CCC commissioner John McKechnie retiring after a decade leading corruption watchdog

Australia Broadcast Center

4 hours ago

Western Australia's longest-serving corruption watchdog has announced he will step down at the end of the month, a year ahead of schedule.
John McKechnie has served as the Corruption and Crime Commissioner since April 2015, after a career including serving as the state's first director of public prosecutions and 16 years on the Supreme Court.
He described the last decade as commissioner as "particularly interesting", with the Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) saying 277 reports had been produced under his watch.
"As a born and raised Western Australian, it has been a great privilege to have been given the opportunity to serve my state over nearly 50 years," Mr McKechnie said in a statement.
"The success of the Commission is in its team and each member of that team contributes directly to the good governance of the state by maintaining a public sector and a police force of integrity or playing a part in the disruption of crime that challenges the fabric of our community."
Deputy CCC Commissioner, former Supreme Court judge Michael Corboy SC, will act as commissioner until a replacement is found.
WA Attorney-General Tony Buti thanked Mr McKechnie for his service.
"As head of the Corruption and Crime Commission, Mr McKechnie has exposed some of the biggest corruption cases in Australia's history," he said.
"His work has been undertaken without fear or favour and in the best interests of Western Australians."
One of those cases was that of former Department of Communities head Paul Whyte, who in 2021 was sentenced to 12 years in jail for masterminding what was described as Australia's single biggest case of public sector fraud.
More recently Mr McKechnie probed the extensive overseas travel of the state's ombudsman and highlighted serious misconduct risks in the way WA Labor used electorate officers.
Mr McKechnie's reappointment in 2021 was marred by controversy, with the government resorting to rewriting the law because a four-member parliamentary committee would not ratify his reappointment.
At one point, two members of the committee — which was made up of two Labor MPs, as well as one Liberal and one Green — opposed Mr McKechnie's reappointment, which he likened to the "decapitation" of the organisation.
Then-premier Mark McGowan and then-attorney-general John Quigley suggested Liberal MP Jim Chown had voted against Mr McKechnie's reappointment because of the CCC's investigations into Liberal MP Phil Edman, prompting the committee to issue a statement rejecting that idea.
A 2019 report by the CCC accused Mr Edman of misusing electoral allowances, using the taxpayer funds to pay for strippers and travel for sex.
That report included an ominous message Mr Edman sent to a businessman about the contents of a laptop, saying: "There's enough stuff on that f***ing computer to bury f***ing a lot of people".
The CCC then seized the laptop and two hard drives, but it sparked a lengthy dispute with non-government Legislative Council MPs, the watchdog and the Supreme Court over whether the computer's contents were protected by parliamentary privilege and could be viewed by the commission.
The Supreme Court ruled decisions on parliamentary privilege could only be made by parliament itself, and the impasse was resolved in 2021 when the president of the Legislative Council handed over more than half a million documents.
Two years later the commission said those documents did not reach the threshold of serious misconduct but had informed a further investigation.