Whatever happened to Chook Fowler?
In 1995 police sergeant Graham 'Chook' Fowler was secretly filmed by an under-dash camera accepting a bribe from a fellow officer from the Kings Cross station who had been turned by the Wood Royal Commission into the NSW Police. The famous 'crotch cam' footage went viral on the broadcast media of the day. Chook was pleased to accept a 'drink' and a 'pony', crim slang for bribes of $500 and $1000. He was subsequently invited by the Royal Commission to 'cooperate'. Sensing the danger, he orchestrated a workplace accident, so qualifying for a lifetime pension on his accelerated retirement. At the Commission he brazenly denied ever accepting bribes or knowing of any other police officer doing so. Asked to explain his substantial savings, he resorted to that old favourite; he was a very lucky gambler on the gee-gees. Limping to the witness box and complaining of various spinal injuries, Chook held fast to his story. Unimpressed, Commissioner Wood's scathing report led, among other outcomes to Chook's detention at Her Majesty's pleasure for three years. He eventually made a seachange and died in 2013, a minor footnote in Australia's seamier urban history. (His reliance on personal injury as a defence was later taken to artistic levels by disgraced corporate bankrupt Alan Bond, whose 'irreversible brain damage' miraculously disappeared after his release from prison.)
A decade before Chook’s fifteen minutes of fame, the NSW Premier Bob Askin died. When his widow was asked how a career politician could leave an estate in the millions of dollars, she guilelessly suggested that 'Robin was a very lucky gambler'. This was certainly true, in the sense that he was often to be seen at Royal Randwick, hobnobbing with the great, the good and the ugly, including well-known figures in the Sydney underworld. Moreover, it was an open secret that Askin was a silent partner in a very successful illegal gambling den in Kings Cross, helpfully protected by the nearby officers of the law.
Further north in the 'Twilight State', an even more egregious pattern of entrenched, institutionalised corruption was uncovered by Chris Masters' Four Corners program. The subsequent Fitzgerald Royal Commission reached up to the top of the Queensland Police and into the Premier's office. Police Commissioner Sir Terry Lewis was found guilty and gaoled, surrendering his royal title en route to the clink. Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was tried and acquitted by a jury in which one standout juror refused to convict.
Victoria Police has also felt the lash of inconvenient public scrutiny. In the late 1970s, the Beach Inquiry returned a scathing report on Victoria Police's armed robbery squad, accused of committing "abuses... so grave as to warrant the most prompt institution of safeguarding reforms". Five years earlier Beach had also inquired into police wrongdoing concerning illegal abortions. No police officers went to gaol. Currently, senior past and present members of the force are being grilled by a Royal Commission into the 'Lawyer X' affair (For international readers, lawyer X is a Melbourne barrister who, while defending underworld figures, was secretly and illegally reporting on them to Victoria Police.)
It is not just state police forces that appear to have lost the confidence of the public. Religious and charitable organisations and large financial institutions have also been the target of Royal Commissions. The tales of wrongdoing have in many cases been jaw-dropping. The dark world of institutional child sexual abuse and the refusal of the institutions concerned to fully accept and compensate survivors has cast a shadow across their function and future, stoking growing public distrust. The actions of the big four banks and Australia's oldest insurance company in fleecing unwitting customers (including after their death) of tens of millions of dollars shocked ordinary Australians. No senior executive or director has gone to gaol. Politicians too are rapidly falling down the ladder of public trust and respect. It is not just the repeated demonstration of political incompetence, blatant pork-barrelling and lying that so infuriates people but the obvious and inept attempts at cover up and denial that is undermining public confidence and eating away at the foundations of our democracy.
The crimes of Chook, Bob, Terry, Joh, Cardinal Pell and others are significant because they underline the long history of official corruption and the need for robust anti-corruption measures to shore up public faith in our institutions of government, policing and other spheres of public life. State governments have, on the whole, travelled some way to addressing corruption, though the variations between jurisdictions leaves much still undone and the gaps in coverage and enforcement persist. For example, only in Victoria has legislation been passed making reporting of child abuse mandatory for Priests in the Confession. It is at the federal sphere that action lags most alarmingly, in this as in so many area. With the hollowing out of the public service as a source of frank and fearless advice, and the rise to power of political staffers paid to get their political masters re-elected at all costs, the Executive faces few checks, other than a reactive Senate and a stonewalled media. Both major parties have steadfastly refused to seriously address corruption and shy away from creating an independent corruption watchdog that would have powers to hold elected parliamentarians, as well as public servants, to account. Even in the light of the very recent incontrovertible proof of interference by the Prime Minister's Office into the awarding of a range of grants to organisations clustered in Coalition and marginal seats before the last Federal Election, nothing by way of real reform has occurred or is likely to. In this, the Labor Opposition is equally to blame, since it appears not to be ready to give up a lever that they can pull when eventually returned to power.
There is a great danger here that Australian (and other) voters become terminally cynical, not just about the current crop of pollies, but about the system of representative democracy itself. That way lies the death of democracy as we have come to know it. There are plenty of object lessons here. The progressive evacuation of democratic institutions and norms in countries like Victor Orban's Hungary, Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey and Andrzej Duda's Poland point to the rise of authoritarian nationalist regimes willing to eviscerate the rule of law and the operation of a free and independent media. In America, President Trump's continual attacks on and intervention in legal processes is testing America's republican democracy to the limit. He has not yet been able to cower the mainstream media that remains a final bulwark against his monarchical aspirations and unstable personality. However, decades of political white-anting at the level of state legislatures and governor mansions, funded by the rivers of 'dark money' laundered through fake right wing charities, foundations and think tanks, has so skewed federal electoral boundaries as to make his re-election later this year a very real possibility. Presidential votes in large Democratic Party leaning states like New York and California are worth less than a fifth of votes in small fly-over states that traditionally vote Republican in the peculiar arithmetic of the Federal Electoral College. Although not quite the twenty-first century equivalent of rotten boroughs, the situation is not a hundred miles away. By the remorseless use of Twitter and the repeated resort to the off-the-cuff lie, Trump has so muddied the sphere of public reason that it is an open question as to whether the world's oldest modern democracy can survive in a form worth a dime.
In the United Kingdom, now that Brexit 'has been done', it is not clear what the future of British democracy holds. Having achieved power with a large working majority Prime Minister Johnson now has to decide what he wants to do. Early signs are not promising. Within days he lost his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a first notch on the gun of his Rasputin-like adviser Dominic Cummings. Boris faces difficult negotiations with European Union nations over post-Brexit trade relations, along with having to sort out the mess left with that hoary old problem -- what to do about Ireland? The futures of Northern Ireland and Scotland in the union raise.wicked problems. Everything about his past suggests that complexity is not what Boris does well or is even interested in doing at all. Hard work is not his bag. He shows every sign that his political ambitions have been exhausted by just getting there.
In short, Chook Fowler lives!
Postscript. The thoughts above relate to a book I’m currently writing, Justice and Democracy: Rescuing Our Future, to be published in late 2021 by Edward Elgar Publishing. The dance of escalating corruption and declining public trust in the basic institutions and values of democratic life represent only one set of many challenges to that future.
A useful source to follow up: Foa, R.S., Klassen, A., Slade, M., Rand, A. and R. Collins. 2020. “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy. This report integrates 25 data sets from all regions of the democratic world over periods ranging from 25 to 50 years and covers responses by four million voters.
Access at:
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/DemocracyReport2020_SJh2KCC.pdf