in the twenty-first century. The ARS, frequently in tandem with the Consorting Squad, routinely dealt with the most violent and ruthless miscreants in society: their tools of trade on dawn raids generally comprised a sledgehammer, guns, and a physical presence and omnipotence that in most cases more than matched anything the underworld could contrive. And somewhere in this kit, according to Crime Department folklore, could be found an ageing manual typewriter for compiling unsigned confessional statements or unsigned records of interview. Known in some quarters as ‘verballing’ or ‘bricks’, this was a practice largely rendered obsolete in 1988 with the introduction of audio-recorded interviews in indictable matters.
In 1975 a cloud was cast over the workings and future of the ARS when the conservative Liberal government of Rupert Hamer appointed Barry Watson Beach, QC, to sit as a one-man board of inquiry into allegations against members of the Victoria Police Force and report ‘which members of the Force were guilty of criminal offences, breaches of Standing Orders, or harassment or intimidation of any member of the public’. Beach sat for more than fifteen months, during which time he received 131 complaints against police and ultimately made adverse findings against fifty-five. However, only thirty-two of those police named by Beach were charged, and none were convicted.
In general terms, Beach found that ‘Complaints investigated by the Board fell into two broad categories—those by hardened criminals against members of the Homicide Squad, Armed Robbery Squad and Consorting Squad, and those by persons with generally little or no criminal background against individual members of the Force’. The disturbing feature of this whole inquiry concerned the behaviour of a number of police officers who were members of the Armed Robbery and Consorting squads during the years 1972–75. Beach reported: ‘evils have been uncovered which demonstrably require remedy. Indeed some of the abuses exposed in relation to one particular “elite” squad, namely the Armed Robbery Squad (or more accurately the members of that Squad at the relevant time), are of themselves so grave as to warrant the most prompt institution of safeguarding reforms’.
Following the Beach Inquiry and the resultant failure to convict any of those police charged, the ARS continued to operate relatively unfettered. The culture of the Crime Department was results driven, and it did not get mired down in navel gazing. One experienced ARS detective steeped in the ‘noble cause’ tradition felt that most people were impressed with the work the ARS did ‘locking up the jackals of society … The perception is that dumb coppers catch robbers, give them a hiding, and make them confess. We sometimes do. You get fantastic information’. In 1992 a total of 1932 armed robberies were committed in Victoria. The force-wide solution rate for these offences was 29 per cent, but ‘in matters directly investigated by the ARS an outstanding solution rate of 65.8 per cent was achieved’. For their efforts the ARS was awarded a group citation for ‘outstanding work and dedication resulting in the arrest of 46 recidivist criminals for the commission of 109 serious robberies’.
The ‘consorters’ did not fare as well post-Beach, and on 17 November 1980 the Consorting Squad was amalgamated with the Breaking Squad to form the Major Crime Squad (MCS), or ‘the Majors’. An investigative unit within the Crime Department, the MCS had responsibility for investigating serious crimes, including prison escapes, kidnappings, safe-breakings and large burglaries.
The rebranding of these squads did not change things on the ground, and old habits endured. Their work routinely placed them in positions of conflict and danger rarely seen in other areas of the force, and their number included many exceptional detectives. Some, however, clung to old ways of working and, on 1 July 1999, the Armed Robbery Squad, Prison Squad and Special Response Squad were amalgamated to form the Armed Offenders Squad, ‘with expanded numbers of specialist investigators focused on a broadening range of armed robbery offences’. While these administrative changes gave a superficial sense of order, Nixon later sagely observed that ‘the violent, notorious culture of the old armed robbers squad … had always endured among some members’. Evidence of this emerged in 2006, almost seven years after the formation of the AOS, when, during the interview of a robbery suspect who was about to be assaulted by police, one of the detectives introduced himself to the suspect with the words: ‘Welcome to the Armed Robbery Squad’. Adorning the squad’s office walls was a ‘rogues’ gallery’ of former members, menacingly dressed uniformly in black suit and white shirt paired with an AOS team tie and replete with dark glasses, alongside poems having the lilt of a bushranger’s lament, honouring past deeds. OPI director Michael Strong described the squad as ‘a cultural relic’.
In late 2006, after receiving information that some members of the AOS were regularly involved in the excessive and unlawful use of force on people in police custody, the OPI, in concert with ESD and senior officers from the Crime Department, installed electronic surveillance devices in an interview room used by members of the AOS. The footage subsequently obtained from the camera showed three AOS detectives verbally and physically abusing a suspect over a period of four hours. The covert tape also depicted an inadequate ‘welfare check’ by the AOS inspector.
The three AOS detectives depicted in the incriminating tapes, Robert Dabb, Mark Butterfield and Matthew Franc, were called into private hearings by the OPI and, when questioned, lied under oath and denied any wrongdoing. Consequently, in March 2008 the OPI conducted public hearings at which the three detectives were confronted with the incriminating vision for the first time, whereupon one of them, distraught, collapsed in the witness stand. Following that ignominious moment, the three detectives resigned and pleaded guilty to charges of assault and attempting to mislead the OPI. They avoided imprisonment but were sentenced to serve intensive correction orders.
While the AOS was unravelling at the hands of the OPI, Nixon and Overland were waging their own war of attrition against the AOS, which, despite plaudits from Nixon that the squad had done ‘some very fine work’, was about to be axed. It was with a sense of déjà vu that Nixon, this time in company with Overland, for the second time during her tenure in Victoria disbanded one of the ‘élite’ crime squads. On 8 September 2006, she ventured from her tenth-floor office in the Victoria Police Centre at Docklands to the hostile home turf of the AOS in the Crime Department building on St Kilda Road. The 35-member AOS was summoned and told by Nixon that the squad was being disbanded, effective immediately. Unbeknown to Nixon, her address to the group was covertly recorded and released to the media—but she did not deviate from her course. With Overland’s backing, she maintained that the level of assault allegations and other complaints was unacceptable and that the squad would be replaced with a task-force model. Initially named Taskforce 700, within days it was renamed Taskforce Emerald and, with equal rapidity, at the behest of Paul Mullett and with the concurrence of Overland, finally resurrected as the Armed Offences Taskforce. An initial focus for the task force was non-fatal shootings, armed robberies and aggravated burglaries.64
While the restructure of the crime squads and the force response to the gangland war were both born of necessity, they drew heavily on police personnel and resources at every level. This included Nixon, who, although riding shotgun with Overland during much of the front-line fracas, still had a police force to manage and a cultural reform agenda to fulfil. It was an agenda on which, not unexpectedly, women and women’s issues figured significantly, and Nixon moved with alacrity to give them effect.
One of her first moves in this regard was both symbolic and pragmatic: she ordered the ‘wall’ to be dismantled and that the ‘dummy be dragged away’. Scaling a 1.6-metre-high wooden wall, together with a requirement to drag a 75-kilogram dummy the length of a cricket pitch, were two elements of the physical agility course that all aspiring recruits had to complete. The ‘wall’ was one of the most daunting barriers to would-be female recruits, but it was not, as some pundits contended, discriminatory or inherently unfair to women. Developed in the late 1980s by the Physical Skills Unit at the Police Academy following an overseas study tour by Churchill Fellowship recipient Inspector Danny Bodycoat, the course was designed ‘to ensure that prospective police recruits possessed the physical attributes [needed] to carry out valid job-related tasks’. In addition to dragging the dummy and scaling the wall, ‘Hopefuls had to go over and under a hurdle, over a platform, across a balance beam, through a maze, scale a 2.4m chain fence and climb through a window’. Before the wall was incorporated into the police recruit selection regime, a training video was produced to demonstrate the link between the tests and the tasks. It was evaluated by Equal Opportunity Commissioner Fay Marles, who deemed that the pursuit course was not discriminatory, and approved of its use. There were no legal challenges to this decision or the related test, and for years the wall remained the nemesis of hundreds of otherwise-suitable female applicants. One study found that 88 per cent of male applicants passed the agility test, whereas 67 per cent of female aspirants failed.
Evidence that Nixon’s edict would change things permanently was apparent in the first group of fifty-two candidates to undergo the modified recruit entrance test sans wall: all twenty-six men passed the test, and of twenty-six female applicants, just six failed to complete the course. From that time on the wall was banished, but following the development of a national standardised police physical fitness testing regime for recruit applicants, it was reintroduced in Victoria on 16 November 2008. The dummy drag test, once hastily discarded by Nixon, was also reintroduced, together with a ‘beep test’ and hand-grip dynamometer test.65
While Nixon’s early recruiting reforms were symbolic of her broader efforts to change the prevailing culture of the force, her focus on the place of women in the organisation underscored a strategic reform agenda driven by pragmatism in the field of police recruiting. She had inherited a force with the lowest proportion of female members of any police service in Australia—at 17.7 per cent, it lagged behind New South Wales with 23.4 per cent and South Australia with 21 per cent.
Nixon’s efforts to bolster police numbers had their genesis in the administration of Neil Comrie. The Kennett Government had announced on 1 May 1999 that provision had been made for an increase of 400 additional police spread over two years. Pledged prior to the state election—on 20 October 1999 by the police and emergency services minister, National Party member Bill McGrath—this was followed by a Labor budget promise in May 2000 for an additional 800 police. McGrath retired before the election and was succeeded as police minister by Andre Haermeyer. A member of the selection panel that chose Nixon, Haermeyer later initiated the ministerial administrative review conducted by John Johnson that addressed the issue of police numbers and found that there was ‘a need for improved planning relating to recruitment and the turnover of personnel’.
Despite the protracted argy-bargy that preceded and followed Nixon into the recruitment debate, she remained focused on the logistics of recruiting and training an unprecedented number of new members—and the added requirement of significantly increasing the proportion of female recruits. In February 2001, Victoria Police launched ‘A New Century. A New Force’, a $2.5 million advertising campaign with a special focus on women and people from diverse backgrounds that generated an unprecedented 90 000 inquiries from prospective recruits. Forty training squads were inducted into the academy, meaning that it was operating at full capacity: 1050 recruits were inducted and 827 graduated, of which slightly more than 30 per cent were female.
As a mark of the rapidly changing face of the police workforce, in 2002 the force produced the Victoria Police Equity and Diversity Corporate Five-year Plan, designed to build a more inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace. Developed under the purview of the manager of equity and diversity, Debbie Sonin, the anticipated benefits of the plan to the Victoria Police were greater productivity, increased employee retention of its best people, lower absenteeism, and reduced potential for litigation. The main benefits to employees were improved morale, greater flexibility to balance work and life commitments, better career opportunities, and more opportunities to team-build and enjoy peer support. Sonin described the broader objectives of the plan thusly: ‘We are a professional workplace and we are applying the basic principle of respecting each other’s differences whether or not we agree with them’.
In 2003, the Corporate Management Group set a hitherto-unreached target of 25 per cent as the desired proportion of women to be in the force by 2007. In order to achieve that goal, at least half of the anticipated 2100 recruits enlisted during that period needed to be female. Positions were created for a new rank of leading senior constable to provide mentors for the unusually high number of trainees. Nixon lauded the education standard and maturity of these recruits. A quarter of them were tertiary educated, and their ages ranged from nineteen to fifty-two years. The target of 25 per cent was not reached during Nixon’s commissionership, but she fostered a climate in which it was imminently possible. Following her efforts the goal was attained by the administrations of chief commissioners Simon Overland and Ken Lay. The 25 per cent target had the endorsement of the premier, Steve Bracks, but disappointed the secretary of the Police Association, Paul Mullett, who cautioned against ‘the lowering of standards … what we want to see is qualified, eligible people entering the academy … irrespective of gender’.
The doctrine that one-size-fits-all had for decades been the catchcry of those opposed to the tailoring of police recruitment, training and deployment to suit women and applicants drawn from a range of minority and ethnic groups. The first chief commissioner whose administration had to adapt to emerging notions of merit and equity involving women police was Reg Jackson, when the Police (Married Women) Regulation passed on 21 December 1971, enabling married women to join and remain in the force. Mick Miller replaced Jackson in 1977, and the following year the Equal Opportunity Act came into effect, significantly impacting on the way in which the force dealt with women. Then, a major change from which most other reforms flowed was the lateral integration of women into the previously all-male general seniority list. In 1987, Kelvin Glare succeeded Miller and, beginning with the formation of an Equal Employment Unit, became the first chief commissioner to implement substantive changes impacting on women in the force that were not driven by external influences. One of Glare’s noteworthy actions in this regard was the selection in 1989 of Bernice Masterson as the nation’s first female assistant commissioner. Some years later, in his retirement, Glare proffered the view that ‘The Nixon regime seemed to be characterised by the blatant advancement of women in the Force because of gender alone’. He did, however, quickly dispel any suggestion that he was misogynistic, defending his position on Nixon by adding that Masterson was appointed ‘because of her skill and ability, not because of her gender’.
In 1990, the force conducted an internal review of the impact of equal opportunity on policing in Victoria, and one section of the resulting document described the statistics regarding the integration of women in the force as ‘startling’. However, it added, ‘Women were found under-represented in specialist areas such as criminal investigation, and a high majority of women respondents believed that they had been unsuccessful in their applications for such positions because of the paternalistic approach of the all-male selection panels’. Promotions boards and selection panels—for decades the domain of the officer class, who were mostly conservative, middle-aged white Australian males—were a fearsome place for anyone aspiring to ‘get on in the job’, and the sense of trepidation felt by women in these forums was magnified many times over.
Following Glare, Neil Comrie headed the force, at a time when the gender and ethnic mix of the expanding police workforce was coming under increasingly close scrutiny, especially from the plethora of academics undertaking police-related research, the media, and community groups who regarded themselves as key stakeholders in the activities and future development of the organisation. Despite the frequent claims of most police leaders through this era that they did not discriminate on the basis of gender or ethnicity, they did. It was not discrimination born of misogyny, as some observers contended, but discrimination in a more subtle but equally damaging form: paternalism, which was sometimes subtle, sometimes manifest.66
The ideal foil to counter what some regarded as enduring paternalism within the Victoria Police was maternalism, and there was no better person in the nation at that time to champion this cause than Nixon. In a case of ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the woman’, she was able to empathise with women in a way that, arguably, no man could, and this influence extended beyond issues of merit and equity to embrace her emblematic role in the ongoing battle against family violence and violence against women.
Nixon moved swiftly to initiate action on this issue, which was one of the four priority areas that she identified following her inaugural statewide road trip. The internal review team comprised Commander Leigh Gassner and senior sergeants Lisa McMeeken and Wendy Steendam. The ‘Violence Against Women’ project commenced in August 2001 and examined both domestic violence and violence against women by strangers, including sexual assault, assault, stalking, abduction and drink-spiking. Providing a sense of scale of the crime mosaic confronting Nixon and her team, she wrote, ‘Of those crimes reported, 90 per cent involve domestic violence … which is a difficult area for police. It takes up a huge amount of our time, which is not good for victims or police. On top of that, 80 per cent of all incidents of domestic violence are not reported at all’. In the year to June 2001, police attended more than 28 000 reports of domestic violence and sexual assault in the Melbourne metropolitan area alone. Nixon commissioned a cost-benefit analysis from Boston Consulting, which concluded that the annual cost of family violence to the people of Victoria was $2 billion. The national figure was $8 billion.
Nixon committed the Victoria Police to taking a social leadership role on family violence, and herself took the lead in a whole-of-government approach to breaking the cycle. The review team report, Victoria Police Violence against Women Strategy: ‘A Way Forward’, was released in March 2002 and Gassner was subsequently appointed as co-chairperson of the Statewide Steering Committee to Reduce Family Violence. On 31 August 2004, the force launched its Code of Practice for the Investigation of Family Violence and Nixon expressed her hope that ‘the Code would empower police across the State to follow the lead of some very good police and take some form of action in every single report of family violence’. In February 2005, the Statewide Steering Committee tabled its multi-agency report Reforming the Family Violence System in Victoria. It was an acknowledgement that lasting change required complementary changes in the broader system.
Professors Jenny Fleming and S. Caroline Taylor wrote of Nixon’s legacy in the field of sexual and family violence: ‘Christine Nixon has placed violence against women firmly on the public and government agenda. The courage to prioritise what has so often been regarded as a “women’s issue” and more often described pejoratively as a “feminist issue” and not “real” police work, has led to an iconoclastic change in the policing landscape and government rhetoric in Victoria. The steady rise in reports of family violence and sexual assault are testament to a growing confidence in police’. They added that Nixon’s active connection with ‘organisations committed to providing educational and mentoring pathways to those affected by child sexual abuse are testament to a woman whose passion and commitment to women and children extended beyond her role as Chief Commissioner’.67
From the time Nixon joined the Victoria Police her sense of compassion was much in evidence, and it became one of the hallmarks of her leadership. She was an accomplished public speaker and an astute social networker with a relaxed and compassionate manner that drew people to her. This was a style consistent with her belief that ‘the emotional culture of the organisation needed to change’. An early sign of her caring nature and her desire to ‘elevate the status of people issues’ was her recognition of members of the Bendigo police and community who had been involved in resolving a house siege at Kangaroo Flat on 1 and 2 October 1999. Four police were shot and seriously wounded by 36-year-old John Mathew Wason, who triggered the siege by calling for an ambulance for his father, who had purportedly suffered a heart attack.
When police arrived at the High Street home they were confronted by Wason, who was armed with an unregistered .22 calibre rifle. Senior Constable Craig Miller and Senior Constable Peter Eames were the first police to arrive at the scene, and Eames was the first officer shot by Wason. While the mayhem was rapidly unfolding, Miller, who was unarmed, observed that Chief Superintendent David Mansell had inexplicably driven into the fray with his wife in a police vehicle, and had left her alone and endangered in the parked car. At significant personal risk, Miller rescued Mansell’s wife and got her to safety. He was shot in the chest, with the bullet puncturing his liver, a lung, ureter, diaphragm and bowel. As he lay bleeding heavily, immobilised in a roadside ditch, a civilian who showed great personal courage was Mary-Ann Beckmans. A registered nurse who lived adjacent to the scene, she made her way to Miller’s side and lay with him in the ditch, monitoring his condition, until he could be rescued. Inspector Ulf Kaminski and Sergeant Peter Lukaitis were also shot and wounded at the scene. After a siege lasting eighteen hours, Wason’s body was found by the SOG in a hallway of the house; he had taken his own life. It is the only occasion in the history of the force where four members have been shot by the same suspect at the one location while responding to the same call for assistance.
Nixon was a member of the New South Wales Police when this event unfolded, but when she assumed the position of chief commissioner in Victoria, the aftermath of the Bendigo siege remained bitter and unresolved. An internal review had upset many of those involved, and the battle to gain compensation while trapped in the legal morass of Victoria’s inequitable accident compensation system exacerbated the frustration and anger felt by many. After Nixon met with the affected officers and their families, her personal intervention began to change the course of events. She was dismayed at what had occurred and formed the view that ‘little recognition was given to the officers involved in the stand-off, and though several of them were physically and psychologically wounded, they had been given minimal support in their recuperation’. It took years of work to help them and the organisation recover.
Much of the angst felt by members was aimed directly at the conservative Kennett Government, which had enacted sweeping changes to the Accident Compensation Act 1985. Effective from 12 November 1997, this legislation determined that workers injured on the job were not entitled, under any circumstances, to take legal action under common law against their employer or the person responsible for their injury. It was a controversial and highly unpopular statute that was swiftly repealed following the change of government on 19 October 1999. In one of its first post-election moves, the Bracks Government reinstated the common-law right of workers to sue for compensation for injuries sustained on or after 20 October 1999, but no provision was made for retrospectivity, leaving a gap of twenty-three months, from November 1997 to October 1999, during which injured workers had no access to common-law litigation. Twenty-six injured Victoria Police employees, including the four shot at the Bendigo siege, fell into this category, which was acrimoniously dubbed ‘the black hole’.
Recognition of those police and citizens involved in the siege was delayed pending finalisation of the coroner’s inquest and issues surrounding ‘black hole’ compensation payments for victims. More than two years elapsed before all those involved ‘were finally recognised for their remarkable daring and bravery’. In an awards ceremony hosted by Nixon and the City of Greater Bendigo, held in the Bendigo Performing Arts Centre on Thursday 29 November 2001, twenty serving and former police, together with six civilians, received bravery awards. Lukaitis and Miller were given the Valour Award for exceptional bravery, and Kaminski and Eames were presented with Chief Commissioner’s Commendations for bravery. For her selfless courage Mary-Ann Beckmans received an Australian Bravery Award. Miller’s Valour Award citation reads: ‘For displaying exceptional bravery in that he placed himself at grave risk when removing a civilian passenger of a police vehicle to safety and the removal of a seriously wounded police officer from the line of fire of an offender armed with a rifle. Whilst further attempting to warn traffic approaching the scene of the shooting he was subsequently seriously wounded to the body at Kangaroo Flat on 1 October 1999’. He expressed the sentiments of many when he told the Herald Sun: ‘We’re feeling a lot more inner contentment that everything has come to a close today in such a positive fashion. I think these ceremonies help to heal it for [our families] too, and that’s why we’ve brought them here and made them part of it’.
Miller’s emphasis on families and healing was a positive affirmation for Nixon, a chief commissioner seeking to cultivate ‘emotional change’ in the organisation, that the change she sought was possible. And her candid address to members and their families was a sign that their wait had not been in vain: ‘There has been a lot of pain and hurt around this incident and it has not just been from bullets. In some cases, it has come from support not given, from promises not kept, from words not spoken and questions left unanswered … But I think there has been an enormous amount of learning for all of us and today gives us a chance to move on, not to forget, but to learn of the resilience of mankind’.68
There were critics both inside and outside the force who harboured lingering doubts that Nixon was capable of the sort of stoicism and resilience her role demanded, but such thoughts were soon dispelled when, like chief commissioners Miller, Glare and Comrie before her, she was thrust to the fore during the dark days following the death of a member feloniously slain on duty.
Senior Constable Anthony ‘Tony’ Clarke joined the Victoria Police in 1994 and worked in general and traffic duties at Frankston, Nunawading and Boroondara before being attached to the Region 4 (North East) Regional Traffic Task Unit (RTTU). At approximately 1.25 a.m. on 24 April 2005, he was patrolling solo on the Warburton Highway in Launching Place when, in the course of a routine traffic intercept, he was shot and killed with his own police-issue firearm. Several hours earlier Clarke had issued the motorist involved, Mark Bailey, with a traffic infringement notice for speeding, but during the second intercept Bailey managed to grab the gun from Clarke’s holster. After shooting Clarke, he used the gun to kill himself. Issues subsequently addressed by Coroner Kim Parkinson included ‘one-up’ patrols, firearm retention training and tactics, and the utility of the Helweg 925 model holster.
Prior to Clarke’s death, the last Victoria Police members to be slain on duty were Gary Silk and Rodney Miller in 1998, and there had not been a police road traffic fatality since the deaths of Mark Bateman and Fiona Robinson in 2000. It was a testament to the fact that the force’s Safety First doctrine, initiated under Neil Comrie, had made a significant impact. However, following Clarke’s death Nixon was confronted with the death of another member just two days later. Senior Constable Rennie Page, a member of the Benalla Traffic Management Unit (TMU), was killed on the morning of 26 April 2005 while he was performing a routine traffic intercept on the Hume Freeway near Benalla. Rennie was struck and killed by a passing vehicle while he was speaking to a motorist he had intercepted at the side of the road. The deaths of two members who were engaged in one-person traffic patrols were of obvious concern to Nixon, who initiated a three-month review of the practice in consultation with key stakeholders.
When she was first notified of the death of Clarke, Nixon was in Cairns, Queensland, attending a national conference of police chiefs. In 1988 Kel Glare had found himself in almost identical circumstances, attending a conference on the Gold Coast at the time of the Walsh Street murders of constables Tynan and Eyre; to his eternal chagrin, Glare ‘made a fundamental error and remained at the conference’. Nixon, upon receiving the news of Clarke’s death, moved with alacrity and, with John Becquet, took a pre-dawn flight that landed her in Melbourne at breakfast-time. Met by her aide/driver, Gavin McGraw, she was soon at Clarke’s home, where a distraught assemblage of friends and family were grappling with their grief. Nixon consoled Clarke’s wife, Tina, and drew solace from the company of the experienced senior police chaplain, Reverend Jim Pilmer. Later that day she visited the RTTU at Knox, where she was met by the officer-in-charge, burly senior sergeant Ian McCallum. It was an unscripted moment in a very traumatic day, where the emotion was raw but real. McCallum recounted: ‘I’ve given the Chief briefings but I couldn’t say I know her. Well, she walked in, opened her arms, gave me a hug and we both had a bit of a cry. The blokes were blown away by her visit, and I would walk over [hot] coals for her’.
Another source of succour for McCallum was Pilmer, who, during the hours and days following Clarke’s death, was a voice of compassion and reason. He remained with Clarke’s wife and son at their home until her family arrived, and then headed to Launching Place to bless Clarke’s body, which still lay by the side of the Warburton Highway. Pilmer conducted Clarke’s funeral in the Police Academy chapel, and Nixon, who delivered the eulogy, later noted that ‘The funeral, like all police funerals, was a huge affair’. Members of the force lined the street outside the academy and the guard of honour stretched for a kilometre. The significance of what had unfolded in the wake of Clarke’s death was acknowledged by Nixon when she said, ‘The strength and support of the chaplains at a moment like this can’t be overestimated’. And McCallum’s feelings resonated with many when he said, ‘I couldn’t have done it without Jim. He was such a comfort. He just has an aura about him. He’s a saint as far as I’m concerned. I know that’s a big statement and I’m not religious but he makes you wonder sometimes whether you miss out because you don’t have that sort of faith’.
An Anglican priest, the Reverend Jim Pilmer was appointed as a police chaplain in October 1995 and served for thirteen years before retiring as senior police chaplain in 2008. His initial task in 1995 was to establish a statewide chaplaincy network of almost fifty clergy of various denominations, including several Salvation Army officers, a rabbi and an imam. His greatest pastoral challenge arose in 1998, when he conducted the funerals of Gary Silk and Rodney Miller. In May 2003 he conducted the funeral service of Inspector Paul Carr of the SOG, who perished while mountain climbing in Tibet. That service was held in the academy chapel and included the participation of Buddhist monks. It was the biggest funeral that Nixon had seen and, reflecting later in a poignant moment of closure, she wrote: ‘To me the motivation of the whole exercise was about caring for our people for the broader family of the police force’.69
At that point of her sojourn in Victoria there were many citizens and police who would have walked over hot coals for Nixon. She had stamped her populist style on the organisation, and in the area of police malfeasance, in particular, she had set the bar high. It was therefore unfortunate that she became entangled in what was dubbed ‘The Beverly Hills Cop Affair’, which irreversibly damaged her public credibility.
On 20 October 2008, Nixon, accompanied by John Becquet, flew first class as a non-paying guest of Qantas Airways on Flight 93, the inaugural flight of the Airbus 380 from Melbourne to Los Angeles. In LA, Nixon and Becquet were greeted by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Accommodated for one night at the opulent Sofitel Hotel, Beverly Hills, they attended two gala social functions before returning to Melbourne aboard a Boeing 747-400 on 24 October, Nixon travelling in the first-class cabin and Becquet in business class. As part of this ‘amazing event’, Nixon participated in a group photo shoot and waxed lyrical about the Airbus 380, saying that ‘the plane was just magnificent’. And so was the value: OPI investigators later established that the market value of the travel ‘package’ on the A380 (allowing for the upgrade to first class) and accommodation exceeded $20 000 per person.
Even before Nixon left LA her trip was arousing media interest, and once back in Melbourne she issued a media release, stating in essence that Becquet, as a former Qantas manager, was the intended recipient of the airline’s largesse—she was simply his travelling companion. Or, as Becquet reportedly told the Australian media, ‘I am normally her handbag—on this she’s my handbag’.
A complaint casting doubt on the veracity of this version of events was made to the OPI, in which it was alleged that Nixon, not Becquet, was in fact the intended recipient of the invitation. Becquet had ceased working as an air-crew operations manager with Qantas in 1995. A senior Qantas executive told OPI investigators that ‘the invitation to Ms Nixon was issued because, as Chief Commissioner, she fitted the criteria of guests we wanted associated with the inaugural flight’. The OPI report noted: ‘The implication is obvious. The inaugural flight was a high-profile event, intended to advertise Qantas’ A380 services. Ms Nixon was a very popular Chief Commissioner whose presence on the flight would add to its profile. This is what Qantas received in return for the benefit Ms Nixon received, whether she appreciated it or not’.
The OPI director (police integrity), Michael Strong, opted to resolve the matter by conciliation, pursuant to the Police Regulation Act. In a ‘departure from the norm’ he also elected to formally report to parliament the action taken by him. As part of the conciliated resolution, Nixon addressed the matter of air fares and released a formal statement that read, in part, ‘As I now appreciate, my acceptance of the free travel was inadvisable. I accept that the free travel involved a gift of more than token value within the meaning of the Code of Conduct … I accept that my conduct has not provided a good example for Victoria Police members to whom gifts and gratuities may be offered. I very much regret that this has occurred’.
While the outcome clearly stung Nixon, there were precedents in Victoria that suggested that, by comparison, she was treated both fairly and kindly. Before her time, Victorian police had been admonished for accepting such things as half-price hamburgers, discounts on footwear, and a raft of merchandise and hospitality ‘freebies’. In 1986 a number of police and public figures had been investigated during the Continental Airlines imbroglio, most of them for accepting discount airfares to New Zealand. Nixon was familiar with the whimsical account of police corruption aired during the Knapp Commission era in New York, which graded police on a corruption scale that ranked them as either ‘birds, grass eaters or meat eaters’. The latter were crooked by any measure but ‘The birds just fly up high. They don’t eat anything either because they are honest or because they don’t have any good opportunities. The grass eaters, well, they’ll accept a cup of coffee or a free meal or a television set wholesale from a merchant, but they draw a line’. Judging Nixon by her own standards, people were entitled to question whether she was a bird who ‘just flew up high’ or a grass eater.70
It was against this background that Nixon sensed that the demands of ‘the job were taking their toll’. There was a case to be made that her questionable judgement in the Qantas matter was due in part to those demands. She had, in her own words, put her ‘heart and soul into it’ and from the time of her appointment had demonstrated an unflagging resilience and met her challenges head-on with a blend of guile and grace. Her initial five-year term had ended on 23 April 2006. When she was first appointed in 2001, both she and the government had indicated that it would be a one-term appointment. However, as the end of her term approached, both Nixon and the government felt they had unfinished business. On 6 February 2006 her contract was extended for a further three years, taking her through until April 2009. Summing up her first term, Emergency Services Minister Tim Holding scored Nixon 10/10 and rated her performance as ‘fantastic’. Premier Steve Bracks felt that she had ‘led the force with distinction’, citing a 21.5 per cent fall in crime and ‘the three lowest annual road toll figures on record’ as evidence of her success.
Citing crime statistics in this way was common but fraught with risk, as Simon Overland would in time discover to his detriment. The road toll had long been the subject of extensive data collection and detailed statistical analysis, and to pluck three years from the tally bordered on being disingenuous. Since 1970 the Victorian road toll had been in steady decline, and apart from the occasional blip it was something best viewed as a continuum, not an endpoint. For years police and politicians had laid claim to falls in the road toll with such pronouncements as ‘the lowest toll in fifty years’. Such claims of themselves were not untrue, but they needed to be presented in a context that acknowledged the role played by other agencies and that the toll was yet to reach an endpoint.
Reductions in the crime rate and the road toll, together with significant developments in challenging the scourge of family violence, were not accomplishments that were achieved by Nixon on her own. When she was first appointed, the senior command team she inherited was emblematic of the Comrie era, the most recent departure from its ranks being the longest-serving deputy commissioner, Graham Sinclair—a disciplinarian who was noted for his strong stance on the requirement to wear peaked police caps, not baseball caps. The members of the team were all male conservatives, and, although they showed due deference to Nixon, to progress her reform agenda she needed new faces around the table. One officer who bridged the schism that otherwise might have been problematic was Deputy Commissioner Peter Nancarrow. A career police officer who joined the force in 1966, he was promoted to deputy commissioner (policy and standards) in 2000 to fill the vacancy left by Sinclair. In a test of wills, Comrie had strongly advocated for Nancarrow to replace Sinclair, whereas the Labor police minister, Andre Haermeyer, had anointed Noel Ashby. Comrie got his way, but it did not put an end to Ashby’s aspirations for the chief commissioner’s mantle. With overall responsibility for equity and diversity, ethical standards, corporate policy and training, Nancarrow’s background included oversight of the Ceja Task Force, the development of local priority policing, and a review of the Drug Squad. Proud of his rural heritage and in touch with those working in the front line, he was approachable, tertiary educated and progressive in his thinking—a sound choice to work at close quarters with Nixon in her early days in Victoria.
Nixon’s first opportunity to work with a deputy commissioner of her own choosing came with the retirement of Neil O’Loughlin in 2002. Following a four-month nationwide search, Bill Kelly was appointed to the position of deputy commissioner (operations). A 32-year veteran of the force who had served at every rank from constable to deputy commissioner, his career was a mix of administrative and operational positions. Gregarious and youthful, he was a keen surfer whose other interests away from the office included flying helicopters and racing his motor car. He was a good role model for those members seeking an appropriate work–life balance, and of his appointment to deputy commissioner he observed: ‘I see my role as getting out and talking to people. I like driving my car, not my desk. Operations is a big portfolio, but it won’t change my management style’.
Despite the desire of Nixon and others to have more women in senior command positions and the rhetoric that accompanied this, the structure of the force did not readily facilitate that objective. Following the promotion of Kelly there were only two further deputy commissioner appointments during Nixon’s time in office, both of them men, making for a negligible three deputy commissioner appointments in eight years, all of them selected from within the ranks of the force.
Kieran Walshe and Simon Overland were promoted to the rank of deputy commissioner on 2 July 2006, replacing Kelly and Nancarrow. Walshe had joined the force as a 16-year-old cadet in 1968 and went on to serve for forty-four years in a diverse range of positions, including service as a detective, seven years at the Air Wing, and service as Assistant Commissioner for Counter Terrorism Coordination and Emergency Management.
Walshe’s elevation to the senior command team followed a largely traditional pathway, whereas Overland, who had crossed from the AFP to Victoria in 2003, followed an innovative course that in time would become a template for filling the most senior positions in the organisation. Aged forty-four, his time as assistant commissioner in Victoria had been spent entirely in the Crime Department, where he made his mark overseeing the work of the Purana Task Force and sponsoring the Major Crime Management Model developed for the force by the Boston Consulting Group. It was generally touted among police aficionados that Walshe, at fifty-five, was not a contender for Nixon’s job but a loyal and experienced ‘safe pair of hands’ on whom Nixon could rely, whereas the talented and much younger Overland was, according to Nixon, progressive, very bright, amply qualified and a strong contender for her job.71
While Nixon had built a team on which she could rely, she was very much the public face of the force, and she networked and moved in community, social and business circles in a mode that was very different from any of her predecessors. An accomplished and tireless public speaker, she talked and listened to ‘just about anyone who asked—from the high-profile breakfasts for hundreds to Country Women’s Association afternoon teas in remote country towns’. Her style was informal and conversational, frequently disarmingly punctuated with expressions like ‘Oh gee’. She displayed an ‘ability to relate to people from all walks of life, academics and police alike: demonstrating optimism, humility and respect for people’. It was not all sweetness and light, however, and on what might have once been regarded as hostile territory, her audiences typically included the likes of the Law Institute of Victoria, where she ‘shared her thoughts on modern policing and leadership with the largest-ever LIV President’s Leadership Lunch’.
Nixon’s ubiquitous presence on speakers’ rostrums was a key element in the development of her public persona in Victoria. It also saw her operate as a consummate networker and a role model for women working in policing and related fields nationwide. For ten years she chaired ACWAP—just one of the numerous such positions she held during her time at the top echelon of Australian policing. Her proclivity as a networker was such that soon after arriving in Victoria she was courted by a number of Australian Football League (AFL) clubs, seeking to enlist her as a high-profile member. Notable among this throng was the doyen of Melbourne networkers and president of the legendary Collingwood Football Club, Eddie McGuire, who soon befriended Nixon and shared the local limelight with her. But when his footballing interests intersected with her position as chief commissioner, in an imbroglio that included Collingwood footballer Alan Didak and the Hells Angels bikie gang, things got decidedly murky. Another source of intrigue, dubbed ‘Eddie-phone’ and pertaining to former AFL champion Ben Cousins and an alleged telephone exchange about him between Nixon and McGuire, attracted media attention that the two neither sought nor wanted. In an astute and genuine foray into the field of Australian Rules football, Nixon found her footballing niche away from the glitz of the AFL clubs and in 2003 became the number one ticket holder of the Rumbalara Football and Netball Club, a small sporting club in the regional town of Shepparton that drew most of its players from the local Aboriginal community.
After almost seven years as chief commissioner, Nixon’s entrée card had few peers in the Australian policing world. An invitation to a dinner hosted by News Limited ‘to celebrate Peter Blunden’s ten years as editor of the Herald Sun’ saw her bracketed with the prime minister, the premier, the treasurer, the lord mayor and Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, while the prime minister’s Olympic Dinner in Melbourne, a six-hour soirée with 600 performers and more than seventy Olympians, found her and McGuire garnering sparse page space in the Sydney Morning Herald, which trumpeted: ‘AOC president John Coates was jiving with world champion aerialist Jacqui Cooper, the former Victorian premier Steve Bracks was bopping with the Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon … Eddie McGuire was on the edges, tapping his feet and networking hard’.72
Neil Comrie never bopped with Steve Bracks: his relationship with the Victorian Labor Party was never that close. Indeed, when Labor came to office in 1999, the idiosyncratic (some would say erratic) Andre Haermeyer, of Labor’s right-wing Unity faction, was appointed minister for police and emergency services. He had been shadow police minister for some years, during which time he forged close working ties with self-styled union powerbroker Paul Mullett, secretary of the Victoria Police Association. It was an eclectic coterie that also included Assistant Commissioner Noel Ashby, and sundry other association activists who had thrown their weight behind Labor in the run-up to the 1999 election. The prominent role played by the Police Association in Labor’s electoral campaign created an expectation in the minds of many, notable among them being Mullett, that the Bracks Government owed them ‘big time’. Evidence of this potentially toxic alliance emerged during the first few weeks in the life of the Bracks Government, when Haermeyer failed to meet with Comrie but instead sought counsel from Mullett. During this period the relationship between police command and Mullett was increasingly adversarial, and Comrie came under pressure from Haermeyer in a plot to promote Ashby and install him as a deputy commissioner. It was an appointment that Comrie declined to support, and his choice of Peter Nancarrow prevailed.
Such was Mullett’s influence during this period that even before she was appointed chief commissioner, Nixon too sought counsel from him. A one-time assistant commissioner for human resources and the holder of a graduate diploma in labour relations and law, Nixon had a solid background in New South Wales Police Association affairs. She ‘came with strong endorsement from union leaders in New South Wales’, and it was on the back of this experience that she fuelled the Mullett mythology by telephoning him, effectively seeking his imprimatur for her to ascend to the top job in Victorian policing. She asked him ‘what the trouble had been in recent years’, and, unsurprisingly, Mullett laid the blame for any shortcomings at the feet of Comrie and Kennett. In short time, however, he admonished her, explaining, ‘You’re supposed to tell us, and then we’ll tell you whether or not we agree. You’re management—that’s your job’. It set the tone of much that followed.
The schism dividing police command and the Police Association deepened over time. When Nixon took over from Comrie the mood among sections of the force was positively ebullient. Led by Mullett, Comrie’s administration was scapegoated for all manner of perceived shortcomings and injustices. It did not take long, however, for the Nixon–Mullett honeymoon to end. Many in Nixon’s camp sensed it was Mullett’s, not Comrie’s, legacy that was at the root of the division wracking the Police Association and spilling over into the general Victoria Police workforce. Nixon felt this acutely and later commented: ‘The careful generosity he’d exhibited towards me and my motives in the early phase was gone. I found myself constantly weathering public asides about my apparent lack of operational experience’.73
One of the most vitriolic episodes that Nixon encountered in her dealings with Mullett and the association occurred when a group of high-profile and respected association members successfully challenged the status quo. Janet Mitchell, Debbie Robertson, Gavan Ryan and Ron Iddles ran on a joint ticket for positions on the association executive committee and, following the highest voter turnout on record, they were elected with the balance of power. Mullett acolyte and immediate past president Shane Butler was voted out and, at the executive committee meeting on 5 October 2004, Mitchell was elected the first female president of the association. A university graduate and twenty-year veteran of the force, her extensive operational experience included time spent as a detective at Fitzroy; her appointment to the Equity and Diversity Unit in 1998 had coincided with her initial election to the association executive. Mitchell later explained that she had decided to run for office to ‘change the male-dominated culture of the organisation and make Paul Mullett accountable’. She hoped for an association that ‘better listened to and more openly and effectively communicated with its members’. Some critics felt that she ‘lacked the mental toughness of a president’ and was ‘concerned only with female members’ interests’. There was an element of prescience in this view, but in the in-fighting that ensued, she took a battering unlike any meted out to her male forebears in the office of association president.
Iddles was elected senior vice-president, Robertson junior vice-president and Ryan treasurer. Iddles was one of the nation’s finest homicide investigators, and Ryan for a time was the head of the ground-breaking Purana Task Force. They were not shrinking violets. But rather than a dénouement that would see a team of progressives led by Mitchell change things for the better, their election was a trigger for the drawing of battle lines. Factions retreated to their bunkers in a stoush that threatened to engulf Nixon. Amid allegations of bullying, including allegations by former association assistant secretary Graham Kent that Mullett was ‘conservative, bullying and unprofessional’ and his recent campaigns were ‘more about damage to the chief commissioner rather than the best interests of the members’, the respective sides went into self-destructive freefall.
During this phase Nixon did not meet with Mullett for over a year. She found it pointless. The Victorian ombudsman, George Brouwer, as well as WorkSafe, the OPI and the ESD, were all at some point drawn into what was effectively an industrial dispute pitting Mullett against Nixon. Sections of the trade union movement rallied behind Mullett, concerned that Nixon’s actions in this case set an undesirable precedent. An ESD investigation found that there was ‘strong, credible and consistent evidence of an enduring culture of bullying within the Police Association workplace’. In this acrimonious and stressful work environment Mitchell’s reform ticket partners and other supporters opted out, leaving her largely isolated and vulnerable.74
A sub-plot to these union machinations was the conduct of Detective Sergeant Peter Lalor of the Stonnington Criminal Investigation Unit. A great-great-grandson of his Eureka Stockade rebel namesake, Lalor was a Police Association delegate and Mullett acolyte. Not as chivalrous as his valiant forebear, he used the Victoria Police internal email system to distribute offensive and malicious documents defaming Mitchell. Sent from a Fitzroy internet cafe and written under the pseudonym Kit Walker (aka ‘the Ghost Who Walks’ of Phantom comics fame), the anonymous emails were a source of anguish to Mitchell, who eventually went on stress-related sick leave and resigned as association president. Mullett, who later confessed that he ‘had always known’ that ‘Kit Walker’ was in fact Lalor, was vehement in his opinion that the Kit Walker case was nothing to do with force command and was a matter that should have been left for internal resolution by the association. His was a view not shared by Nixon and many others. On 1 May 2007, investigators from the ESD were en route to Malvern police station to interview Lalor about Kit Walker when their efforts were stymied by a tip-off to Lalor. Shortly before his appointed starting time he called in and claimed carer’s leave; he did not return to duty, but it was not the end of his alleged involvement in the dark side of policing in Victoria.75
Much of this activity took place in the lead-up to the state election held on 25 November 2006, when the Bracks Labor Government successfully secured a third term in office. However, this political coup came at a cost: it emerged post-election that during pre-election jockeying, Bracks, Mullett and then police minister Tim Holding had agreed on the terms of a secret deal to which Nixon was not privy. Dated 6 November 2006 and headed ‘Record of commitment’, the five-page epistle was not restricted to matters of broad policy but directly intruded upon sensitive issues that were rightly the purview of the chief commissioner. Pre-eminent on the list was a Labor pledge to commit an additional $10 million for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons. It was no secret that Nixon ‘had reservations about introducing semi-automatic weapons into Victoria Police’, contending that the revolvers then on issue were a ‘sturdy and reliable weapon that had served [the force] well to date’. This position placed her at odds with the association, which was vociferous in its quest to arm the force with semi-automatics—the weapon of choice of police agencies around Australia.
The agreement struck between the Police Association and the government also made provision for the acquisition of conducted energy devices (CEDs) or ‘tasers’. A decade earlier the force, on Neil Comrie’s initiative, had become the first in Australia to deploy oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray. Introduced in the face of opposition from the Police Association and many members of the legal fraternity, the general use of OC spray as a non-lethal weapon in the police armoury and the inclusion of CEDs on the list of approved weapons were lauded by their proponents as being long overdue. The introduction of OC spray and tasers was met with criticism both inside and outside the force, but fundamentally they were non-lethal options consistent with the force’s long-standing Safety First mantra. Nixon was opposed to the general issue of tasers, and Victoria was the only Australian police jurisdiction not to have them. (That changed on 1 July 2010, when Simon Overland, who by then had succeeded Nixon as chief commissioner, initiated a twelve-month trial of CEDs involving police in Bendigo and Morwell. Following that successful trial, they were deployed across the state.)
The secret deal struck by the Bracks Government and the Police Association was regarded by many observers as an act that undermined Nixon’s authority within the force. Bracks had recruited her in 2001 and hitherto, both publicly and privately, his government had afforded her unstinting support. His decision to undermine her for personal political gain drew incisive criticism from sections of the media and outside commentators. The Age quoted highly regarded corruption fighter Tony Fitzgerald, QC, who, based on his experience in Queensland, recommended that ‘there should be no contact between police unions and government ministers, including premiers, unless the commissioner is present’. And former royal commissioner Frank Costigan, QC opined: ‘The document speaks for itself. It amounts to a secret agreement between the premier and his then police minister and the Police Association that certain commitments to the association would be honoured if the government was returned to power at the next election’. Nixon was not given a copy of the ‘Record of commitment’, but publicly she was philosophical about the course of events and later observed, ‘Call me a pragmatist, but this is how the world works’.76
In contrast to the Bracks election farrago, a more positive union between Labor and Nixon centred on the 2006 Commonwealth Games. A major event that was widely touted as a huge success for Labor and the Victoria Police, it was among the largest sporting events ever held in Melbourne and one of the biggest security operations of its kind ever staged in Australia: 13 000 Victorian police, together with 1200 troops and a plethora of defence, security and intelligence specialists from around the nation, were on duty during the games. Despite spurious murmurings in some quarters that she ‘was not up to it’, Nixon was placed in command of this massive security operation. It was largely free of serious incident and reflected well not only on the people of Victoria and the state government, but especially on Nixon and the force. In crowds of more than 100 000 spectators standing up to 3 metres deep, Bike Patrol members Andrew Willgoose and Beth Heale epitomised the positive spirit and good will that prevailed among police and community members. Willgoose expressed the sentiments of many when he enthused that everyone enjoyed the events in a safe and friendly environment: ‘These are the best times for us as police officers. It’s great to be interacting with so many people in a positive way’. It was yet another example that Nixon’s focus on ‘emotional change’ resonated with a younger force, in touch with their changing world.77
Appointed as a change agent with ‘cultural change’ one of her primary goals, by 2007 the fruits of Nixon’s efforts, for better or worse, were evident in almost every aspect of policing in Victoria. Baseball cap at the ready, she was on the home run and well into the tenure of her second contract. It therefore came as a shock when Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland broke the news to her that they were confronting a case of alleged police malfeasance of a type and scale unlike any they had previously experienced in their time with Victoria Police.
On 4 June 2003, vampiresque gigolo Shane Maurice Chartres-Abbott was fatally shot in the neck by a gunman as he left his home in the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir. Accompanied by his pregnant girlfriend and her father, who were jostled by the gunman’s accomplice in a bid to distract their attention from the shooter, he was headed for the County Court, where he was standing trial for the rape and bashing of one of his female clients. During that ordeal he had told the client that he was a 200-year-old vampire. When staff at the Saville Hotel in South Yarra, where the two had gone for their tryst, found her that morning, she was covered in bruises and bite marks and part of her tongue was missing. Chartres-Abbott was the seventeenth victim to die during the gangland war, but not even the lurid circumstances surrounding his death were sufficient to garner ongoing media attention. Interest in the case soon dimmed.
The death of Chartres-Abbott was seemingly destined for obscurity in the cold case archives, and it lay gathering detritus there for almost four years until it rose, phoenix-like, sparked by the revelation from a career criminal and hitman known to police as ‘the Journeyman’ that he was the gunman. Chillingly, he also claimed that the murder had been facilitated by Detective Sergeant Peter ‘Stash’ Lalor, and that a former detective sergeant and associate of the Journeyman, David ‘Docket’ Waters, was privy to this information. The Journeyman claimed that he had provided Lalor with the home address of Chartres-Abbott, and that within hours of the slaying Lalor ‘arrested’ the Journeyman at the Prahran police station on a raft of outstanding traffic warrants, clouding the waters for Homicide Squad detectives working on the Chartres-Abbott case and potentially laying the groundwork for an alibi.
The Journeyman’s unsolicited confession to a senior Purana Task Force detective that he had killed Chartres-Abbott sent shock-waves through the top echelons of the force, prompting the Victoria Police and the OPI to establish a secret joint task force. Code-named Operation Briars, this select unit operated on a strict need-to-know basis. Its reference group included Nixon, Overland, Ken Latta and the duplicitous Victoria Police media and corporate communications director, Stephen Linnell. The role of the media became critical when Age investigative reporter Nick McKenzie advised Overland that he was ‘onto’ the Briars story and the alleged link between the underworld and police corruption. For years Nixon and her corporate management group had refuted such suggestions, but on 14 September 2009 Overland told the Age: ‘I am happy to concede there is now evidence allegedly linking police corruption and organised-crime killings. But we have found it and we are following it’. The worst-case scenario was the possibility that a serving detective had provided an underworld gunman with the address of Chartres-Abbott, who was subsequently murdered at that location.
Following the Age revelations, the OPI and the Briars team went into overdrive. Making extensive use of lawful telephone intercepts and OPI secret hearings, they sought to follow a trail that began with Linnell and threaded its way through the corridors of police power in Victoria, swirling around several bit players before finally landing at the feet of Linnell, Ashby and Mullett. Things came to a head when Overland, in conjunction with OPI investigators, staged an ‘integrity’ test for Linnell. Overland ‘leaked’ sensitive information to Linnell, who took just eleven seconds to take the bait and pass it on to Ashby, who allegedly shared it with Mullett. The OPI then posited that Mullett passed the information to Briars target Peter Lalor via Police Association president Brian Rix, an allegation that was never sustained. On the surface it appeared that the OPI had landed its catch hook, line and sinker, but its creel was badly holed and in time the OPI was left to lament the tale of the big fish that got away. Respected crime journalist Andrew Rule described Ashby’s defence, funded by the Police Association, as ‘a highly technical loophole’, and the ‘evidence’ against Rix as ‘flimsy [and] circumstantial’.
Linnell, Ashby and Mullett were charged with criminal offences arising from Operation Briars but, despite Linnell initially pleading guilty to perjury and agreeing to give evidence in the pending trials of Ashby and Mullett, due largely to a prosecution failure to follow due process and a consequential lack of admissible evidence, they all walked free. However, they were not unscathed: Ashby retired on 9 November 2007 and Linnell resigned three days later. Mullett was on long-term secondment to the association and his position was tenuous. On 15 November, Nixon banned him from entering any police premises in Victoria, effectively rendering it impossible for him to fulfil his duties as association secretary. From that point onwards, his influence both inside and outside the force steadily diminished.
It was not until 2016 that civil litigation initiated by Mullett was finally settled. In a high-profile court case, he alleged that Nixon, together with former deputy commissioner Kieran Walshe and superintendent Wayne Taylor, was guilty of malfeasance in public office and malicious prosecution. Mullett’s lawyers postulated that his allegedly malicious treatment by Nixon in 2007 and the subsequent intense media focus on him effectively destroyed his career. In a 100-page judgement the presiding judge, Supreme Court justice Terry Forrest, rejected Mullett’s submission that his prosecution was groundless and unjustified, and also found that he had failed to establish any misuse or abuse of power by Nixon in her role as a holder of public office. Mullett was seeking a multimillion-dollar settlement from Nixon but instead faced the prospect of paying legal costs exceeding $1 million. Although Nixon ‘welcomed the decision’, she lamented that the matter ‘had gone on for nearly four years’ and related to events that took place ‘back in 2007’. Judge Forrest noted that the ‘duration, frequency and ferocity’ of Mullett’s attacks upon Nixon ‘would have tested the patience of the most stoic chief commissioner’. By then Nixon had endured enough. She had not ‘spoken to Mr Mullett for a long time’ and her parting sentiments resonated with many serving and former police when she said, ‘I feel sorry for Mr Mullett. I wish [that] he had gone on with his life’.
During Mullett’s exile, the position of Police Association ‘secretary-designate’ was filled by Senior Sergeant Greg Davies, the incumbent ‘discipline and legal manager’. Popular and accomplished, he served in the force for more than thirty years, having followed his father and grandfather into ‘the job’. He was installed as secretary-designate until 29 July 2008, when he officially succeeded Mullett as Police Association secretary. This was also the date on which, after receiving a summons to answer a charge of alleged criminal conspiracy, Mullett ‘slipped out of the association’s East Melbourne offices through the side gateway and never returned’.78
Nixon didn’t exit via the side gate—that was never her style—but she too had fought and won enough battles with the media, the police union, public servants, police, politicians and sundry pontificators to contemplate a lifestyle change. After successfully fulfilling her initial five-year contract, she had surprised many police pundits by signing on for a further three years to April 2009, albeit with an opt-out clause. The Labor government that had initially chosen her was keen for her to continue in the role, but her mindset was shifting to new horizons and she reached a point where she determined she ‘was ready to go’. Despite personal entreaties from Police Minister Bob Cameron and the premier, John Brumby, who, perhaps prematurely, lauded Nixon as ‘the best chief commissioner that we’ve had in Victoria’, she moved decisively into pre-retirement mode.
On the morning of 5 November 2008, the day after the running of the Melbourne Cup, Nixon convened a meeting of her senior managers and announced that she was resigning. Shortly thereafter, in a carefully scripted ‘Team Nixon’ cameo performance reminiscent of her inauguration, in the presence of the media, her husband, her parents, the premier and the police minister, she publicly announced that she was retiring.
Having made her intentions known, Nixon set about putting her legacy in place. While still in office, at the behest of her supporters and with the assistance of funding from the Australia Council, she embarked on writing her memoir. Co-authored with accomplished Age journalist Jo Chandler and published by Melbourne University Publishing (Victory Books), it was Nixon’s hope that her memoir would, inter alia, afford her an opportunity to ‘share her vision of policing together with some of the stories, insights and strategies [she had] picked up along the way’. The narrative opened in relatively benign times and included vignettes of her childhood and adolescence, but as it unfolded it paralleled the momentum of an unchecked bushfire, taking Nixon and Chandler into places they could never have envisaged when they began work on their magnum opus. The book, Fair Cop, which was launched by the then prime minister, Julia Gillard, on 3 August 2011, courted controversy even before it was released, and there were some, including Gillard’s cabinet colleague Stephen Conroy, who urged Gillard not to launch it. While Fair Cop has its detractors, it is an important addition to the scant body of biographical literature published in Australia on the subject of police commissioners and other senior police leaders. Surprisingly dilatory for a person in Nixon’s position, when it came to preserving memorabilia, notes, paperwork and diaries for posterity, Fair Cop filled the breach and encapsulated much of the oral and documented material that might have otherwise drifted off into the ether.79
The announcement of Nixon’s pending departure triggered a flurry of interest from both the private and public sectors, where it was widely recognised that away from the world of policing Nixon had much to offer. Aged fifty-six and with a lifetime of policing experience behind her, she also had a strong academic background and a gift for oratory that made her ideally suited to life in academia and on the public speakers’ circuit. Embraced by a range of personal networks and supportive women’s organisations, she set about building her post-police portfolio. One job offer she accepted was a position as a non-executive director on the board of global beverage giant Fosters. This was ill-advised. Premier John Brumby endorsed the appointment and advocated the case for more women on the boards of major companies, but in that regard his view was largely influenced by corporatisation and overlooked the special position in which retiring chief commissioners find themselves. Former chief commissioner Mick Miller was one who was strident in his view that retired chief commissioners should use their networks and special skills in volunteer work; his first post-police position was as inaugural chairperson of the Victorian Coordinating Council on the Control of Liquor Abuse. From the moment she arrived in Victoria, Nixon had expended a great deal of personal energy in confronting the abuse and misuse of alcohol both inside and outside the force and was widely respected for her efforts. The Fosters appointment was counter-intuitive to her prior actions and drew significant public criticism, which, together with other events in her life at that time, she found very difficult to cope with. After less than five months on the Fosters board she resigned, pledging to ‘rethink her priorities’ and ‘put her skills to use in other fields’.80
Before Nixon reached this point, however, she had other matters on which to focus. One of these was a ‘meet-the-troops’ tour that in a very real sense replicated her statewide whistlestop tour almost eight years earlier. It was an odd leap into the policing hinterland that had the stated purpose of speaking to members to ‘get their views on the issues facing Victoria Police and on what more needs to be done’. Nixon planned to pass this feedback on to her successor ‘to ensure we are well placed to continue this good work and to keep moving forward’. Many observers felt that after eight years at the top, she, of all people, should have been cognisant of the strengths and weaknesses of the force she had shaped and should allow her successor to view the organisation afresh. She announced her intention to tour on 5 January 2009 and planned to visit thirty stations and work locations, travelling around 3500 kilometres to meet more than seven hundred members. It was a relatively small sample of respondents, given that the force’s vital statistics at the time included a budget of $1.7 billion, 14 000 employees, 500 work locations and 339 police stations. By 19 January 2009, she had visited police stations at Benalla, Broadmeadows, Fawkner, Melbourne West, Seymour and Shepparton, and the ESD; by the first week in February this list numbered seventeen.81 She also embarked on ‘a kind of farewell tour’ that focused on the public, which, as well as affording opportunities for mutual expressions of gratitude, served to bolster her immediate pre-retirement networks and portfolio.
While Nixon’s daily agenda was of necessity police-related, John Becquet focused on the home front, readying their city-edge warehouse apartment for sale in November 2008 and working on their plans to find their post-retirement nirvana on the Mornington Peninsula. In this decidedly bucolic mood, they saw themselves sailing into the sunset with time their own to do as they pleased. It was a lifestyle with utopian appeal but, as with much that is mythological, their longed-for Arcadia was not then to be. Instead, the Greek god of the underworld, Hades, interposed and Nixon found herself engulfed in a ring of fire.
Ash Wednesday, Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black Saturday and Red Tuesday are but a few of the epithets seared into the memories of generations of Victorians who have experienced the living hell of their state aflame and utterly at the mercy of the winds and the weather. Since the beginnings of permanent white settlement in Victoria, when in 1851 the details of devastating bushfires were first recorded, the state has had a long and unenviable history as one of the most perilous bushfire zones anywhere in the world. For this reason, in the summer of 2008–09 statewide there was a strong body of collective bushfire experience, bushfire research, emergency services preparedness and general community awareness that, in theory at least, saw the state ready as usual and in fire-fighting mode to battle its ferocious nemesis.
During midsummer 2009, in a period extending from 27 January to 8 February, a withering heatwave claimed the lives of 374 Victorians, not including fire victims. In conditions not experienced since the Ash Wednesday bushfires on 16 February 1983, when forty-seven people had died, the fire predictions for Victoria were dire. During the final week of January 2009, for the first time since records were kept, the temperature in Melbourne rose above 43 degrees for three consecutive days. The forecast for Victoria on 7 February was for temperatures in the low forties accompanied by high winds. The forests and grasslands were the driest they had been since Ash Wednesday, and a forest fire danger index of more than 100 was a portent of the conflagration about to consume parts of Victoria.
On 6 February, in readiness for what was to come, the premier, John Brumby, warned that the state was tinder-dry and prophesied that 7 February was expected to be the worst bushfire day ‘in the history of the state’. The police officer with the most significant statutory responsibilities in the face of that prediction was the chief commissioner. Nixon was the deputy coordinator-in-chief of emergency management, and state coordinator of the State Emergency Response Plan (SERP), with direct personal access to Bob Cameron, the minister for police and emergency services. Despite a later and lamentable plea to the contrary, she remained at all times during the crisis the person with ultimate control and command over the resources and personnel of the Victoria Police. Her deputy under the Emergency Management Act was Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe, the deputy state coordinator of the SERP. At the instigation of her senior emergency management team, on the afternoon of 5 February Nixon had authorised the circulation of an email to all members instructing that municipal emergency coordination centres were to be ready to activate, that divisional coordination centres be on standby, and that regional operations centres be activated by no later than 10 a.m. on 7 February. A similar email was sent by Walshe to all regional assistant commissioners the following day. On the morning of 7 February a number of fires were already running from the previous day, including the Bunyip State Park fire, which had first ignited on 28 January. It jumped fire containment lines around 5 a.m. on 7 February and was one of the first fires to seriously trouble fire-fighters in Gippsland.
In the absence of Nixon and both deputy commissioners (neither deputy commissioner was rostered for duty) on that critical, parched and bleak Saturday morning, the officer saddled with command responsibility was Stephen Fontana, the assistant commissioner for counter terrorism and emergency management. Highly regarded as an experienced investigator of major crimes, he was accustomed to putting in the hard yards. Popular, respected and loyal, like many others in the organisation he commenced work that morning at around 6 a.m. and effectively remained on duty for the next thirteen hours. Other officers who performed key roles during that day included Commander Dennis Henry, who was based at the Police Operations Centre (POC); Superintendent Rod Collins, the State Emergency Response Officer (SERO), who operated predominantly from the integrated State Emergency Response Coordination Centre (SERCC); and Inspector Doug Hocking, a long-serving and experienced emergency response officer who managed the SERCC. Consistent with her erroneous and naive belief that she ‘was officially off duty’, dressed in mufti and with her husband in tow, about midday Nixon made a cameo appearance at the SERCC. During this period she also had appointments with her hairdresser and her biographer. About 3.30 p.m. she attended the integrated SERCC, where she was briefed by Fontana and Collins together with Country Fire Authority (CFA) chief officer Russell Rees and Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) chief fire officer Ewan Waller. During these briefings the chief commissioner ‘was told that a number of major fires were burning across the state, that important elements of state infrastructure were under threat, that the Kilmore East fire had the potential to kill people in at least Strathewen, that a wind change was forecast, and that it was possible that the situation would deteriorate’. Her meeting with the fire chiefs at around 5 p.m. ‘left her with the clear impression’ that ‘Victoria was facing a disaster’.
Chief Commissioner Stephen Fontana
Despite knowing of this impending inferno, at around 6 p.m. Nixon went home, then dined at a ‘local hotel’ with her husband, her personal assistant, Lita Bostjancic, and former assistant commissioner Bernice Masterson. When challenged on why she had done this, she responded, ‘I had to eat’. It wasn’t a wise retort, for it emerged later that while she repasted at the Hotel Metropolitan, a heritage-listed gastropub lauded in the Age Good Food Guide, her troops mostly ate at their posts, at one point sending out for a bulk pizza delivery. After dining Nixon returned home and remained there throughout the evening. In a critical period from 6 to 9 p.m. she did not make or receive any telephone calls or text messages, effectively rendering her incommunicado: meanwhile, the fires raged. Walshe was not on duty but attended to personal matters for most of the day before going on ‘standby’, eventually reaching the SERCC around 9 p.m. During this leadership vacuum the Beechworth fire erupted, the Murrindindi mill fire front hit Marysville, the deadly Kilmore East smoke plume and pyrocumulus cloud reached a terrifying height of 15 kilometres, confirmation of the first fire-related deaths was received and the Victorian Health Emergency Coordination Centre alerted Melbourne hospitals to prepare for burn victims.
As wind speeds and temperatures rose, so too did the number of fires springing up around the state. By day’s end, fire crews from the CFA and DSE had attended or patrolled 316 grass, scrub and forest fires. The fires at five locations claimed the lives of 173 people: Kilmore East (119), Murrindindi (40), Churchill (11), Beechworth–Mudgegonga (2) and Bendigo (1). Almost eighty communities were directly affected and 2133 houses were destroyed; in some cases whole towns were obliterated. Three primary schools were destroyed and a further forty-seven were partially damaged or required cleaning: it was fortuitous that the schools were closed on Saturday. More than sixty businesses were burned, and fire ravaged 430 000 hectares of forests, crops and pasture. Seventy national parks and reserves were affected, and the fires claimed 3550 agricultural facilities, including dairies and hay, wool and machinery sheds—around 211 000 tonnes of hay was lost and over 11 000 farm animals were injured or killed. The date 7 February 2009 was eternally etched into the annals of Victorian bushfire history as Black Saturday.
The day after this maelstrom, the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and the premier, John Brumby, visited Victoria’s fire-ravaged communities in the company of Nixon. It was in the course of that tour, amid the ash and fire debris in Marysville, that the premier asked Nixon if she would head the proposed Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority (VBRRA). After consulting her husband, Nixon accepted the premier’s proposal almost immediately. It was agreed that she would continue in her role as chief commissioner for a further two weeks and that her resignation from the force would become effective on 27 February 2009, one month before her planned retirement date.
While the Brumby Labor Government moved swiftly to activate the VBRRA, it moved with equal alacrity to establish the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission (VBRC). On 9 February the premier announced the state’s intention to establish a royal commission, and letters patent were issued by Professor David de Kretser, AC, governor of Victoria, on 16 February. Former Victorian Supreme Court judge Bernard Teague was appointed chairperson, and Ronald McLeod, former Commonwealth ombudsman and head of the 2003 Canberra Bushfires Inquiry, together with Susan Pascoe, formerly a commissioner at the State Services Authority in Victoria, were appointed as royal commissioners. The commission commenced work on 16 February and the hearing of evidence began on 11 May 2009 and concluded on 27 May 2010, during which time there were 155 days of hearings, including eight days of regional hearings and twenty-three days examining the 173 fire-related deaths. The commission’s final report was submitted on 31 July 2010.
Three key witnesses subpoenaed before the royal commission were Nixon, Ewan Waller and Russell Rees. Despite Nixon’s acerbic aspersions that royal commissions ‘can become the worst kind of kangaroo court’, expending energy on blame, scapegoating and revisionism, the history of the Victoria Police has been punctuated with sage-like and insightful royal commissions whose deliberations have been of significant benefit to the Victorian community and its police force. The VBRC was no exception. The commissioners expressed their dismay at Nixon’s ‘approach to giving evidence before it’: her initial written and oral statements were inaccurate and incomplete, and she had to be recalled. Her counsel put the view that the questioning of her ‘was unfair’, a suggestion largely aimed at counsel assisting the commission, particularly the astute and incisive Rachel Doyle, SC. The commission rejected any suggestion that the questioning was unfair, unbalanced or otherwise inappropriate, describing it as ‘thorough, and testing, entirely appropriate’. More broadly, the commission observed of Rees, Nixon and Waller that ‘These individuals were senior public officials with leadership responsibilities in each of their respective organisations, and it is with ordinary expectations that these positions be subjected to rigorous public examination of their own performance and the performance of those they led’.
While the close scrutiny surrounding the commission left some police feeling their views had been disregarded, this was not in fact the case. Senior officers of the Victoria Police had made efforts to ensure that police were prepared. An email sent to all members and staff by Chief Commissioner Nixon had directed that municipal emergency coordination centres be ready to activate, that divisional coordination centres be on standby, and that regional operations centres be activated by no later than 10 a.m. on the Saturday. Police at the local level were also asked to make contact with local representatives of the CFA, the DSE and Parks Victoria. Similar messages were conveyed in an email on 6 February from Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe to all regional assistant commissioners. The evidence in relation to the individual fires demonstrates that the Victoria Police succeeded in achieving a high level of preparedness, enabling police to provide valuable support to the fire agencies ‘both on the ground and through the municipal emergency coordination centres’.
In conclusion, the commission found that Nixon ‘took a hands-off approach to her responsibilities’ and, together with Rees and Waller, ‘did not demonstrate effective leadership in crucial areas’. It considered that her approach to emergency coordination and the manner in which she purported to execute her statutory responsibilities ‘left much to be desired’, and the commissioners ‘shared the view’ that ‘Ms Nixon’s approach to emergency coordination was inadequate. Ms Nixon herself acknowledged that leaving the integrated Emergency Coordination Centre and going home at about 6 p.m. on 7 February was an error of judgement’.82
Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland was interstate on holidays on Black Saturday and, despite assurances from his work colleagues that things were ‘under control’ and he need not return to duty, he ‘felt, given the enormity of what had happened’ that he ‘couldn’t in all conscience remain on leave’. After hearing news of the fires ravaging Victoria he returned to duty of his own volition at the earliest opportunity. Following Nixon’s early retirement from Victoria Police and her move to the VBRRA, Kieran Walshe was appointed interim chief commissioner while the selection process got underway. In the interregnum Overland continued in his position of deputy commissioner. It was felt by keen force aficionados that Walshe would not be a contender for the top post but would be a safe pair of hands while the selection machinations occupied the minds of others, notable among them being Overland, who was a favoured candidate. Appointed in 2003 and having held the positions of deputy commissioner and assistant commissioner for three and five years respectively—for much of that time serving as the high-profile public face of the Purana Task Force—he was described by Age journalist John Silvester as ‘at heart a private man in a very public arena’.83
The government appointed a four-person panel to provide a shortlist of candidates for the position of chief commissioner: the panel comprised chairperson Helen Silver, who was the Department of Premier and Cabinet secretary; former New South Wales police commissioner Ken Moroney; Department of Justice secretary Penny Armitage; and World Vision Australia chief executive the Reverend Tim Costello. Described by Premier John Brumby as ‘a quality field of local, interstate and international candidates’, the interviewees reportedly included Overland, assistant commissioners Gary Jamieson and Bob Hastings, and Sir Ken Jones, then chief constable of Sussex Police in the UK. The final choice of a successor to Nixon fell to the police minister, Bob Cameron, and the premier, who moved swiftly and announced on 2 March 2009 that ‘Mr Overland assumes his new role from Tuesday 3 March’.
Chief Commissioner Simon Overland
Of Overland’s selection an enthusiastic Brumby told media pundits: ‘Simon Overland was the superior candidate, he was the exceptional candidate. He interviewed extremely strongly, and the range of attributes that I believe he brings to this job—his knowledge of our state; his deep experience in policing at both a federal level and a state level; his successes here in Victoria, obviously working very closely with the former chief commissioner Christine Nixon, particularly in tackling organised crime; his honesty, his integrity, his very strong intellect and his understanding, as I’ve said, of issues in our state—all led the police minister and I, and the cabinet subsequently, to endorse him as Victoria’s next chief commissioner’. At Overland’s investiture ceremony the premier and the police minister personally pinned the chief commissioner epaulets to his uniform. Compared to Nixon’s gala investiture, when she was feted by Labor premier Steve Bracks amid a throng of local celebrities, it was a modest and low-key affair; nevertheless, it was pejoratively seized upon by some as evidence that Overland had Labor leanings. This caused Overland to lament later, with hindsight: ‘If [I had] the moment over it wouldn’t happen’.
One of the first people to congratulate Overland on his appointment was retired chief commissioner Mick Miller, who, with insightful prescience, wrote: ‘You have become the custodian of a police force which has existed since 1853. In the intervening 156 years, through its own mutations, it has become what it is today. For this, your nineteen predecessors share the collective credit or blame, as the case may be, for their respective contributions and, in the final analysis, the accountability. Nothing is forever and, as the twentieth such office holder, you will not be the last. However, when your tenure ends, the verdict of history might well be that you are adjudged to have been the best till that time. In that regard, as I am sure you will agree, the leaders of organisations, of any kind, are only ever as good as the people they have working for them’.84
After six years working in the top echelons of the Victoria Police, Overland had a sound knowledge of the force and its people—and, unlike Nixon who, years before, on arriving in Victoria had much to learn about her new home state and its police and politics, he was able to hit the ground running. Among his early changes was a restructure of senior command. On 25 May 2009, following an extensive international search for suitable candidates, Overland announced that he would have three deputy commissioners: Deputy Commissioner (Road Policing) Ken Lay, Deputy Commissioner (Public Safety) Kieran Walshe and, in a remarkable dénouement, looming like a knightly nemesis, Deputy Commissioner (Crime) Ken Jones. Lay and Walshe were well known both inside and outside the force: Lay in particular had a high public profile that was largely due to his work on road safety during his term as assistant commissioner (traffic and transit). But Jones, who had been an unsuccessful applicant for the chief commissioner’s position, was a complete newcomer.
Welsh-born Sir Kenneth Lloyd ‘Ken’ Jones, QPM, was knighted for his services to policing in the United Kingdom in January 2009. A Fulbright scholar and associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, he holds the degrees BA (Hons) and MBA (University of Sheffield). In 1996, he studied the growth of private policing in America. Described by Overland as having ‘a unique set of skills’, the former chief constable of Sussex Police (2001–09) had worked in law enforcement for thirty-eight years, including positions as deputy chief constable in Avon and assistant chief constable in Somerset. He had walked the beat for eight years, investigated homicides, tackled corruption in Hong Kong and worked as an election monitor in Zimbabwe. He had also been president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (UK), which had responsibility for leading and coordinating the direction and development of police services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In his first epistle as a deputy commissioner in Victoria, Jones outlined his thoughts on the direction the force might take under his influence: ‘Victoria Police already has a very successful operational platform in place. I want to move that forward by focussing on high-volume crime as well as confronting organised crime. We need to continue to drive down volume crimes and take on organised criminality by state of the art prevention, reduction, disruption and detection’.85 He also advocated ‘reviving the opportunity for regular formal exchanges between police departments around the world’. Described by sections of the antipodean press as ‘outspoken’, Jones was ‘considered a policing nomad who had built a sparkling CV by constantly moving’.86
In addition to the appointment of the three deputy commissioners, Overland also appointed three non-police executive directors on equal footing with the deputy commissioners. Executive Director (Business Services) Jenny Peachey had previously held the positions of general manager of the National Gallery of Australia and national director of the Australian Customs Service. Executive Director (People) Rebecca Munn, formerly executive general manager for corporate development and community relations with the Port of Melbourne Corporation, was responsible for the police’s Human Resource and Education departments. Executive Director (Infrastructure) Michael Vanderheide was recruited from the Canberra bureaucracy to fill the troubled IT portfolio. The situation was a signal that the days of the ‘gifted amateur’ in policing were changing, especially in the disciplines of finance, human resources management and information technology.
The engagement of senior public servants to fill non-operational positions within the force was not new: notable among past such appointments was Chief Commissioner Glare’s employment of Jean Gordon as director of personnel and Neil Comrie’s selection of Ken Latta as director (corporate services). Despite such precedents and the tertiary and vocational qualifications that such senior executives brought to the force over time, Jones did not conceal his enmity, aimed principally at Overland, on the subject of ‘the three Executive Directors being on equal footing with the three Deputies’. According to Lay, who was later appointed chief commissioner, the relationship between the members of the executive was ‘fraught’ and largely driven by Jones’s angst about decisions taken ‘around the table’. Former director of media and communications Nicole McKechnie felt that Jones was ‘clearly unhappy with being in the organisation’ and ‘expressed his dissatisfaction with a range of people’. Overland initially saw Jones as someone who could be ‘a breath of fresh air … someone who could bring challenge and critical thinking to senior ranks … a really smart, lateral thinker … [an] incisive mind that can cut through and see issues’. But that did not eventuate and, in the eyes of Overland, Jones became a disruptive influence rather than a supportive ally.87
Against this backdrop of threatening internecine conflict, Overland sought to foster a diverse range of changes within the force in anticipation of improved work performance across the organisation. To this end he announced that some senior officers had ‘lost their way’ and that he was introducing a back-to-basics programme in a ‘partial return to traditional law enforcement’.88 In large measure this was a policing philosophy at odds with the style of Nixon. In addition to his reintroduction of direct areas of responsibility for the three deputy commissioners, Overland dismantled Nixon’s committee-driven leadership style, brought back promotional examinations and fitness tests, and re-directed police recruiting. He also moved with alacrity to meet workforce requests for the issue of Smith and Wesson semi-automatic .40-calibre fifteen-shot pistols, and defended the increased use of capsicum spray. His plans were endorsed by Premier John Brumby, who felt that the changes across the force were aimed at further improving the performance and quality of the police.89
Overland was a relatively youthful forty-seven years of age when he assumed the role of chief commissioner. A strapping ‘Carlton six-footer’, he had been an athletic Australian Rules footballer and cricketer who was known to run home from work as part of his personal fitness regime; as such, he was never subject to the ‘fattist’ taunts that beset Nixon. A member of generation X, he was progressive and one of those senior police officers who readily adapted to the computer age and the technological trappings of the twenty-first century, as evidenced in his work with the Boston Consulting Group and the innovative Major Crime Management Model.
Overland had a number of personal goals mapped out for implementation during the nascent phase of his commissionership, and high on his list were active communication and engagement with the force and the community. This hands-on philosophy ‘to listen and learn’ saw him embark on ‘routine’ but enlightening divisional-van patrols, visit small communities impacted by the bushfires, and attend major highway motor-vehicle collisions. He was committed ‘to being open and accessible’ and wanted to meet with ‘as many members as possible’. One of his first moves in this direction was to dedicate every second Tuesday from 12 noon to 1 p.m. to an online forum, where he invited questions and feedback from members of the force with the aim of getting a ‘clearer understanding of their concerns’. The online forums were a popular means of interaction, and early ones addressed topics as diverse as overseas postings, sick leave, tasers and the availability of computers. In a similar vein, heralded by the media as ‘Top cop faces the virtual public’,90 he introduced monthly public forums where online correspondents raised such issues as the gangland murders, the Victoria Police response to the Black Saturday bushfires, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and the safety of late-night train travel on the suburban rail network. One of Overland’s first innovations was the launch of a Victoria Police website, www.vicpolicenews.com.au, designed to keep interested communities apprised ‘of crimes committed in their Police Service Area [PSA] and general policing issues impacting on their lives’. He also hosted structured community meetings at nine suburban and country locations—Melbourne, Footscray, Wangaratta, Frankston, Morwell, Bendigo, Geelong, Broadmeadows and Knox—where he gave twenty-minute presentations outlining key Victoria Police achievements, before opening the assembly to questions.
Aware that communities served by the force were a diverse socioeconomic, ethnic and cultural mix, Overland built on the work of his predecessors, notable among them in this regard being Nixon, in developing and consolidating effective working relationships with a range of groups. Of particular focus was the safety of more than 100 000 international students resident in Victoria, a large concentration of whom were living and studying in the Melbourne CBD. A significant number of them were from India, and a series of high-profile attacks targeting Indians culminated on 31 May 2009 in a blockade of Indian students and their supporters outside Flinders Street Station. Some media portrayals erroneously depicted these events as evidence of tensions between Indian students and the Victoria Police. The force had been actively working on a number of fronts to address the public-safety concerns of the students, and a locale in Footscray had been identified as ‘a bit of an enclave with a lot of Indian residents and small businesses within it’. The inner west emerged as a cultural crucible that gave rise to the Police–Indian Western Reference Group, which fostered co-operative action by interested parties. A 1800 telephone number was set up to provide an immediate point of contact for students, and the police presence on tertiary campuses was enhanced. The Victoria Police also undertook a number of operations, including Guardian, Safe Stations and Safe Streets.
Deputy Commissioner (Public Safety) Kieran Walshe explained that ‘an increasing trend of violence against international students was identified and resources were directed to highly visible policing operations in hot spots. We have conducted many operations in and around railway stations late at night when students use public transport. We’ve since expanded this to include operations in high-risk locations including public transport corridors, railway stations, tram stops and businesses and occupations that have historically provided employment opportunities for international students’. The priority attached by the force to the safety and security of Indian students was underscored when Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans travelled to India in a party of eight federal and state government officials in a bid to reassure prospective Indian students and their parents and government representatives that Melbourne was a safe city. Evans participated in forums in six major Indian cities—New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Bangalore—and reminded participants that ‘Melbourne is a big city in world terms’, and that, while students should take basic safety precautions that were appropriate to their personal circumstances, it ‘was a relatively safe place to live’.
Melbourne might have been a safe city, but constantly shifting social demographics meant that conditions that were viewed by some ethnic groups as ‘safe’ were viewed appositely by other groups within the broader community. Overland was attuned to these nuances, and in a bid to build closer relations between the Victoria Police and local Muslims he visited the Newport Mosque, where Imam Abdul Razak Bakroo presented him with an English translation of the Koran and prayer beads. Newport’s Islamic community described Overland’s visit as a ‘milestone’, and in acknowledging this Overland said, ‘Let’s not pretend there aren’t challenges. There are people on both sides who from time to time do the wrong [thing], say the wrong thing, who believe the wrong thing. The challenge is for us to rise above that and always come back to that starting point of [mutual] respect’.
Following the detention of five men of Somalian and Lebanese backgrounds ‘over alleged terrorism offences’, the chief commissioner visited the ‘8 Black’ prayer centre in North Melbourne to assure worshippers that they were ‘all Australians and shouldn’t feel like second-class citizens’. He subsequently wrote in the Age:
This is not the time to be divisive, to overreact or to unfairly lay blame. We should instead be focusing our efforts on cohesiveness. One of our best defences against terrorism is being open, tolerant and inclusive—not to judge all by the actions of a few. These people live and work in our communities, and they contribute. They add to the vibrancy of our cities and they bring cultural experiences we could all learn from.
Importantly, we should all share in the responsibility by respecting and accepting diversity and difference. Not just because it enriches our lives, but because alienation is one of the biggest risks we face … We have a proud tradition in this country of welcoming people from all backgrounds—let’s continue that tradition and embrace the multiculturalism that has provided us with such a rich culture in this city.91
While Overland led the way with his public orations, there was an ongoing need for the philosophy he espoused to be translated into coordinated action on diverse fronts. One of these was the employment of New and Emerging Community Liaison Officers (NECLOs). Based at suburban police stations including Northcote, Dandenong, Keilor Downs, Moonee Valley and Darebin, their job was ‘to help the police understand the cultural nuances of new migrant communities, and conversely, to help those communities gain trust in the police’. Many refugees had an inherent fear of people in uniform: in their home countries the police could not be relied upon to maintain law and order—on the contrary, they were feared as agents of corrupt governments and politicians. Typical of those working to bridge the cultural divide between police and refugees was Kot Monoah. A multilingual lawyer from Sudan who had spent fifteen years of his life in refugee camps, he was a NECLO based at Darebin, where he worked with all cultural groups in the local community, including those from Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Burma, East Timor and Sri Lanka. His tasks ranged from providing advice on motor-vehicle licences and traffic laws to assisting to resolve family violence disputes and dealing with criminal behaviour.92
After bearing the chief’s mantle for six months, Overland was called upon by his ‘friends in the media’ and ‘various [other] people’ to provide a ‘report card’ of his achievements. His response was typically candid: he told those who were interested that he and his team ‘were just getting on with the job’ in a ‘back-to-basics’ approach to policing.93 He had counselled previously that this was not about ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ policing but about delivering a police service that best met the demands of both the community and the force. His list of specific achievements was succinct, but one initiative that he considered noteworthy was the establishment of the Operations Response Unit (ORU) in March 2010. The single largest specialist unit in the force, numbering 289 members, it provided a highly visible police presence and had a statewide mandate to focus on public order, crime and road policing. During its first two years of operation the ORU responded to more than 10 000 incidents, undertaking a range of tasks that included high-level security, large-scale searches, random breath test operations and public-order policing. Teams from the ORU were also despatched to assist other agencies coping with major events such as the Queensland floods; the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand; security duties at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth; and the US president Barack Obama’s visit to Darwin. After its early successes, a scion of the unit was formed; the Public Order Response Team (PORT) was tasked with attending riots, protests, out-of-control street parties and public-order incidents, where its members undertook ‘community reassurance work’.94
Another ‘report card’ initiative that Overland introduced, on 1 July 2009, was the realignment of regional boundaries from five to four; this was designed to ensure more effective emergency management and to complement existing borders used by other emergency service agencies. In a post-Black Saturday environment, with Overland actively leading the way, command-and-control and incident management training for members at all levels was updated and expanded, and a greater focus was placed on operational safety and tactics, which had lagged during the Nixon years. Overland moved swiftly to identify and remedy a number of shortcomings arising from the fires, and Taskforce Phoenix was established to identify their cause. Subsequently this group was involved in the preparation of inquest briefs, and sixty debriefings were conducted around the state, the lessons from which were fed back into force management strategies with an upgraded focus on ‘prevention, planning, response and resilience’. When he was head of the Purana Task Force, Overland had candidly opined at one point that the force had ‘dropped the ball’, and he was equally blunt in the wake of Black Saturday when he said, ‘We lost our way in regard to command and control [in emergency incidents], to be quite frank. It is our bread and butter and we have spent a lot of time strengthening it’.95
It was generally accepted within government and police circles that in the early phases of his chief commissionership, Overland’s back-to-basics mantra made a positive difference. It was therefore unfortunate that, having weathered the gangland war and other major obstacles on his rise to the top, he stumbled on a peccadillo that caused him angst and embarrassment. On 18 March 2010 at Canberra Airport, during a routine scan of his carry-on luggage, he was found to be in possession of prohibited articles, ‘namely a loaded magazine clip from a Victoria Police issued Glock .40 calibre semi-automatic handgun’. A written complaint about this matter was sent to the OPI on 29 March 2010 and, following an investigation, the OPI concluded: ‘The incident has provoked intense media interest and has caused Mr Overland considerable embarrassment. He has publicly acknowledged his wrongdoing. Public exposure and opprobrium are relevant matters to be taken into account in determining an appropriate sanction. In [our] opinion, neither the integrity of Mr Overland nor the broader reputation of Victoria Police has been diminished by this event’. While the OPI determined that no further action was warranted, commentary attributed to the secretary of the Police Association, Greg Davies, that ‘if it was a constable or member of the public, you would be hung, drawn and quartered … you and I would still be in handcuffs and remanded in custody’, highlighted the depths of the association’s enmity towards Overland.96
Following his ‘report card’ experience in August 2009, Overland continued to pursue his back-to-basics mantra. During the ensuing months he tackled a range of issues that demonstrated his strength of purpose and showed that, as with the Boston Consulting project, he was open to innovation and modernisation. In a wide-ranging interview with Age journalists John Silvester and Richard Willingham in the lead-up to the Victorian state election of November 2010, he touched upon an eclectic mix of issues that included: ‘the jump in mental illness in the community that was creating massive problems for police’; the increased use of capsicum spray and foam, leading to a decline in injuries to police and suspects; a Brief Investigation Support Centre pilot project that saw the time taken to get contested matters to court drop from 210 days to thirty-five days; and a need to refocus on the basics of operational tactics and safety at all levels.97 This grab bag of statutory and administrative changes was underpinned by a $6 million recruitment campaign that used television, radio, print media and online advertising to attract 1700 more recruits over the next five years. The campaign focused strongly on attracting more applicants from diverse cultural backgrounds, particularly women and men with different professional and life experiences, as well as people living in country Victoria. It included the introduction of a new physical fitness testing regime on 1 July 2010, which applied to recruits entering the academy and applicants starting the recruitment process. The contentious 1.6-metre obstacle wall that had been ordered to be dismantled by Nixon was replaced by a 1.3-metre vaulting horse and a series of fitness tests designed to align fitness standards with operational duties. Inspector Dan Trimble of the People Department espoused the corporate view that in recent years, mandatory physical standards for recruits ‘had been allowed to slide’ and that the levels required ‘were not onerous, and [were] in line with general community standards’. He added: ‘I think it is fair for someone who has their handbag snatched to expect that police will be fit enough to give chase’.98
After a review by the Transfer and Promotion Unit, the philosophy behind the new approach to physical fitness management and training was extended to embrace police promotion examinations. Once a fundamental element of police training at all levels, promotion examinations were now eschewed by many police educators as a thing of the past, and Overland noted in 2010 that it had been ‘more than 10 years since pre-promotional exams were part of this organisation’.99 The inaugural sergeant-level pre-promotional qualifying examinations were held on 14 September 2010. More than eight hundred eligible senior constables and leading senior constables registered to sit the multiple-choice examination, which covered such topics as professional standards and conduct, police powers and accountabilities, operational management and response, and investigation and intelligence. The ‘new’ examination system reverted to the traditional order of things, where members were equipped with sound job knowledge acquired through study and examinations that could later be augmented, rather than a post-promotion regime. In the course of discussing these developments with the Age, Overland, in a classic instance of ‘be careful what you wish for’ intimated to Silvester and Willingham that he ‘would be happy when next month’s election [was] out of the way’ so that ‘police would not be part of the daily political agenda’. On his watch this was always a faint hope, and it was never fulfilled.100
In 1981, Satyanshu K. Mukherjee, a criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, in a discourse titled Crime Trends in Twentieth-century Australia, wrote:
Crime is not a new phenomenon and it has been a vexing problem for centuries. But how can we really be sure whether today’s concern with the increase in crime is due to increased sensitivity to the phenomenon, to increased publicity or to a real increase in the volume of crime? From the variety of means many countries use to combat crime we are made painfully aware that none of these methods has proven successful in containing it; the lack of success tends to make crime look a much graver problem than it is.101
The systematic collection and distribution of crime statistics by the Victoria Police had its genesis in the 1850s, under the commissionership of Frederick Standish. Compiled annually and presented to both houses of parliament under the heading ‘Criminal Statistics’, the detailed multi-paged returns contained a surprising amount of data, showing ‘The Number of Persons Taken into Custody by the Victorian Police Force during the Year, Offences, Total Numbers, Sex, Age, Country, Religion, Education, Occupation, and How Disposed of’. That nascent foray into the collation of crime statistics was not maintained, and it was not until the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics was established in 1908 (it was renamed the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1974) that serious attention began to be paid nationwide by criminal justice and law enforcement bodies to the systematic collection of crime statistics by federal and state agencies. The Victoria Police was one such agency, and along with numerous other post-World War II initiatives overseen by chief commissioners Alexander Duncan and Selwyn Porter, the first Victoria Police Annual Report of the modern era was published in 1946; it included the crime statistics for 1945. This was followed in 1959 by a standalone publication titled Statistical Review of Crime. The statistics were largely viewed by the Victoria Police as the ‘intellectual property’ of the force, as they were collected, managed and made public by the force at its discretion. There were calls for independent researchers and others to be given greater access to these and other data collected and stored by the force, but one significant impediment to the sharing and broader application of the statistics was the estrangement between many police and criminologists. When asked about the ‘police-bashing industry amongst criminologists’, Christine Nixon observed: ‘That hasn’t done a lot of good. Some make a good living out of it. But policing is just as responsible for not having opened up to research. Although, it would be good to see criminologists take a more positive perspective on researching policing’.102
The polarisation of those engaged in the debate on crime statistics—their accuracy and their worth—was succinctly distilled by Mark Twain, who postulated: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’. Simon Overland was one who saw merit in the judicious use of statistics as a management tool, especially when contemporary computer technology enabled the rapid collation, dissection and meaningful analysis of raw data. Unfortunately, endemic weaknesses with the LEAP system that Overland inherited meant that he was never able to optimise the data’s strategic potential. Despite this, the figures were capable of providing succour to communities feeling beset by crime and public disorder, and underpinned requests for additional personnel, resources and equipment. Police commanders, bureaucrats, academics, union officials, politicians and lobbyists, engaged in both laudable and dubious causes, routinely relied on ‘the crime statistics’ to make their case or, alternatively, to tear apart someone else’s case. One of the first initiatives introduced by Overland upon being appointed chief commissioner was the inclusion in April 2009 of a section called ‘My Place’ on the police news website. It was intended to be driven by community access to quarterly crime statistics for their local area, but, perhaps auguring what lay ahead, for unspecified reasons the figures provided were ‘provisional’ and Overland cautioned: ‘we have previously released our crime statistics per 100 000 population. This will not be possible for these quarterly crime statistics releases. Instead we are releasing the number of raw offences’.103
Overland’s ‘My Place’ announcement and his ‘report card’ bookended a special edition of the Police Gazette104 published to coincide with Premier John Brumby’s announcement that ‘the Victorian Government [is] committed to putting an additional 120 police officers on the streets, as well as giving police stronger powers to combat violence and antisocial behaviour’. Brumby’s announcement also coincided with the release by Overland on Sunday 9 August 2009 of ‘our official crime statistics, which again highlight the tremendous work of our frontline officers … The organisation also recorded its highest [crime] clearance rate since computerised recording began in 1993, solving 45.8 per cent of crimes’. While none of these actions were of themselves untoward or inappropriate, the contemporaneous nature of the mutually beneficial announcements highlighted the clear links that existed between crime statistics, politics and policing.
In the period following the release of the official crime statistics for 2008–09, Overland and his management team had much else on which to focus—in particular, Deputy Commissioner (Road Safety) Ken Lay achieved some excellent results in his portfolio. Other matters addressed by the Overland team included the formation of a partnership between Crime Stoppers and the Victoria Police Gay and Lesbian Advisory Unit (GLAU); the Regional Boundaries Project, designed to enhance the force’s emergency management capacity; HR Assist, a contemporary human resources management system; the NECLO programme; the Police and Muslim Youth Council; and the Community and Radicalisation research project.
A state election was due to be held on 27 November 2010, and in the lead-up to the polls Overland took the unprecedented, unilateral step of authorising the early release of the official crime statistics on 28 October, a month before the election date and just a few days before the ‘caretaker period’, which commenced on 3 November. In the normal course of events the release date for the July–September quarterly crime statistics data would have been around mid-November. However, Overland contended that if that timeframe had been adhered to, ‘the quarterly statistics would have been released in the week before the election’, posing, in his view, ‘a much greater risk of politicisation than an early release’.105
Surprisingly, the early release of the crime statistics was, according to Overland, ‘not picked up by the media’ and consequently ‘had no impact’. However, in a public debate between the then police minister, James Merlino, and the Opposition spokesperson on police matters, Peter Ryan, broadcast on radio station 3AW on 24 November, just three days before the election, the meshing of crime statistics, politics and police was much in evidence, particularly when Merlino, resorting to the problematic statistics, opined: ‘What I would say to my family and friends is I feel safe walking the streets of Melbourne … We are turning around street violence, with a 27.5 per cent reduction in CBD street violence in the past quarter, compared to this time last year’; he attributed this to the actions of the Labor government in providing ‘additional police and tougher police powers’. The public release of the figures was a task delegated by Overland to Deputy Commissioner Walshe in preference to Ken Jones, who was the deputy commissioner (crime). In any event, Overland unequivocally accepted responsibility for the early release, stating: ‘It was my decision and mine alone made free from any input from anyone else’.106
Contrary to the expectations of many pollsters, in an election where ‘law and order’ was an issue, the government of John Brumby was voted from office. Brumby had ascended to the leadership of the Labor Party in Victoria and the position of premier following the unexpected resignation of Steve Bracks, who had stepped down on 30 July 2007. The 2010 state election was the first that Brumby had contested as premier in his own right, and his incumbent Labor government was narrowly defeated by a Liberal–National Party coalition led by Ted Baillieu, who was installed as premier on 2 December 2010. The Nationals leader and former Gippsland solicitor Peter Ryan was chosen as deputy premier and also served as minister for police and emergency services from 2010 to 2013. Following the election, conservative political journeyman and public policy consultant Ben Hindmarsh was engaged as chief of staff to Ryan. It was a position he held from November 2010 to December 2014, during which time he was a political insider, privy to much of what was happening within the troubled upper echelons of the Victoria Police.
One budding bureaucrat with serious political ambitions who entered the fray at this time was Detective Leading Senior Constable Tristan Weston of the Security Intelligence Group. A bank officer before joining the Victoria Police on 17 July 1996, his tertiary qualifications were focused on public safety, risk management and counter-terrorism. Working at close quarters with Hindmarsh, Weston made a rapid ascent from being a little-known sleuth, political aspirant and wannabe kingmaker to being a confidant of Deputy Commissioner Jones and other ‘insiders’, including Police Association secretary Greg Davies. In the state election, Weston had stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in a tightly fought contest for the seat of Macedon. Following his electoral loss, he applied to the Victoria Police on 28 January 2011 for twelve months’ unpaid leave, which he was granted. Subsequently, on 24 February, he signed a contract of employment with the premier’s chief of staff and commenced duties on 8 March, ‘assigned to the office of the Minister for Police and Emergency Services [Peter Ryan] as Police Adviser’. Hindmarsh was the relevant chief of staff. For Hindmarsh’s part, he later avowed that he would ‘not again employ a serving police member as an Adviser to the Minister’. Although approval for Weston to undertake secondary employment in the minister’s office ultimately came from Overland, he did not choose Weston. Overland expressed a preference for ‘a member of higher rank’ for the role, and told OPI investigators ‘that having a Detective Senior Constable offering advice to the Minister didn’t thrill me’.
The role of ‘police adviser’ had its genesis in 1982, when it was first conceived by Chief Commissioner Mick Miller and Race Mathews, the inaugural minister for police and emergency services in the incumbent Labor government. Erudite, articulate and progressive, Miller and Mathews were exemplars of what could be achieved when ideology and politics were put to one side and all parties worked together for the common good. It was in this political climate that serving police officers were first appointed as ministerial advisers; however, over successive years the nomenclature, political status, ranks, roles, responsibilities and mutual regard of key office holders varied markedly.
It was widely mooted that Baillieu was not a supporter of the perceived ‘soft policing’ model erroneously ascribed to Overland. There were many people, both inside and outside government and policing circles, who wanted the force to take a tougher line on crime, particularly street violence in the Melbourne CBD.107 One high-profile advocate of the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to dealing with the unprecedented levels of serious public and after-dark violence was Assistant Commissioner Gary ‘Jamo’ Jamieson. Ideologically adrift from Overland and more ‘sheriff than diplomat’, he declared ‘old-fashioned policing is back in favour … people are asking me to deliver old-fashioned policing’. Popular with the media and his troops in the front line, his message resonated with a community tired of alcohol- and drug-fuelled violence. Emblematic of Jamieson’s efforts to ‘win back’ the streets was the deployment of paramilitary Hummer ‘battle wagons’ to the violence-prone ‘battle’ zones. An unsuccessful aspirant for the position of chief commissioner when Overland had applied and been appointed, he later reverted to the rank of commander. In a rare negotiated agreement, brokered with the support of the Police Association, he took a ‘slight pay cut’ but remained for more than a year ‘on the books’, keeping his car and entitlements. Astute police watcher and Age journalist John Silvester was one who openly addressed the elephant in the room, musing: ‘[Jamieson’s] days as a serving police officer are over. By taking holidays and long service leave at half pay he can remain for another 14 months and will get a healthy tax break. But what is in it for a police command to have a wounded veteran on the sidelines? The answer may be that he leaves the job without a public spat’. It was yet another indicator of the difficult times engulfing Overland.108
In the flurry of activity that followed the election, the relationship between Ken Jones and Overland deteriorated even further. Jones was critical of the structure of the force generally, and of the Crime Department specifically, which he felt was cumbersome and in need of change. But this was problematic. During Overland’s term as assistant commissioner (crime) the department had undergone a major revamp costing more than $1 million. In this milieu, the forthright Jones proffered his opinion that the administrative structure adopted by Nixon was bizarre: ‘a complete and utter charade at bureaucracy. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life’. Amid this acrimony the media gaggle maintained its attack on Overland. Television and radio networks, notable among them respected Melbourne broadcaster Neil Mitchell on radio 3AW, were to the fore, and not far behind was the print media, including the Age, the Australian, Crikey and the Herald Sun, the latter of which alone produced eighty-nine articles that were critical of Overland’s commissionership.
Vicissitudes of this nature and degree are savage enough to test the resolve of even the most stoic and media-savvy public figure, so for a man who valued his privacy, family and friends above all else, these highly public media and sectional missives were unsettling and toxic. And there was worse to come: in late February 2011 the Victorian ombudsman, George Brouwer, received a complaint from a whistleblower alleging that the crime statistics released by the Victoria Police on 28 October 2010 had been manipulated for political purposes and were misleading. Brouwer investigated the complaint under the Whistleblowers Protection Act 2001, and his report, which was presented to parliament in June 2011, found, inter alia, that ‘the decision to release the crime statistics several days before the caretaker period leading up to the November 2010 state election was the Chief Commissioner’s and his alone’. Following on from that, the ombudsman asserted: ‘I consider that the quoted reduction of 27.5 per cent of assaults in the CBD [for] the July–September quarter 2010 compared to the July–September quarter in 2009, without qualification, was based on unvalidated data. It was therefore likely that releasing the data without qualification could reasonably be perceived to be misrepresenting the fuller picture of the trends’. These crime statistics were subsequently used for political purposes. Senior officers had failed to pass on warnings to Overland that the data was ‘not settled’ and was incomplete. In their haste to release the statistics just before the caretaker period, a number of senior police officers and public servants involved in the process not only ignored warnings about the incompleteness of the data, but also failed to appreciate the profound impact that such data could have on both state politics and high-level administration within the Victoria Police. In his recommendations on crime statistics, the ombudsman advocated that the force ‘address the continuing inefficiencies in the recording of crime as a matter of urgency. In doing so, a comprehensive plan for the future of policing in relation to its information technology needs should be developed together with proper audit processes. Any new information system needs to embrace all aspects of modern technology as statistics have a bearing on resourcing for front-line police’. He also recommended that ‘the Victorian Government create an independent body to manage, collate and disseminate crime statistics’.109 The Victoria Police supported both recommendations, and the Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) was established in 2014 and commenced public operations on 1 January 2015.
While the crime statistics imbroglio was adroitly resolved by the OPI, a string of vexing unrelated matters simmered in the background, and the media barrage targeting Overland became reminiscent of the 1920s stand-off between Chief Commissioner Tom Blamey and the Fifth Estate. It was widely accepted within the force that both Overland and Jones had failed to embrace the culture and strengths of the Victoria Police, and it was equally felt by ‘the outsiders’—Nixon, Overland and Jones—that the status accorded ‘insiders’ would always elude them. Jones was never reticent about speaking his mind, and several times expressed his frustration on the subject of civilian executive directors being placed on equal footing with the three deputy commissioners. It was a view at odds with that of former chief commissioner Neil Comrie, who had engaged the first civilian director in 1997.
In this context, Jones felt isolated from the decision-making process, not quite in the thick of it. His role, as he saw it, was to constructively challenge decisions, especially where there was a risk posed to the organisation. He raised misgivings about the force structure because it had a ‘growing degree of unresolved ambiguity which in [his] view did not optimally align the accountabilities … directorates and deputies’. Further, he expressed his angst about cost over-runs, parolees, the force’s information technology infrastructure, and the manner in which police used ‘informers’. Reluctantly, Overland conceded that some changes to the force structure were necessary, especially because ‘accountability had suffered’ under Nixon and it wasn’t clear who was making decisions. It was a murky period in the history of the force, when leadership was found wanting at the highest echelons.
By June 2010 Overland had formed a view that Jones was indiscreet about matters discussed at force command, and had become disruptive. Tension between the two leaders simmered, and less than a year after joining the Victoria Police, Jones was contemplating resigning. He told Overland of this in July and confirmed his decision in writing in October. As a consequence, Overland discussed their prickly relationship with the secretary of the department of premier and cabinet, Helen Silver, who suggested mediation. In October, Jeff Whalan was engaged to assist. While the process did not alter Jones’s intentions, Overland finally agreed to structural change within the force and Jones agreed to stay on and ‘work towards a good exit’.110 His resignation was planned for early 2011. On 1 March that year Overland asked Jones to reconsider his resignation, but that approach was rebuffed.
Such was the duplicitous nature of the rancour undermining the senior levels of the force—both acolytes and adversaries—that during one lamentable period the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), the OPI, the Victorian ombudsman and the State Services Authority were all involved in tackling the ills that beset the force. Indeed, Murray Kellam, SC, in his report to IBAC, commented on friction between the OPI and the ombudsman; this was resolved in time, when the OPI and IBAC were effectively merged.
Jones publicly announced his intention to resign from the force on 2 May 2011, with an effective date of 5 August 201l. On 6 May, Overland directed that Jones take leave effective from the close of business that day. It was a communication that Overland did not share with the police minister, but the minister would have the last word. On 14 June, the Victorian ombudsman provided Deputy Premier Peter Ryan with his report on the investigation into Victorian crime statistics and, after discussions with the premier, ‘The Government concluded that the report presented issues in relation to the management of Victoria Police that were of serious concern’.111 Things moved quickly. On the day that the ombudsman’s report was released, the day after a late-evening discussion with Ryan on 15 June, Overland resigned. In a four-minute press conference to publicly announce his exit, he answered few questions and said simply: ‘the best interests of the Force [are] being served by my departure’. In an incisive last word on the bitter media campaign directed at Overland, Ryan observed: ‘I’ve not seen the like of the campaign that’s been run against Mr Overland. Never seen the like of it in my eighteen years in politics and in my similar time in private life. It [has been] unremitting and remorseless’.112
The sombre mood surrounding Overland’s acrimonious resignation on 16 June 2011 was of a kind not before experienced in the upper echelons of the Victoria Police. Kindled by vitriolic cant fuelled from within an organisation that he had once proudly led, Overland was undermined and betrayed by disloyal inside elements. They failed to accord him the fundamental courtesies routinely due to the chief commissioner of the nation’s second-largest police agency. He was not entirely blameless for the shortcomings that beset his force during this period, but the OPI report Crossing the Line sagely highlighted ‘the history of disunity in senior command and the necessity for an understanding within that command that the fundamental allegiance is to the Chief Commissioner’.
Nixon and Overland were products of the New South Wales Police and AFP respectively, set loose in Victoria as agents of change to oversee what at times was a bold attempt at organisational and cultural reformation. Successive Labor governments had headed the state for almost a decade, and Overland’s resignation presented the incumbent conservative government with the opportunity for a significant paradigm shift. Premier Edward ‘Ted’ Norman Baillieu, leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, Melbourne architect and a scion of Melbourne’s Baillieu dynasty, and the deputy premier, Gippsland lawyer Peter Ryan, leader of the National Party, were presented with a genuine opportunity to exercise their vision and stamp their mark on the ailing thin blue line. The force had laboured for too long in a culture of deceit, distrust and dishonour, and the senior leadership team had been stymied by dysfunction, politicisation and treachery, largely generated by elements from within its own ranks.
It was in this political climate, on 9 May 2011, that the premier established a special inquiry ‘into the command, management and functions of the senior structure of Victoria Police’. For this task the government again turned to highly regarded Melbourne barrister (later Supreme Court judge) Jack Rush, QC, who was appointed to conduct the inquiry, supported by State Services Authority (SSA) employees and Ms Melinda Richards, counsel assisting. Rush had figured prominently as counsel assisting the VBRC, and was no stranger to the machinations of the senior ranks of the Victoria Police. The document eventually resulting from the inquiry, which became known as the Rush Report, was probing, informed and incisive, and had much to teach the force. However, given the state of disarray then confronting the police portfolio, the government was compelled to act quickly to find an interim replacement for Overland—someone who, among a long list of challenges, would have the capacity to rebuild public confidence in the Victoria Police.
The government acted decisively to ensure that Overland’s resignation did not precipitate blowback within the senior ranks of the force, and Deputy Commissioner Ken Lay was appointed acting chief commissioner, effective from 16 June 2011.113 Some police pundits viewed the elevation of the taciturn Lay as an inspired choice, but in reality the chain of events that catapulted him into the top job were largely fortuitous.
Like most police officers who were products of the ‘baby boomer’ years, Lay had begun his police career as a uniformed general-duties constable. Working his way through the ranks, he had a reasonable expectation that over time he would have the opportunity to perform duty in specialist areas that interested him, and from which he could follow his chosen career path through until his retirement. He joined the Victoria Police as a callow teenage police cadet on 4 February 1974. Then aged eighteen, his formative years had largely been spent in the bucolic South Gippsland dairying township of Korumburra, where he was born, raised, educated and domiciled before heading to the bright lights of Melbourne.
After completing his mandatory stint at the Glen Waverley Training Academy, Lay, like thousands of recruits before him, was appointed to the iconic Russell Street police station for ‘beat duty’. He was transferred to Bourke Street West and then Prahran police station for ‘general duty’. From that time onwards his career path mirrored that of many of his colleagues.
Following Lay’s appointment as acting chief commissioner, it was a further five months before the Baillieu Government confirmed him as the new chief commissioner, while it waited for the tabling of the Rush Report and worked through the applications of fifteen prospective candidates. It was a useful period of gestation for Lay, who soon settled into the role and saw prospects for rebuilding respect for the force, citing ‘stability and public confidence as his foundation stones’.114 The success and stability of this time gave the government confidence that a healing process had begun. During this interregnum he worked closely with Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe, who had a public image as a conservative with ‘a safe pair of hands’. Not widely seen as an aspirant for the chief commissioner’s position, in the past Walshe had opted not to apply for the top job. However, like Lay, he was richly experienced and loyal. After a difficult period as superintendent at Wangaratta, he had been appointed Nixon’s chief of staff in 2003. In 2005 he was promoted to assistant commissioner for North West Victoria (Region 3), and with the departure of Noel Ashby took the position of assistant commissioner (traffic and transit). In 2009 Simon Overland had recommended Lay for promotion to the rank of deputy commissioner (road policing).115 This innovative decision by Overland was the first time in Australia that responsibility for road safety was accorded such a level of authority, and demonstrated the importance he attached to the role.
On 14 November 2011, Ken Lay was officially appointed Victoria’s twenty-first chief commissioner. The following day, the Australian, which had run a series of articles critical of Overland, signalled a changed approach with its headline: ‘Police officers’ commissioner—Victoria’s new law-enforcement chief appears a wise choice’.116 Few in the force had been immune from the eddies of instability swirling around the upper echelons of the organisation, and Lay noted this in an internal email to staff:
I’d like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the enormous contribution [Overland] has made to Victoria Police. He has overseen a huge amount of positive work and I thank him for all that he has done. I know the organisation will join me in wishing him the very best for the future.
I would also like to reassure members that whilst we are experiencing a period of difficulty, the entire Victoria Police leadership team will be working hard to ensure service delivery is not compromised and community safety is maintained.117
And then, down to business: building public confidence, managing an enormous recruiting campaign,118 overseeing replacement of the force’s antiquated LEAP, and steering enterprise-bargaining negotiations with the Police Association. Importantly, too, came a soothing of the badly ruffled relationship between the government and senior force command.119
Humbled both by his selection and overwhelming organisational support, Lay set about communicating his intentions to build a loyal and committed leadership team to assist him attain a focus that, internally, was about supporting front-line troops to deliver the best service possible to the community. That service included throwing everything at public-order flashpoints across the state. ‘The Force [will] not back away from sending big police numbers to the most challenging situations,’ he said.120 Among other goals he hoped to achieve were: solving the murders of police informers Christine and Terrence Hodson; tackling the scourge of domestic violence; fighting organised crime, cyber-crime and fraud; and pushing down the rate of P-plate deaths and improving road safety generally.
Chief Commissioner Ken D. Lay
Lay brought experience to his position from a variety of community interests, including the Blue Ribbon Foundation, the Alpine Valley Community Leadership Program, and the Gippsland Community Leadership Program. In his first week of office he was keynote speaker on a subject that, as a chief commissioner, he would make uniquely his own. In launching the rabbinical protocols for disclosures on family violence,121 he very publicly stepped into the dark, secret world of marital brutality, misery, injury, pain and grief. He would seize upon this behaviour and parade it openly and often in a way that no other chief commissioner had before him.
Lay was driven by a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of family and domestic violence. He was aware, for instance, that one Australian woman in three experienced domestic violence; that the World Health Organization considered domestic violence a global epidemic; that one Australian woman was murdered every week by her partner or ex-partner; that domestic violence was a whole-of-society issue and not just a feminist issue; and that family violence constituted 30 per cent of Victoria Police assault statistics, 30 per cent of abductions and 42 per cent of murders. From his years of country policing he knew that rural women were more likely to encounter domestic violence than their city sisters, and that family violence was significant in driving young people under eighteen either into care or onto the streets with homeless others. Time and again at a variety of forums he would throw down the gauntlet for silent men to speak out and condemn the blight. He would challenge people in power—politicians and leaders in all fields of commerce, industry and trade—to do something constructive, to assist, to break the cycle. He introduced a Domestic Violence Service Delivery model into the force and implored all police to listen, reach out, end complacency, never lose sight of the human faces behind the jobs attended, remember there was no such thing as ‘routine’ when dealing with family violence, and work with victims and other agencies in engineering either peace or a workable solution. To assist all this, he made the recording of family violence details simpler and more comprehensive. On 10 December 2012 the promised new family violence form became available. Fully electronic, the new system was designed to reduce time, duplication and frustration as well as provide a more comprehensive account of family dynamics. Importantly, the new system enabled the tracking of mobile families around the state: a source of comfort to those experiencing this dysfunction, and relevant knowledge for attending police.
Lay pulled no punches about domestic violence being almost exclusively a men’s problem, one they needed to talk about seriously. In December 2013 he developed a seminar titled ‘Breaking Men’s Silence’. While there would be some women experts present, the day was aimed at men, who comprised the majority of the audience. In 2014 he formed a remarkable partnership with Rosie Batty, whose son, Luke, was murdered by his father at cricket practice in the small Victorian town of Tyabb. Batty became an advocate for domestic violence survivors and victims and sought to address perceived systemic failures in the response to domestic violence in Australia. She was instrumental in the establishment of the 2015 Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria and acknowledged Lay’s personal support as ‘helping her through some of the darkest months of her life’, saying that his understanding of domestic violence really ‘helped to drive’ the cultural shift in the community. Batty was named Australian of the Year in 2015.122
At the beginning of December 2014, Taskforce Alexis was formed in the Southern region. Comprising twenty-three staff, including a senior family violence practitioner and a mental health clinician, the task force’s objective was to ensure both victims and perpetrators were accessing appropriate referral services. On 5 December, Lay announced that he was forming a ‘Family Violence Command … to provide a single point of accountability’. He did so because he passionately believed that family and domestic violence was a ‘blight on our society [and] one of, if not the most insidious of all crimes perpetrated in our society’. He saw it as a cultural issue underpinned by misogyny.123
Constantly he exhorted his members to take care of themselves in the workplace, to look after themselves and their colleagues and to consider all risks when making operational decisions. ‘Safety first’ was once again a key priority: a simple comparative table stating injury numbers for the previous and current year became a regular feature in the Police Gazette, and personal safety became factored into discussion at operational debriefings. Building this broad level of awareness of safety in the workforce had not happened before. Importantly, mental health was openly factored into Lay’s thinking—a matter underscored by the deaths of twenty-nine police who had taken their own lives since 1995. By the time Lay announced he was standing down as chief commissioner, there had been a reduction in personal injury rates of 20 per cent, and time lost from work was down by 18 per cent.124
Lay’s approach to his role demonstrated concern for the community and concern for his workforce. Slowly, systematically, he was healing the pain and ridding the force of its previous treacherous and disruptive era. Mindful of the Rush Report and its recommended changes, he pressed ahead in fulfilling his promise of building a new leadership team. With the retirement announcement of Walshe in February 2012, effective from July, the way opened for the appointment of three new deputies of his choosing: Lucinda Nolan, Graham Ashton and Tim Cartwright. All were appointed in February 2012. In June, Lay augmented his executive team by selecting several new assistant commissioners—Chris O’Neill, Jack Blayney, Robert Hill and Shane Patton—and two executive directors, Cliff Owen and Andrew Loader. The new leadership team was complete. Lay’s choice of these members was based on their competence, their loyalty to the force and the fact that none had been part of the former politico-personal machinations and disorder.125 Final tweaking of these leadership changes occurred through an ‘organisational re-alignment’ that resulted in altered work groups, reporting arrangements and titles. There were no changes to regional structures and no job losses.
Underpinning and preceding these changes was a proclamation for a new set of appearance guidelines commencing on 1 January 2012 that were a reversal of Nixon’s laissez faire approach to personal appearance and the dress code. The latter had resulted in considerable uniform variations across the state and, with no firm direction, the appearance of police specifically, and the force generally, had become untidy and unprofessional. The Appearance Guidelines resulted in an appeal to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal by sixteen police who complained that the beard ban trammelled their individual rights. Interestingly, the Police Association saw no reason to support their grievance.126
Beneath such empty distractions, Lay and his team got on with the job of dealing with the myriad issues confronting police—such as transferring Mildura’s call-taking and dispatch services to the Ballarat State Emergency Communications Centre; establishing the new Road Policing Command under Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill; working to reduce complaints against police; changing the title of ‘department’ to ‘command’ in seven areas;127 establishing a task force to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace;128 seriously considering the implications of the Rush Report for the shape and style of future policing; the first graduation of protective services officers (PSOs) appointed to patrol train stations; the selection of Ballarat and Geelong as first in line for a statewide roll-out of tasers;129 and trialling a new-look police uniform—a significant development.
The new uniform was, in fact, a carry-over task from Lay’s time as deputy commissioner under Simon Overland. On 8 December 2009, Lay had announced that the first meeting of the Uniform and Appearance Advisory Committee (UACC) would take place on 15 December. By March 2010 the UACC had explored changes to uniform entitlements, industrial relations implications, policy, procurement and contracts. Feedback from members revealed that they wanted a professional appearance; innovative, smart fabrics; breathable, odour-resistant shirts; less restrictive and (in necessary cases) padded trousers; longer shirts with pockets for women; trousers suited to thigh holsters; and lighter boots.
The next phase was uniform design, commercial engagement, design sources and the manufacture of samples for trialling. Members were informed that full use would be made of a recent textile industry report detailing research into new fabrics. This later proved useful when, in April 2014, an explosion in Middle Park caused grievous burns to the three attending police, and the Police Association raised serious concerns about the safety of the new uniform. The force was quickly able to reassure members that the uniforms had not exacerbated the injuries of those hurt, even though the design had been a trade-off between flammability and the requested breathability (non-flammable materials had low breathability). A month-long testing period at the Victorian Institute of Sport, undertaken by 133 police, had been predicated upon comfort, breathability and utility—not fire resistance. Even so, this information did not pacify the national secretary of the Textile Union, who argued that police ‘could not be certain of the material composition or of fire safety standards for the new uniforms because the shirts were manufactured in Bangladesh’, a place where ‘the garment industry is fraught … with safety problems [and] a range of production problems’.
Yet the unasked question was: why was the uniform change necessary? Police Gazette and other forums suggested several reasons, including the needs of modern policing (functionality and integration with equipment), a desire for a more consistent and professional appearance, and too many changes to the old uniform since 1979, which had led to untidiness. Further, the darker-blue shirts were said to be more compatible with the colour of the integrated operational equipment vests (IOEVs) worn over the uniform, and that the colour was complementary to uniform changes in other states. Additionally, it was claimed that the new design and colour differentiated police from a host of other emergency services that had ‘crept into the police uniform space’. In summary, it was argued that the ‘block colour of dark navy creates uniformity as everyone looks the same rather than the current situation of several uniform combinations’. Appearance seemed to be the nub of the problem. Even the Police Association president advised that, despite some negative reaction, the overwhelming majority of members welcomed a return to a more professional image because ‘the current uniform and dress standards have been allowed to slowly slip to a point where sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between the police at the scene of an incident and a council worker’.
The ‘Sustainable Government’ initiative, which saw a targeted reduction of public servants in the force, was a niggling and worrisome problem. That it should emerge so soon after the Rush Report had clearly recommended the opposite was deeply problematic. Almost from the force’s inception, the government method of funding the Victoria Police was based on the number of ‘sworn police’ in the organisation. Little regard was paid to any necessary support staff in the form of public servants or qualified civilian experts. Jack Rush, QC, in his report, referred to another government initiative, Building Operational Capability and Capacity (BOCC), which had identified 200 non-operational positions occupied by police. The BOCC objective was to return these police to operational duty and fill the vacuum with civilian employees. In its first twelve months of operation, the initiative returned 154 police to operations. Like the OPI report Enabling a Flexible Workforce for Policing in Victoria in 2011, the auditor-general’s report of 2006 and, prior to that, the 1982 Neesham Committee of Inquiry into the Victoria Police Force, Rush disagreed with a government funding process based upon ‘sworn police’. Instead, in common with previous inquiries, he supported a funding model based on the overall mix and numbers of personnel required to perform the most effective policing role for the state. Indeed, during interviews, the problem was made starkly yet simply clear to Rush when he interviewed one senior executive who said, ‘I feel we run a business with our hands tied behind our backs’.
Yet perhaps the last word should go to the chief commissioner, who said, ‘politicians on both sides make law enforcement promises to the electorate without consulting senior police on what they need. Last election [2010] turned into a Dutch auction on police numbers. First it was 1500, then it was 1600, then 1700 and 940 Protective Service officers. But not once did anyone come to police command and ask what was best for the organisation’, or even what mix of resources might provide the community with the most effective outcome.130 Political imperatives continued to outweigh practical reality. In July 2012 the Police Gazette declared that the force had taken significant steps towards being an ‘intelligence’-led organisation by launching the Victoria Police Intelligence Doctrine (VPID). The aim of the doctrine was to build a policy framework of accountability around police intelligence gathering and dissemination, and to integrate intelligence into decision-making across the force. The VPID was expected to have a significant bearing on crime, road policing, family violence and public order.131
The enhanced community protection expected to flow from the VPID was also implicit in the creation of the new Road Policing Command. Different from the command system of assistant commissioners in earlier years, this newer concept involved a centralised assistant commissioner and his immediate team setting core road-policing business policy while leaving implementation to regional and local area commanders without any form of line control over them. The Road Policing Command under Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill was divided into four divisions: Enforcement, Operations and Investigations, Road Safety Projects, and Strategy.
At the completion of his first twelve months as chief, Lay was keen to congratulate his members on their overwhelming support for him personally and the organisation generally. He was, however, dismayed and repulsed by what he considered a gross breach of trust. Detective Leading Senior Constable Andrew Tait of the Homicide Squad had pleaded guilty to three counts of disclosing restricted information to a body builder with a criminal record. Tait had not submitted a declarable association report that might have allowed his friendship to be managed, and, in return for drugs, had sacrificed a promising career. The presiding magistrate observed: ‘Acts of this nature, indeed relationships of this nature, go to the heart of the integrity of Victoria Police, which, in this instance, has been compromised’. With Lay’s full blessing, similar ‘rats in the ranks’ had been pursued by Taskforce Eagle, which had identified police working as double agents for the Hells Angels. In one case, hundreds of pages of carefully sourced and collated material identifying active investigations, suspects and investigating police were found in a policeman’s home along with drugs, guns and stolen property.
Lay declared that the force had good intelligence linking a small number of police with outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs), amphetamines and performance-enhancing drugs. He was rightly concerned about the cultivation of police and infiltration into the force of members of OMCGs, who could compromise a broad range of police activities well into the future. As a result, he established four separate task forces to concentrate on the problem: Eagle, dealing with police links to bikies; Razon, assessing the involvement of bikies with nightclubs; Keel, investigating leaks and potential witness harm; and Echo, examining connections between bikies and organised crime.132
Yet there was more bad news. From 2007 onwards, the Kensington Legal Centre had lodged a series of claims by African men alleging racial discrimination by police. At the time, Lay was assistant commissioner for the Western region, source of the claims. When matters progressed to the stage of a civil suit before a federal court, Jeremy Rapke, former director of public prosecutions and the lawyer defending the African men, signalled his intention of interrogating Lay over his actions in dealing with the complaints while in charge of the region. The principal claimant, Daniel Haile Michael, a 22-year-old civil engineering student, said that he had been assaulted and harassed by police for the previous seven years. When Professor Ian Gordon examined data from the force’s LEAP system he found that ‘African men around Flemington and North Melbourne were roughly 2.5 times more likely to have their interaction recorded by police than the rest of the population. Of those on the LEAP database, African men from the area committed significantly fewer crimes than men of other ethnicity. When dealing with African men, police were more likely to use such terms on their interaction records as “gang”, “no reason” and “move on”.’ Gordon’s analysis was powerful and justified the claims of harassment.
The civil case was settled without proceeding to a hearing, a matter that caused Justice Shane Marshall to remark, apropos Rapke’s earlier comment: ‘the police commissioner is off the hook’. Settlement was followed by a headline in the Australian: ‘Threat of $6m bill prompts police to settle race case’—a line Lay disputed. He said that the case had already cost $3 million in legal fees and was set to cost another $3 million; this was not something he could agree to, especially in the face of Gordon’s finding. He conceded that there were seven unresolved ‘race cases’ against the Victoria Police involving either criminal or disciplinary action, arising from twenty-six cases occurring in the previous four years. While neither Lay nor the police named in the civil action agreed that racial profiling was conducted by the force, Lay said that he did not ever want to hear those two words again mentioned in conjunction with the Victoria Police. He considered the six men who brought their action against the police to be ‘courageous, resilient and tenacious and [that they] had done their community proud’.
The settlement required the force to conduct a review of relations between police and the Horn of Africa community in Flemington, to implement identified strategies, and to invite the community to examine and comment on police policy involving field contacts, data collection and cross-cultural training. Subsequently, three police were dismissed, disciplinary action was taken against nine others, and a further six were admonished. These actions caused Lay to reiterate that he would not tolerate racism in any way, shape or form. On 8 September 2014, as part of its healing process, the force announced that four future leaders from African communities had been hired as part of the New and Emerging Communities mentoring programme. The programme had a three-pronged approach, enabling individuals from diverse backgrounds to share experiences with police recruits and PSOs, effect active liaison between front-line police and African communities, and facilitate youth camps and sporting activities with young Africans to enhance awareness of cultural differences.133
By August 2013, Lay’s time in office had been sufficient for people to understand his style of leadership. He was consultative, non-judgemental and compassionate, but above all he was his own man. Indeed, John Silvester of the Age wrote that Overland’s demise had led to the Baillieu Government taking a ‘strict hands-off approach to policing [with] Lay appearing to be the most independent Chief since Mick Miller retired 25 years ago’. Lay, aware of his strengths and weaknesses, understood that he was a ‘soother’, as he put it, and placed people around him whom he respected and who possessed the skills he felt he did not have. Blending his personal style with loyal support, he was determined not to waste his opportunity to influence government, government departments, investment and legislation. Leadership, in his view, was about fully occupying the leadership space, not just leading the Victoria Police but the community, too, and having governments accept that.
Such thinking, of course, also carries full responsibility for bad decisions. A decision to abolish the police bands in September 2013 was a deep disappointment to many people—police, the general community and members of the music industry. Commencing in June 1891, Victoria’s Police Brass Band, at 122 years, was Australia’s longest continuously standing band. But, like so many aspects of contemporary life, it seemed to fall to the relentless crush of economic rationalisation.
The government’s BOCC initiative was only partially successful in returning the 200 non-operational police to operational duties, as funding for the project was discontinued in 2011. The force sponsors for BOCC were the then deputy commissioner Ken Lay and executive director (people) Rebecca Munn. For the police, BOCC’s underpinning mantra was ‘more police to the frontline’, and, from the time of Lay’s appointment as chief commissioner, variations of this theme were proclaimed by him regularly. Redeployment of forty-eight members from the police pipe and brass bands dovetailed perfectly with the BOCC mantra.
While some considered that Lay’s elevation to chief commissioner resembled the ‘Bradbury’ phenomenon, or thought him ‘very beige, no controversy about him, a do it by the book’ sort of man, he grew into his role with passion, persuasion, power and foresight. If mistakes were made he apologised and set about fixing them, and his standards were clear. It is probable that he confounded many through the vision he brought to the role.134
The Rush Report was a crucible of change for the Victoria Police. Though limited to inquiring into the senior command structure and management functions, its twenty-five recommendations were penetrating and far-reaching. Eleven dealt with future force capability, six were directed at legislative reform (although two of these also affected the senior command structure), four focused directly on the senior command structure and the remaining four encompassed information technology.
The Victoria Police Act 2013 replaced the Police Regulation Act 1958 on 1 July 2014. It was the embodiment of Rush’s recommendation 12. By its proclamation, the new Act formally recognised the body known as the Victoria Police. For the first time, an Act defining the existence and function of police in Victoria sought to define the relationship between the police minister and the chief commissioner of police. Within that relationship, the minister was empowered to direct the chief commissioner, in writing, as regards the government policies and priorities to be pursued by police. Exemptions included situations where the directions might compromise the protection of life, people or peace, the enforcement of laws or the prosecution of offences. The minister also had restricted power to direct the chief commissioner upon the organisation of force structure, allocation or deployment of police to particular locations, police education, training and professional development, and grievance procedures. The restriction applied at all times unless any one of ten specified entities reported upon or made recommendations about any of the four mentioned areas and, in the minister’s opinion, the chief commissioner failed to adequately respond to the report or recommendations. Clearly, some elasticity had been included, allowing the minister to override the chief commissioner. Further substantial change was invoked through the introduction of the Police Registration and Services Board, whose purpose is generally, inter alia, to maintain a police profession register, advise the chief commissioner on professional standards and functions, hear and determine appeals, and advise the minister and chief commissioner about its own functions. Only time will determine if this attempt by the new Act to define the separation of powers between parliament and the executive is effective or fraught with controversy.135
In regard to future capability, Rush recommended that an integrated planning and risk management model (IPRMM) commence by July 2012. Preparation of a ten-year strategic workforce plan based on a ‘whole of workforce’ approach, together with an assessment of the community’s future policing needs, was also required.
The Victoria Police Blueprint 2012–15 resulted from the IPRMM and immediately commenced changing the planning focus. Included in the revised thinking were things like influencing the public to feel more confident in reporting family violence, expansion of the police, ambulance and crisis assessment early response (PACER) teams, upgrades for information technology (electronic patrol duty returns) and the graduation of 1700 police and 940 PSOs. The blueprint also articulated change in three important dimensions: reconsidering the make-up of geographic communities, an expanded approach to the elements of harm, and broadening the meaning of jurisdictions.
Stretching well beyond the three-year blueprint was a Blue Paper—the form and effect of Rush’s second recommendation regarding a ten-year plan. Lay introduced Deputy Secretary Donald Speagle from the Department of Premier and Cabinet to his workforce through the Police Gazette. Speagle was on loan to assist with production of a visionary plan for the force, and Lay informed police that Speagle would be consulting with local commands, front-line troops, public servants and other government agencies. The resultant document, produced in May 2014, was adventurous, far-sighted and, in several ways, iconoclastic. The news media saw it as a ‘grim warning that, without major changes, Victoria Police [would] indeed lose the battle to keep the community safe’. The Age considered it ‘bold and some points deliberately provocative, as if designed to open a wide debate about the future’, yet noted that while ‘politicians from both sides have made the right noises … that is a long way from making unpopular decisions such as shutting unproductive police stations in swinging electorates’. ‘It’s a tough call,’ Silvester summed up.136
Then, on 28 December 2014, when all things in the force were pointing to goodness, Ken Lay unexpectedly resigned only three years into his five-year contract, after forty-two years with the force. His wife and partner of thirty-three years was ill and he was leaving to support her. In his email to the force he thanked all members for their commitment and support, and left them with a quotation of great personal significance: Australian Army Lieutenant General David Morrison’s ‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept’. Lay had not accepted the standards that he inherited, and worked hard to heal the organisation after a period of turbulence, treachery and political grandstanding. That he recovered so much ground in a mere three years was sobering testament to his inclusive, considerate and thoughtful style of leadership. He was a man who made a difference. Indeed, former chief commissioner Mick Miller said:
Ken Lay proved an ideal choice as Chief Commissioner. As well as being a man of undoubted intelligence, integrity and dedication, he possessed attributes of courtesy, compassion and common sense. He also exhibited innate qualities of humanity. Arrogance and superciliousness were never part of his makeup. The public and the media accepted him as a man of sincerity, credibility and transparency in his public statements, even on matters adversely affecting police.137
On the day that he announced his resignation, Lay ‘singled out a shift in community attitudes towards family violence as his single greatest source of pride’ during his time as leader of the Victoria Police.138 His community leadership did not stop there. Roles have included the position of chair of the Prime Minister’s Ice Task Force and Ambulance Victoria and director of the Greyhound Racing Board. He has maintained interest in the family violence sphere, acting on advisory councils, and in 2017 he was appointed to the role of Victoria’s Lieutenant-Governor.
The premature departure of the popular and populist Ken Lay meant that the government was once again looking for a new police leader, the third in five years. Lay’s resignation was lamented by one of his deputy commissioners, Lucinda Nolan, who described him as a ‘wonderful, authentic, compassionate chief commissioner … No one wants to take over after Ken, trust me’.139 Lay trod a well-worn path of early departures from the chief commissioner’s office. Both Neil Comrie and Christine Nixon left early into their second contracts, and Simon Overland did not complete his first.
During the interregnum between Lay’s resignation and the appointment of a new leader, the force was led by Deputy Commissioner Tim Cartwright, who was not a candidate for the senior position. Matters of significance handled by Cartwright included release of the first online opportunity for members to have their say about the organisation, enabling them to offer ideas and suggestions about the present, the future and working conditions generally; commencement of an independent inquiry by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC) into sexual harassment in the force; completion of the largest personnel intake in the history of the force (1700 sworn and 1000 PSOs); and, regrettably, the need to issue safety warnings to sworn and unsworn members because the potential for terrorist acts against police had increased.140
Despite previous calls for politicians to be removed from the process of selecting a new chief commissioner after Overland’s appointment and subsequent departure,141 the Daniel Andrews Government continued the tradition of political announcements. When Graham Leonard Ashton was appointed as Victoria’s twenty-second chief commissioner, he was photographed with Andrews and Police Minister Wade Noonan.142 The short list for the position had included local candidates Nolan, Andrew Crisp and Stephen Patton. Ashton was no outsider to the Victoria Police, having served as a deputy commissioner under Lay and Overland. Premier Andrews said that Ashton was the right commissioner for ‘uncertain times’ and had been chosen from a strong field of applicants.143
Graham Ashton started his police career with the AFP in Canberra, subsequently receiving postings in Melbourne and Brisbane. Between 1995 and 1997, as a law enforcement liaison officer, he was attached to the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. When the Bali bombings occurred in 2002, killing 202 people and wounding hundreds more from twenty-two countries, Ashton shared joint leadership of the investigation and Disaster Victim Identification tasks with Indonesia under Operation Alliance. As the AFP’s largest operation, police from all Australian states and the Northern Territory, as well as many overseas police authorities and medical and scientific specialists, became involved in a task that ultimately resulted in the arrest of six key perpetrators.144
In his twenty-four years with the AFP, Ashton conducted investigations into drug trafficking, organised crime and money laundering. He was attached to the NCA and promoted to the rank of assistant commissioner, southern operations with responsibility for AFP activities in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. Before his departure from the AFP in 2004, his last major role was as assistant commissioner for counter terrorism with a global responsibility to lead AFP resources in the field of counterterrorism.145
In 2005, Ashton joined Victoria’s OPI as deputy director. There, his role was to provide strategic advice and oversight investigations, and to prevent corruption among Victoria’s police. In 2009 he joined the Victoria Police Executive as director, forensic services and in December of that year became director, corporate strategy and governance. In April 2011 Chief Commissioner Overland appointed Ashton as assistant commissioner (crime), noting that his experience in the AFP and NCA and in joint task-force investigations involving the Victoria Police brought ‘great strength, leadership [and] depth of experience’. Less than twelve months later, Ashton, Cartwright and Nolan were appointed to the rank of deputy commissioner by Chief Commissioner Lay on his conviction that they were ‘the right people with the right experience and the right skill set’ for the job.146
A trusted and reliable adviser to Lay as deputy commissioner (specialist operations), Ashton’s portfolios embraced crime command, road policing, intelligence and covert services, forensics, and legal services. Among those responsibilities were matters of child sexual abuse, OMCGs and sports integrity, and a brief to find improvements for the way the force tackled organised crime. He was a solid contributor to both the Victoria Police Blueprint 2012–15, devised after the Rush Inquiry into senior force command, and the Blue Paper, which essentially met Rush’s recommendation for a ten-year plan for policing. When Ashton left the force in December 2014 to return to the AFP, Lay announced to the workforce that he had been ‘a valued member of executive command, always bringing a thoughtful, yet outcome-focused perspective to discussions’.147
When Ashton formally returned to the force as chief commissioner on 1 July 2015, he wasted no time drawing attention to the likelihood of increased threats from Islamic extremism while also making clear that nothing could guarantee prevention of home-grown terror attacks. ‘The current conflict,’ he said, ‘the amount of people involved … the way that young people are attracted to the movement, the IS [Islamic State] movement particularly, are situations that are worsening around the world, and they’re worsening here.’ It was a sober warning accompanied by comment from the premier: in welcoming the new chief commissioner, Andrews described him as having ‘the rarest of abilities, the ability to foresee issues before they arise’.148 Ashton noted the ‘scourge of ice’ and family violence as some of his other priorities, along with achieving a nationally consistent legislative approach to OMCGs and a strong desire to improve the IT capability of the Victoria Police.149
These issues indeed figured in the first two years of his command and included not only the threat of but actual deeds of terrorism in Victoria, and escalating crime accompanied by extreme violence and intimidation committed by young, Australian-born males, some of whom belonged to ethnic minorities and who practised group attacks, home invasions, carjackings, public-event invasions and repeat burglaries with abnormal ferocity. Acts of violence were committed by people on bail, such as the horrendous motor-vehicle attack on pedestrians in the Bourke Street Mall in January 2017 by the allegedly drug-affected Dimitrious Gargasoulas. These events raised community concern and caused both system reviews and political engagement. The release of a review of the mental health of Victoria’s police revealed much about the organisation’s people and culture in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, and a reluctance to seek help for these conditions. There was also the release of a report by the VEOHRC concerning sexual harassment within the force, which disclosed that of the more than 5000 staff surveyed, 40 per cent of the women had been sexually harassed. This harassment had resulted in their mental and physical health being adversely affected, and in at least one case, a woman alleged rape by a male colleague. Alarmingly, it was found that more women in the Victoria Police had been sexually harassed than the number uncovered by the longrunning inquiry into the same problem in the Australian Defence Force. Ashton also had to defend the force over an allegation from Cardinal George Pell that police leaked information about him to the ABC concerning claims of child molestation.150
Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton
Ashton has continued to articulate and implement his goals regarding his ‘favourites’. The police community-engagement model will be not only maintained but also given every encouragement to evolve; and sharp focus will be directed to public order, family violence, ‘ice’ and its deleterious effects, and organised crime. Recruiting the right people with the right skills, along with the acquisition of technology to sustain community confidence, is a mantra often repeated by Ashton. Implicit within these goals is an awareness of larger issues, too, such as the pressures of housing affordability, which, in the city of Melbourne, are considered to be contributors to poverty, homelessness, stress and unprovoked violence. A strong focus on family violence is to continue, but Ashton has stressed that this is a problem not confined to police alone—it crosses government and not-for-profit sectors, and the response has to be a collective one.151 He has worked towards redressing hostility and discrimination against women in the force, and has had the full support of the Police Association in implementation of the VEOHRC recommendations.152
When Ashton was appointed to the position of chief commissioner, he described himself as a ‘traditionalist’ who appreciated the ‘rich history’ of the Victoria Police: ‘While ensuring Victoria Police—an organisation that pre-dates Federation—does not lose its traditions, I also want to ensure it presents a modern, effective and contemporary face to the community it serves’.153 After more than a hundred years, the Victoria Police Act 2013 changed the name of the Victoria Police Force simply to Victoria Police, and all its members are now police officers. Traditions and contemporary trends in policing have melded—it is no longer a ‘force’, but it continues to be shaped by the people it serves.
