Labor

SHAMED: John Cain’s little mate George Brouwer exposed as Victoria’s dodgy Ombudsman

Many political observers around Spring Street are saying this morning that Victorian Ombudsman George Brouwer has been exposed by an independent panel as an almighty fraud.

The friend of former Victorian Premier John Cain, who is paid nearly $400,000 per annum by taxpayers, has been found by an independent panel comprising a former Victorian government solicitor and a former State Services Authority chairman to have produced a report that contained conclusions based on “flimsy” evidence and without foundation.

It is a gravely concerning conclusion that will lead many to question what the Ombudsman’s office has got itself into and the kind of misconduct in which it is engaged.

THE LACHLAN McCULLOCH SCANDAL
VEXNEWS has already revealed that one of the Ombudsman’s investigators has admitted to a range of very serious – even criminal – activities in his three volumes of memoirs.

When asked about these allegations, the Ombudsman’s office refuses to comment, even threatening journalists from News Limited for daring to ask them about the issue.

DETAILED PROBE REVEALS OMBUDSMAN’S SHAME
We understand the report into the Ombudsman’s allegations about Hakki Suleyman runs to around forty pages. We’ll do our best to obtain a copy because we believe it will shed new light onto the workings of the highly secretive and controversial Ombudsman’s office. It also raises serious question about the Ombudsman’s entire report into Brimbank. If he lied about Hakki Suleyman, what else did he lie about?

The Opposition’s strategy on this has been understandable. Attack those who even slightly question the Ombudsman’s office as undermining the integrity and independence of that office. Particularly if the Ombudsman is slagging their political foes. It’s their job to score political points but it’s not the Ombudsman’s role.

For rhetorical purposes, the Liberal spokesman Robert Clark and some of his colleagues in the upper house like David Davis pretend the Ombudsman is a judge and is constrained by judicial ethics and practices. They imply that he should be above criticism and scrutiny.

Brouwer is not a judge. He’s not been a practising lawyer. He’s a former public servant, he’s a personal friend of disgraced former Victorian Premier John Cain, serving the full length of Cain’s Premiership before being bumped off by Joan Kirner. Cain and Brouwer have been sighted by VEXNEWS informants having cups of tea close to Cain’s office over the years.

Brouwer has views. An agenda. He’d like to remove the politics from politics. He and John Cain shared that view and they still held that view long after they’d both driven the state into its deepest recession since the Depression, one that makes our current troubles look like a boom. And Brouwer unmistakably uses that office to push that agenda. If he attempted to impose his political views as a judge, the Opposition would rightly be horrified, as they are horrified by some of Rob Hulls’s judicial appointments.

But he’s not a judge. He’s a law enforcer of sorts. And not a very good one. He employs ex-cops who’ve written memoirs detailing their illegal acts. He employs people who threaten journalists when they ask reasonable questions about how taxpayer money is spent. He refuses to publicly explain himself and he won’t even answer to the Parliament, shielding himself behind their failure to create a committee to oversee him.

THE OMBUDSMAN’S LIES EXPOSED EVEN BY THE AGE
Even The Age – clearly no friend of Suleyman – reports that:

■ there “was no improper conduct on the part of Mr Suleyman in respect of the Cairnlea Park Reserve lease allocation”;

■ “the evidence in respect of the Sunshine pool is very thin” and

■ “Mr Suleyman was not guilty of any improper conduct” over the Biggs Street property.

This strikes at the heart of the adverse findings against Mr Suleyman. It makes a complete nonsense of the Ombudsman’s report and the sensationalist coverage we have seen mainly on the AgeBC.

LIFE IS FULL OF IRONY
Many will find it ironic that a report that has the effect of removing Suleyman from being a JP, an unpaid role entitling the office holder to sign statutory declarations and to put the letters JP after their name, has also totally cleared him of the allegations made by the Ombudsman.

Many who read the report knew the findings to read very strangely. It seemed to a Mt Everest of Exaggeration from a slagheap of racist smears and invented scandals from a notorious Sunshine residents’ group that champions race-based conspiracy theories and obsesses about the role of people from non-Anglo background in the ALP in the western suburbs. It even quoted slab after slab of this infamous group’s website and correspondence as if its claims were evidence of some kind.

Now we have an independent panel who have looked at the evidence objectively – and without the agenda that George Brouwer brings to the table – and have found the Ombudsman’s office guilty of making unfounded allegations that reveal that office to be a shonky peddler of lies and false conclusions.

No honest judge would act this way. No decent Ombudsman should. The Parliament has the right to determine George Brouwer’s position, it should investigate this matter in a full Parliamentary hearing, calling witnesses, including the Ombudsman and his criminal investigator Lachlan McCulloch and determining how things went so horribly wrong.

If this independent panel of lawyers and senior public servants is correct, the only conclusion they can reach is that George Brouwer is unfit for the office he holds and that all those involved in the sham report into Brimbank ought be removed immediately.

Please come back later in the day to see a full copy of the report into the Ombudsman. It’s a damning indictment.

© 2009 VEXNEWS 2010©.