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The Victorian government is looking to push its new Labour Hire Licensing Bill through Parliament, starting this week. The Bill is a legislative scam pretending to do one thing, but in reality will do something else—namely, open new doors to corruption in Victoria.

The Bill is supposedly a (long overdue) response to the exposé by the ABC's Four Corners programme on 4 May 2015 about the exploitation of migrant workers on some Australian farms. What Four Corners exposed was illegal migrants, working below legal pay rates and organized through some small, illegal 'labour hire' businesses.  More...

Not one for mincing his words, ICA's Executive Director, Ken Phillips, had this to say in an urgent mass email sent out today: More...

This week, in Business Spectator, ICA Executive Director Ken Phillips wrote about a ‘mystery’ box that arrived in the post for him some years ago. It contained the true financial records of a major trade union. The records differed from the union’s publicly declared accounts. The point of Ken's article is that full transparency and disclosure should be imposed on the big superannuation funds or we could see corruption scandals in superannuation similar to those we are seeing with unions.  More...

Big business is angry that the Abbott government is proposing to make anti-competitive behaviour by them more difficult. New laws would restrict big businesses from abusing their market power. Small Business Minister Bruce Billson has hit back saying big business is talking “utter nonsense”. We agree.

Just recently, Coles had to refund $12m to 200 suppliers due to unconscionable conduct by Coles. And the competition regulator (ACCC) is finally responding to evidence of big business cartels in the construction industry. What’s odd is that unions and Labor seem be lining up with big business on this. More...

Australians tend to look down on developing countries, viewing many of them as suffering from wide-scale corruption. We think of Australia as relatively clean. We have independent authorities that root out and investigate corruption. Where corruption is found, we see it as the bad behaviour of individuals and not something that’s inbuilt into our social, legal, political, governance and business systems.

However, ICA Executive Director Ken Phillips has recently written a series articles for Business Spectator that put a different view. He argues that there’s plenty of evidence that, in Australia, we have corruption ingrained in key institutional arrangements. Our corruption is undertaken at a highly sophisticated level and is even given ‘legal’ cover. It sits under our noses but we choose to ignore it. More...