de WET, Mr George-Philip, Acting Chief Executive Officer, National Anti-Corruption Commission GAUNTLETT, Dr Ben, Deputy Commissioner, National Anti-Corruption Commission [by video link] KILGOUR, Ms Kylie, Acting Commissioner, National Anti-Corruption Commission LOWE, Ms Jamie, Acting Deputy Commissioner, National Anti-Corruption Commission O'MEAGHER, Mrs Rebekah, General Manager Legal, National Anti-Corruption Commission [by video link] SHAKESPEARE, Ms Penny, Acting Deputy Commissioner, National Anti-Corruption Commission [10:33] CHAIR: Welcome. I now invite you to make a short opening statement, and then we will proceed to questions Ms Kilgour : We don't have an opening statement. I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting today and pay my respects to their elders past and present, and to any First Nations people who are watching proceedings today. CHAIR: Thank you, all. As you would know, in this inquiry we are looking at matters including timeliness of referral assessment, and we've had quite a bit of information from submitters around the NACC's 90-day KPI for referrals. I understand that you have acknowledged that perhaps there's an ability to have a more nuanced system of how you set a KPI in that system to recognise complexity within that. Can you tell us if you are doing work at the moment on how you measure your referrals and whether you need a more nuanced KPI system in that space? Ms Kilgour : We're constantly having a look at how we're going with the management of referrals. I've got some further data to give you today, because I was able to give you data up until, I think, 30 June 2026 in our second submission. As of 31 August 2026, since the commencement of the commission, we've received a total of 8,326 referrals, of which 7,631—that's 91.65 per cent—have been finalised. As we said in both of our submissions, we have been really concentrating on dealing with some matters that have languished at the bottom of the pile for way too long. There's been a concerted effort to deal with the backlogs that we were reporting from 2023-2024. As of today, in terms of matters from 2023-2024, we have only 12 matters left. Those are matters that are under preliminary investigation, so there is substantial work being done in relation to documents being received and reviewed by investigators. Again, we are prioritising finalisation of those preliminary investigations as soon as we can, but those matters do take some time. With respect to 2024-25, as of 31 August we had 54 matters left that were still in the assessment and/or finalisation of the assessment phase. This week we knocked off another five of those, so we're down to 49 in that queue. I wish we had cleared all of those matters, but some of those matters have been complex matters. I think the inspector, when she gave evidence, noted that some of our referrers come back to us multiple times. We might receive the referral in one financial year, but they're still giving us more information as the assessment process goes on, so some of those matters are in that category where we're getting additional documentation. In terms of whether we have a firm idea on what our KPIs should look like—no, but we have been thinking about whether we should be reflecting the difference between the matters that come in and going through what we call the intake and triage process, which we can often resolve in 30 days or less because, generally speaking, once we look at them, they're very clearly not about a Commonwealth official. Unfortunately, some referrers send us stuff about private businesses, state and territory agencies or public officials—matters that just aren't our jurisdiction. Other matters might be about a Commonwealth public official, but, after a very short period of us having looked at the material that's been given to us, we can see that it's not going to raise a corruption issue as defined under the NACC act. We can talk some more about how I think we need to improve public education around people's understanding of the definition of corrupt conduct under the NACC Act. A lot of people use a very plain-English pub test of 'that's corrupt'. Some people send the stuff to us because they consider it's corrupt that a government department made a decision to investigate them or to not give them a social security benefit. A number of people come to us because they've been through the court system and they come to us almost asking us to review the court decisions, and obviously that's not our jurisdiction. Some of those matters we can deal with very, very quickly, and it may be worth us having a KPI that publicly reports on those matters that we are able to knock out very quickly so that we can then give better information about the matters that sit with us for longer. I think one of our submissions noted that, for some of the matters that are going through assessment, the average time is more like 200 days. We set a service standard back in 2023 that we were aiming to deal with matters that needed substantive assessment within 90 days, and I think what's become evident is that 90 days is probably not enough for a lot of the more complex matters that are coming before us now. I know that, for all the KPIs, you're probably going to ask me questions like, 'Could you change them?' And my answer to that is yes, we could. Those three KPIs got set at the outset of the commission, I think in the first year. I wasn't at the commission for a lot of its first year. I think, in the first year, the budget process didn't ask us to set KPIs. We were given 2023 and 2024 to get up and running and then start thinking about what KPIs we should have for the 2024-25 period. We put those KPIs in. They were based on scanning what the KPIs of a lot of the other integrity agencies looked like and how, at the time, we thought the business might operate. As with all new agencies, the more you do, the more insights you get about how long things really do take and how complex some matters are in comparison to others. So that idea that a few people have floated about whether we could have more graduated—maybe it's low complexity, medium complexity and high complexity. How you would define that and count that would need a bit of work. But it could be that we could step out maybe three or four different KPIs. It's interesting. I have been looking at what the other integrity commissions use, and I don't think anyone necessarily has the best—there's not one model that makes me say, 'We should just move to that model.' For us, it's more that we could do some further KPIs on low-, medium- and high-complexity matters. CHAIR: It is good to hear that you are putting a focus on dealing with the backlog. What we heard from the inspector and others was that people are frustrated by that. Ms Kilgour : Yes. And I apologise. To anyone who has had a bad experience with us, I apologise. CHAIR: Thank you. When would you expect to have work on what a revised KPI might look like finalised? Ms Kilgour : I haven't got a set date in mind. We've just done our annual report for this year. Obviously, this year, we're still stuck with the KPIs of the 2025-26 annual report. The commission has, partly, been waiting because you're doing your inquiry. We've absolutely been reading all the submissions and thinking about the ideas that people have been putting forward. It would be good to have further discussions with you about what you think might be good KPIs, and we can keep working on dealing with that. The other thing we've got to remember is that the KPI process in the Commonwealth—there's a dark art to changing KPIs. Perhaps the acting CEO can explain the time it takes. We could come up tomorrow with three new KPIs, and the process for us to actually be allowed to do that in the PBS environment would take a bit of time. CHAIR: Okay. I might move on to the broader theme of how you're communicating with referrers. You would be aware that one of the persistent themes that we have seen in submissions and heard in evidence is frustration around the way the NACC communicates with referrers. People either feel that they are not being communicated with or don't understand the information that is coming to them. In many cases, these are people who feel very vulnerable and feel, obviously, that what they are referring to the NACC is a matter of great importance to them and great consequence to their lives. They've explained to us the consequences of feeling like they are not being communicated with. They have been quite severe for some of them, in terms of mental health and other issues. I note that, in your submission, you state that the NACC is 'reviewing its strategy for engaging with referrers to identify potential enhancements to timely, consistent and respectful communications with referrers, while recognising the imperative of avoiding jeopardy to investigations and unfair damage to reputations'. How is that review progressing, and what changes are you implementing or planning to implement as a result of it? Ms Kilgour : I want to make sure I'm giving you all the work that the team are doing on this. Obviously, that issue about our not meeting our service standard of 90 days—I totally agree that we probably need to implement a process of getting back to people once we hit the end of that 90-day timeframe. We need to reach out to people and say, 'We're sorry; we haven't completed your matter,' and give them a time horizon. There is work underway to think about how we might be able to do that and whether that would just be through an automated email system where, if we get to 90 days and we haven't finished their matter, they get a little email from us that says: 'We're very sorry that we haven't met the 90 days. If you'd like further information about what's happening, we can be in contact with you.' There are a number of referrers, though, who actually say to us on their web forms that they don't have any further information for us. Sometimes I wonder about the utility of an automated system where some people might get that message and go, 'I've given you the information, and that's all I wanted to do.' So I think we need to think about models that are more bespoke and that look at who the referrer is and what kind of communication would best meet their needs. Some of it would have to be email based. Some of it could be done on the telephone, though. In certain cases, the witness liaison service, who generally work more with people who are in our investigations—and some of those are referrers who have become witnesses. Increasingly, we use those witness liaison officers with some of our referrers so we can see that what they're reporting to us has a traumatic background and/or they've told us in their communications with us that there are other things going on in their lives that mean they need a bit of extra support from the agency in their interactions with us. We will use those witness liaison officers to sometimes lead the communication with that class of referrer. It's not everybody; it's a very small number. But we are increasingly using those people to help us with making sure that we're giving those people a better understanding of the process and a better understanding of why things are taking the time that they're taking. Because those witness liaison officers are trained in social work—psychologically trained—they can often figure out with the referrer whether there are other health services or supports in their lives that they might be able to connect with and that can help them with some of the other issues they're bringing to the table that aren't issues of corrupt conduct. We're not social workers, and we're very mindful that we don't have a therapeutic relationship with referrers. That would be totally inappropriate. But, when people tell us that there are things going on in their lives, we try and make sure that they get the support that they need. CHAIR: I might pick up on the point you made about the witness liaison officers. You refer to them in your submission. I understand it's a relatively new role that you've established at the NACC. How do you determine who has access to that service? A witness, I presume, is someone who is possibly quite involved in a prosecution. Referrers—some of the people who've been coming to the committee to give evidence about their experiences—may not, in fact, be witnesses. Can I confirm that what you're saying is there is the— Ms Kilgour : There is capacity. We define 'witness' very, very broadly. It's in the submission; I won't read it out. I'm just going to take a step back and explain why we've done this. The witness liaison service that the commission uses builds on work that other anticorruption commissions have done, including IBAC, where I worked beforehand. There has been, I would say, a growing recognition across all the anticorruption commissions—I've been working in them for a while now—that, when people have interactions with us, whether they're a witness or they're a person who's under investigation, it's a very stressful experience for a lot of them and they need support. That is support with engaging with our processes, but they may also need psychological or social support outside of what we can provide to them, which is taking them through our processes in the most respectful way that we can. My understanding is that, when the NACC was first established, the witness liaison idea wasn't reflected in its original organisational design. Once the first set of people who operated the NACC started looking at that, they realised that they probably should have a witness liaison function. So, over the course of 2023, work was done to think about what it would look like and how we would resource it internally. We've had to take money from other parts of the commission's budget in order to establish this witness liaison service, but it was something that we were able to do back in 2023 and 2024. Since 2024, we've had at least one, now two. As of August 2026, we have three witness liaison officers in the commission. I have to note that we have actually loaned one of them to the Bondi royal commission for a period of time, to assist Commissioner Bell with supporting witnesses in that royal commission, but she'll be back with us shortly. In addition to the three witness liaison officers who work with us, we have a contracted service provider called Converge. Some people might know them as an employee assistance program scheme, but they also do this witness support service for a number of the commissions around the country. We have a contract with them where every witness—and remember: the definition of 'witness' is broad—who wants to access that service can access that service. It's a service that the commission funds and pays for. At the moment, the service offering is up to six sessions, and that generally is enough for most people who've been engaging with us to date, but there's no cap on it. If they needed more, we would make it available to them for more sessions. So it's kind of a two-pronged service. There's stuff that's happening with our officers, and then there's the psychological support service that Converge provides. In terms of your question about how we work out what people need, every time we serve a summons on someone or conduct a search warrant on someone's house, we will give information about the availability of the witness liaison service and our witness liaison officers will generally reach out proactively to those people and say, 'Do you need to access the Converge service at this point in time, or have you got other things in place to help you if you're having any sort of stressful reaction to the fact that we are now engaging with you?' For witnesses who are assisting the investigation, it's not as stressful an experience, but it still can be stressful to get a summons that says, 'Come to a coercive hearing and give evidence.' Like the CDPP said, a lot of people have no interactions with the criminal justice system or the justice system more broadly and certainly not with integrity investigations in their lives. So people can have a stress reaction to the fact that they're even just assisting us. The witness liaison officers will talk to each of those people who have that summons about how best they can support them. For some people it's just: 'I just need you to tell me: When I come to the hearing room, where am I going to sit? Will there be breaks? Can I have a legal representative with me? What will happen if I can't remember something?' For some people it's just that. Other people are definitely very stressed by the fact that they're being summonsed, particularly if they're the person of interest, and it may be that we have to encourage them to use the Converge service and encourage them to go and see their doctor if they need to get medical support with the issues that are arising for them. And so the witness liaison officer will provide that sort of advice about making sure you take care of yourself and get the supports that you need. There will be touchpoints as well. There's the hearing, which I would say is probably the most stressful bit of engaging with us. Investigations go for a long time, so there can be a period of time where we are considering all of the evidence that we've heard, we're still looking at documents and we're still interviewing other people apart from the person that's just appeared from appeared before us. The witness liaison officers are also having regular contact with people along the way to keep them updated if they're wondering—'I did my hearing in April, and now it's September and I haven't heard from you.' The witness liaison officer will be a touchpoint, particularly once we enter into what we call the procedural fairness process. That is when we're at the stage where we've finished the investigation, we think we're going to be able to conclude it with findings of corrupt conduct and we'll be sending out the written procedural fairness packages for people to make submissions back. The witness liaison officer will also contact people to let them know that that procedural fairness process is coming, because, again, getting those notices from us where we are about to make findings of serious corrupt conduct against you can be a very confronting and stressful experience. Maybe I can give this to the committee afterwards, because I don't think we put it in our submission. We have basically a placemat of the key touchpoints at which we should be reaching out to people when they're in the investigation pipeline, and the witness liaison service is often the front door for those key touchpoints. CHAIR: Thank you. Yes, it would be helpful if you could provide that. It's useful to have that overview. You have said there that the most stressful part of engaging with the NACC is during a hearing. I don't necessarily dispute that, but we are hearing from people who actually in many cases have not got to that hearing stage and are feeling very stressed and traumatised by their interactions with the NACC. In terms of your resourcing, it would seem to me that three staff—two with one on loan to the royal commission—is a relatively small number given the number of referrals that you do get made and work that you have underway. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand from previous work we've done with you around the annual report that you didn't spend all your budget last financial year and you still had FTE available to allocate. Is there something the committee should know there about your ability to allocate resources to this function? Ms Kilgour : It's not so much that we still had budget to allocate. With all budgets, you set your budget and you start recruiting. You think you're going to get to a certain number of staff by the end of the year, and we haven't always achieved that. I'll defer to the acting CEO to explain this to you better, because he's the guru on Commonwealth budgeting processes. I'm not. I think it has been one of the difficulties for the commission in its first couple of years of operation. We've projected budget in a particular way. We've been aiming to hit our staff numbers in particular allocations between—we put this in our first submission—how many investigators we're going to have, how many people in assessments we're going have, how many people are we're going to have in corporate, how many people we're going to have in legal and how many people we're going to have in CPE. We allocate those budgets and we're working towards meeting those, but we haven't always ended up doing that, partly because we've had staff attrition. But I'll pass to the acting CEO, and he can explain a bit more about the budget position at the moment. Mr de Wet : The characterisation that you referred to was correct. In the first three years of operations, we did realise an underspend. As Ms Kilgour alluded to, one of the things that have evolved along with our maturity is our ability to forecast more accurately and have an understanding of what that budget position is. The FTE position, or the underspend that was realised at the end of every year, was, again as Ms Kilgour alluded to, a result of attrition, not the fact that at the start of a financial year we had projected that we would be fully resourced to our approved ASL of 266. The additional point Ms Kilgour made earlier was that, within that 266 upon the establishment of the commission, the witness liaison function was not an active component or consideration within that funding. And so already within our existing resources we've made a prioritisation call to free up three positions within the 266 to provide funding to. But in each year, the committee would appreciate because the commission is not unique in this, we need to balance an ASL framework that we need to operate within alongside the financial framework, and there are many variables that occur in each year that result in an underspend or overspend position. CHAIR: Okay. I don't want to take away from your complexities of managing all of that, but can you tell the committee if you are looking at increasing the resourcing in this area? Do you have the budget and staff allocation you would need to do so? Ms Kilgour : We've just put one extra person on. They only just came on in August 2026. I appreciate what you're saying about it being a small number. Yes, it is a small number. We can keep looking at that. At the minute, that's the allocation that's in the budget going forward for 2026-27, isn't it? Mr de Wet : Yes. Ms Kilgour : But it may be that we need to keep revising that. The challenge then is where you are taking it from. Am I taking it out of the assessments area? Am I taking it from the legal area? Am I taking it from the CPE area? I'm not saying, no, we can't do that, but that's just the internal debate that you have to have about where you are getting it from. I think that, if you spoke to any integrity commission across the land, they would say that, with more, you would do more. Budgets are constrained across all public sectors at the moment, and so we're mindful about allocating our resources within the constraints that we have to work in, which is a $60 million budget. CHAIR: I might move on because I know other members will have questions. I want to go back to one of the things you talked about earlier, Acting Commissioner, with the pub test and public understanding of the NACC. It does seem to me that there is not a high degree of awareness in the public of the NACC and what you are doing. I think a lot of the frustration we are receiving as a committee comes from people who have engaged with the NACC in good faith but, in some cases—not all—may not have had the right information about the NACC's role and what you are doing more broadly. I'm interested in how you are looking at lifting public understanding and public education of your role and the broader corruption-prevention work you're doing. It seems to me very much at the moment that people do not see evidence of what the NACC is doing, and in some cases they also think the NACC is a different body to what it is. Ms Kilgour : Honestly, that's not unusual for anticorruption commissions. All anticorruption commissions have this challenge of generating public understanding about their jurisdictions, so we're not alone in that. But I agree that we need to do better at educating the community about what is 'corrupt conduct' under the NACC Act. In the last two months we did an investigation, which I'll refer to as Op Lota, up in Queensland, which involved a Chinese national trying to bribe a public official in the Clean Energy Council with respect to giving that person $20,000 in a tin of tea to try and get that public official to do something for the company that that Chinese national represented. We did a joint investigation between us and—I think QPol and the AFP would have assisted us. We arrested that person very quickly because they were about to leave the country. It wasn't a matter where we were going to do a full corruption investigation—and it was very clear criminality, so we were able to very quickly arrest that person. Unlike in previous operations where that sort of activity has gone on, we proactively put out a media release at the time of the arrest and again at the time of the conviction, about a couple of weeks later. I was very clear in explaining in that media release how the conduct by that person was characterised as 'corrupt conduct' under the NACC Act. There was also the Op Esk case that the CDPP referred to this morning, of an ATO officer who we arrested—not last week; I think it was the week before, but I could be wrong about that—for misuse of information, which is a form of corrupt conduct under the NACC Act. During the course of that investigation, we discovered child sex abuse material on devices; he's been charged with those offences as well. Again, we proactively put out a media release at the time of the arrest where I articulated how this is corrupt conduct but also a criminal offence. I think it's through those particular cases where we can ground it in, 'If people do this kind of thing, that's corrupt conduct.' That's a more effective tool for explaining things to general members of the public. If I sit there and give them a lecture about what section 8 of the NACC Act says about the definition of 'corrupt conduct', most people's eyes glaze over. I did, however, do the Westminster Tradition podcast after Operation Myrtleford, where I spent a lot of time explaining what the corrupt conduct in Operation Myrtleford was and wasn't. On, I think, 13 July, I also did a podcast with the Centre for Public Integrity, which was an hour-long discussion about our work and particularly the definition of 'corrupt conduct'. I appreciate those podcasts go to a very particular section of the public who are more educated about or more interested in what anticorruption commissions do, so you can get into a level of technical detail in those forums. For the average person, they just want to know: are we on the job, are we picking up the people who are engaging in corrupt conduct and are we getting consequences for those people? That's my thinking about the things we need to do more of. We have a website. The website has heaps of material on it. We go to pretty definite efforts to make it as plain English as possible, but we are in the process of rewriting some sections because we have had feedback that people are still finding some of what we thought were simple explanations a bit dense—so there is a rewrite of the website going on. We need to do broader work in changing what the website looks like. The website was done in 2023 as a very quick piece of work—I would describe it as 'minimum viable product'—to get the commission out there with a website, as often happens with new agencies. During the time I was at IBAC, we made a major change to what the IBAC website looks like, and I think the IBAC website, of all the anticorruption commissions, is now one of the better ones. It uses a lot of animations, a lot of simple tiles and a lot of simple videos that are just 'watch this thing for two minutes' and explain what corruption risks are in procurement: 'Watch this video for two minutes. It talks about why misuse of official information is corrupt conduct.' We need to go on that journey to have resources like that available. CHAIR: It's good to hear that you are looking very seriously at this, because, from the evidence we've had, there seems to be a huge gap. I agree that the public is looking for concrete examples of the work you do. Are you formalising this work through a public engagement and media strategy, and are you considering drawing from other public agencies? I'm thinking particularly of something like the AEC, who, while not a corruption commission, have a very strong integrity role in our system and, as you would have noticed, have over recent years gone out of their way to use public communications to very clearly explain their role and dispel myths, and, in doing so, build a lot of trust in them as an institution. Ms Kilgour : In the last two months, we've taken a different approach to communicating with people about concrete examples of our work, and there's more of that that we could be doing. We haven't formalised it in a strategy per se, but there have been general conversations about, 'We need to get better at this; we're not doing well enough in explaining what we do and why we do it.' That's one of the things I've been focusing on while I've been the acting commissioner. I'm conscious I'm the acting commissioner and we're waiting for a new commissioner. When we get a new commissioner, I will be advising them strongly that we need to keep going on that journey of lifting our game in the public communication space. CHAIR: You have communication staff, though, don't you? Ms Kilgour : Yes, we have communication staff. We put out weekly stats. We do a monthly— CHAIR: I'm just surprised you don't have a formalised strategy for them to work to. Ms Kilgour : We have an internal strategy about this. I thought you were asking if I had something I could put out publicly to say, 'This is the approach that we're taking.' We have internal working documents about the tone that we try and take when we do and don't say something. I think some of the submissions suggested we need to make more public statements about our approach. I don't have a public statement I can point to. Ms Lowe : If I can add to the acting commissioner's answer: we're going through a process at the moment of developing a more formal national engagement strategy. One existed for internal purposes during that three-year establishment phase, but we're now, based on those three years of experience, using that to inform a national engagement strategy that will have a public facing element so that we can be transparent about what we're trying to achieve and how we'll go about doing that. Ms Kilgour : One of the other things to mention is that, in the initial stages of the commission, a lot of the focus of the communication has been with Commonwealth public officials. If you look at all the CPE engagement work, a lot of it has been very much going out to different agencies and making sure they understand the jurisdiction. That's possibly why there hasn't been so much public-facing work, because the thinking was that we needed to get the Commonwealth public officials to understand what the NACC is, what the definition of 'corrupt conduct' is, when they have to report matters to us. That's where a lot of the CPE effort and a lot of the comms effort has gone to date. CHAIR: Deputy Chair. Dr HAINES: Thank you, everyone, for your appearance today, and thank you for your submission. In your submission, you state that the commission has finalised 31 investigations. Can you tell me about the different ways in which investigations are finalised. Ms Kilgour : Yes. There are a few different ways that investigations get finalised. Some of them will get discontinued. We call them 'finalised' when we talk in plain English. What will happen is that, in a number of our investigations, we get to a point where we've looked at all the documents, we've interviewed all the relevant people and we've probably even conducted some hearings to get compelled evidence from people, and at the conclusion of that process we might come to the opinion that we're not going to be able to sustain any kind of corrupt-conduct finding. It might be that there's misconduct there and we need to refer that off to the APSC or an employer or something for action. But, once we get to the point where we're no longer going to be able to sustain a corrupt-conduct finding, particularly not a serious or systemic corrupt-conduct finding, we're not in jurisdiction anymore. So what we have to do is reconsider the matter under section 41(5) of the NACC Act and make a decision about what we're going to do with it. Like I said, sometimes the decision is to refer it for action by someone else. For a number of the matters, the decision is just to take no further action, because what we've done is started an investigation thinking that someone had engaged in serious or systemic corrupt conduct, we've got two years into an investigation and it hasn't checked out. That's the case with investigations—the police have the same problem. All the integrity agencies have that issue. Not every investigation that you start will finish with a decision of corrupt conduct. Those matters technically, under the act, get discontinued by virtue of a reconsideration under section 41 and a decision to take no further action under section 41(6). For other cases—for example, the three section 149 reports that have been published by the commission to date—you get to the point in the investigation where you are satisfied that you think you can make a finding of serious or systemic corrupt conduct and you engage in the procedural fairness requirements under the act. As you're doing that, you're writing the section 149 report that has to, under the act, be conveyed to the Attorney-General, the head of the agency and possibly other ministers if they're responsible for the people that were involved. Then, under the act, you have to turn your mind to 'Is it in the public interest for us to publish this report?' Now, for the three that we've completed so far, we determined that it was in the public interest to report. That's Operation Kingscliff, Operation Myrtleford and Operation Pelican. So those matters get finalised by virtue of having gone through what I'll just call the section 149 process. Dr HAINES: That's the difference, then, between a finalisation and a completion? Ms Kilgour : Yes. Well— Dr HAINES: Under section 149, a completion must have a report. Ms Kilgour : Yes. So they're all finalised, but they go on two pathways. They go on a pathway of discontinuance or a pathway of completion pursuant to section 149 of the NACC Act. It's a bit technical, and it's confusing even for us sometimes—the act and how it all fits together. Dr HAINES: If you get to a point—and I understand the example you gave that this happens to the police as well—even after a couple of years of investigation, that you're not going to make a finding, and it's finalised, do you have internal briefing notes? How is that finalised within? Ms Kilgour : The investigators will write up a document that outlines 'these are all things that we did, this is the methodology that we adopted, these are all the people we spoke to, this is the evidence that we got', and it will conclude with a summary saying, 'Despite all of this, we don't consider that this is going to amount to corrupt conduct under the NACC Act,' and there may be legal advice given on that as well, because sometimes it can be tricky because of jurisdictional considerations and legal considerations that come into that. So, yes, there is an internal document that says, 'We should discontinue this matter under section 41(5) and 41(6) because it's not going to be corrupt conduct.' Dr HAINES: What capacity do you have to share that information with a referrer? Ms Kilgour : We will write outcome letters. We don't have to. Under the act, it's a 'may' provision; it's not a 'must'. We will generally, both for referrers and for persons of interest, when we get to the point where an investigation has concluded and if it has concluded through that discontinuance process—we can write them an outcome letter, and we have written outcome letters, where we'll say, 'We've looked at this, but, sorry, we're finalising it because we're not taking any further action.' I appreciate there was an article in the paper, which you're probably alluding to, about how, unfortunately, in the drafting of that letter, a mistake was made. We've apologised for that mistake, and I apologise again for the confusion that was caused. It was a mistake. It was an honest mistake by the people who were drafting that. We have had a conversation about how we need to be clearer with referrers about when we say we've finalised a matter because we're discontinuing it. I think we could have done better in that case explaining to that referrer why what that referrer had sent to us did not amount to corrupt conduct. That matter is with the inspector, so I'm also mindful that she's got a process that she's now running with us around consideration of a couple of issues. I don't want to dwell on that too much more, but absolutely I recognise that that was an unfortunate error. Dr HAINES: Given that there is confusion, even internally, about completion and finalisation and that completion is discussed under the NACC Act, do you think there need to be changes in the NACC Act to make this clearer? Ms Kilgour : I haven't looked at it through that statutory review lens, because I'm mindful that we've got the statutory review coming up in 2028. It may be one of the things that needs to go on the list, to think about how we do that. Particularly because of the issue that arose in that matter that I'm referring to, we have done some internal guidance and clarification for people about needing to be really clear about which pathway they've taken a matter on. What I would say is the internal decision-making documentation in that matter is very clear that was the pathway, the section 145 reconsideration pathway. The outcome correspondence was not clear enough. Dr HAINES: Notwithstanding that the inspector is looking at the particular case that you referred to and that was reported on in the Saturday Paper, reporting back to referrers is an area of distress and frustration that we hear about as a committee. In circumstances where there is an investigation that's finalised rather than completed—and there are several of them, I have no doubt—do you think you could do better? Is there another way that you could go, beyond just a letter to say, 'This is finished'? Ms Kilgour : Sometimes there is, but it won't be in public. There might be communication with the referrer where they have a meeting with us, and we explain the decision. That can happen. We are careful about what we write in correspondence, particularly for investigations that are discontinued because they don't amount to corrupt conduct, because we have to be mindful of people's privacy and the reputational damage that can be done. Dr HAINES: Of course. Ms Kilgour : Once we give that letter to a referrer, we don't have control over how that referrer is going to use that letter, so we may be constrained in the written documentation that we give to a referrer. But absolutely there are some cases where we have sat down with referrers and had a meeting where we've gone through the explanation privately so that they can understand more about our reasoning. Dr HAINES: In some investigations, you may be engaged for a couple of years, as you indicated. You gather evidence and exercise your various powers under the act, and then the investigation is discontinued because the evidence doesn't show corruption. Is that materially different to doing an investigation and finding corrupt conduct? Is there a difference between corrupt conduct and corruption? Ms Kilgour : We only make findings of corrupt conduct under the NACC Act. People use 'corruption'—and, again, I think the language in the act sometimes lends to some lack of clarity. We talk about 'corruption issues' when really a corruption issue is: has someone engaged in corrupt conduct under the NACC Act? Dr HAINES: Indeed. Ms Kilgour : I wasn't part of the drafting of that legislation. It may be another thing that we could have a think about: do we just need to be clearer with people about always talking about 'corrupt conduct'? I drive my staff a bit mad because I'm constantly saying, 'Don't say 'corruption'; say 'corrupt conduct.' We need to be really clear that that's what we're doing. 'Corruption' has a plain English meaning, and people are getting very confused about what is the difference. Dr HAINES: I think that is something that would be very useful to look at in the review. In terms of reports under section 149 of the act, how many of those have been shared with referrers? Ms Kilgour : Well, they're all public. Dr HAINES: So they're shared only publicly? Do they get a separate report? Do you write to them and give it to them? Ms Kilgour : We will write to them and say, 'Here's the report,' I believe. But, for example, if I think about Operation Myrtleford, I didn't write to Catherine Holmes to give her an outcome report, because she was no longer in the royal commission role. If I think about, say, the Western Sydney Airport case, which is Operation Pelican, yes, we wrote correspondence to the company—I'll call them 'the whistleblower company'—who originally reported that solicitation of a bribe. We informed them ahead of us publishing. Because we consulted with them along the way under section 149, procedural fairness process, they were consulted about the drafting of the report. Then, when we finalised it, we did send them a copy for the record. But, again, it was publicly available. And for Operation Kingscliff, yes, we would have communicated with the referrer in that matter as well. Dr HAINES: Would you agree that there is something of a gap between what becomes publicly available under section 149 of the act and what's not publicly available when an investigation is finalised rather than completed— Ms Kilgour : Yes. Dr HAINES: and that people who've referred have invested so much over what is often a long period of time and the amount of information they receive at the conclusion of that is often unsatisfying? Ms Kilgour : Yes, I appreciate that because I think some people believe we should have found corrupt conduct. Dr HAINES: Even notwithstanding a finding of corrupt conduct or otherwise and that you can't prejudice the people who are involved in that case, would you agree that some more detail could be looked at by the commission? Ms Kilgour : Absolutely. In every case, you've got to think about it. If there are examples that people want to point me to where you don't think we gave people enough information— Dr HAINES: The Saturday Paper article was, perhaps, the one that comes to mind most clearly to me. Ms Kilgour : Yes. I know that the people who drafted that letter, notwithstanding the mistake, did put information in there about what we did find and what we didn't find, so there was information provided. Again, I'm a bit constrained in what I'm going to say because the inspector's looking at it. Dr HAINES: Of course; I appreciate that. I've noticed in your outward communications since July that there have been some changes on your website. I noticed that 'fast facts' are now in the commission's monthly updates. Was that your initiative? Ms Kilgour : I'm not going to claim personal responsibility for it. We're a team, so I think we've all been reflecting about this. Sometimes, yes, I've got bright ideas, but there are a lot of other people in the commission who have good ideas, and we try and harness those good ideas where we think they're going to make us a better agency. Dr HAINES: Good. I think you've said that there'll be other improvements that we can look forward to seeing on the website in that public-facing— Ms Kilgour : Yes. There's a rewrite under way. Jamie and I have just pretty much cleared all the papers, I think, so there's a rewrite coming. I think they had us on a deadline of 30 September for us to do our approvals, and then the team will be doing the refreshes of the pages. I think we've been refreshing a few pages as we've been going, but, like I said, we're not finished yet. Dr HAINES: Is there anything in particular that you could point us to that may assist the public in getting a better understanding of where you're up to with investigations, how many you've got on foot and your progress? Ms Kilgour : The fast facts are the weekly update about how many investigations we have got under way. And, if people do read them every week, they'll see numbers are going up and down a little bit. We are finalising a few matters. We're up to 12 convictions now and we've got five matters before the court. So we are putting that out there on a weekly basis. I appreciate there are some suggestions that we need to provide more of, say, 'This investigation is up to this stage.' I'd echo what Mr Day said about having to be really careful about what we say about where investigations are up to. I appreciate there can be some matters, again, where maybe it is in the public interest. Say, for example, the Victorian royal commission into 'building bad' makes referrals to us, and we stand up an investigation as a result of that. That may be a matter where it's in the public interest for us to announce that we are doing that. So there will be some matters, I think, as we go along where we may take a different approach about saying, 'We are commencing this investigation.' But I often find, once we've commenced an investigation, we have to go dark for a period of time, because—for some investigations in particular—the less we say, the more successful our investigation is going to be. We've always got to be mindful about people colluding, destroying evidence or getting up to other stuff once they know that we're coming their way. Dr HAINES: I understand. Thank you. CHAIR: I've got Senator Shoebridge and then Senator Darmanin. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Thanks, everyone, for your attendance today. Mr de Wet, what's your substantive role? Mr de Wet : Mine is general manager of enabling services with the commission. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: What is that and what does that mean? Mr de Wet : I look after all corporate and enabling functions for the commission. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Okay. And you're not normally the acting CEO. Are you the 'acting acting CEO'? Ms Kilgour : No, that's not right. Can I just— Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I thought we were going to have Mr Ratcliffe as the acting CEO. Ms Kilgour : No. What happens is we circulate. As part of professional development for all of our general managers, the acting CEO role gets rotated. Peter Ratcliffe was the acting CEO last year, I think. He is off on sick leave at the moment, but he wasn't the acting CEO anyway. He's in his general manager job, and Mr de Wet has been appointed the acting CEO for a month while Mr Reed is on leave. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: So Mr Reed is on leave. How long have you been the acting CEO, Mr de Wet? Mr de Wet : Since 10 September—eight days. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Was there an acting CEO before then, or was it Mr Reed? Ms Kilgour : No, Mr Reed's been in the position. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: He went on leave on the 10th. Ms Kilgour : Yes. It was a period of planned leave that was scheduled a long time ago. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I'm just trying to work out who's who. Ms Kilgour : Yes, sorry. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: You're the acting commissioner? Ms Kilgour : I am the acting commissioner. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: How many other senior acting roles are there in the NACC? Ms Kilgour : We have two acting deputy commissioners and, I believe, the general manager of the assessments area, which we call the evaluation branch. That is an acting position as well. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: So we have an acting CEO, an acting commissioner, two acting deputies and an acting senior manager. Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Of the senior management team, who's in their—I think we have Deputy Commissioner Gauntlett in his substantive role. Ms Kilgour : Correct. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Who else in that senior management team is in their actual substantive role? Ms Kilgour : Rebekah O'Meagher, who's on the call today, is the substantive general manager of legal. Mr Peter Ratcliffe is in his substantive position, which is general manager of ops capabilities. Like I said, he's on sick leave, but he'll be back at work next week. I'm trying to remember everybody else. Mr de Wet : The general manager of operations is in his substantive position as well. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: So it's still fewer than half who are in their substantive positions. More than half are in acting roles. Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: That speaks to an organisation in a bit of a mess, doesn't it? Your two most senior roles, your CEO and the commissioner, are both acting. Your deputy commissioners are all acting. It must be—the public would see an organisation in a bit of trouble, wouldn't they? Would they be fair to see that? Ms Kilgour : I think that's an opinion. People can have different opinions about us. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: But I'm asking you— Ms Kilgour : I appreciate that. Setting aside Mr de Wet, because he's just acting for a month while Mr Reed is on a period of leave—we all take leave. People have to take their leave, and people have to act when people take their leave. Yes, the former commissioner resigned on 6 July. Nicole Rose resigned on 6 July as well, so we're in a situation where someone had to be the acting commissioner. Instead of me being the acting commissioner and us not filling my position, the government decided to put two acting deputies on. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: To be honest, Ms Kilgour, I think you're proving my point. It's an organisation in a bit of a mess, isn't it? Have you been given a timeframe for when you're likely to have a commissioner appointed? Ms Kilgour : You'd need to talk to the government about the selection process. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I'm asking if you've been given a timeframe. Ms Kilgour : I haven't been given a definite timeframe, no. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: You say you haven't been given a definite timeframe. Have you been given an indicative timeframe? Ms Kilgour : I haven't been given an indicative timeframe either at this stage, no. The process is underway. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: So when you said you hadn't been given a definite timeframe, did you actually mean to say you haven't been given any timeframe? Ms Kilgour : No. Our acting arrangements at the minute are to 6 October 2026. I think that was made public when the appointments were made. I'm waiting on advice about how the selection process is going. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Have you been asked if you would accept an extension after 6 October, which is quite soon? Ms Kilgour : When I was first asked to act in the role, I was asked whether I would be prepared to keep acting for as long as the selection process takes, and I said yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Alright. The Chair asked you a series of questions about your communication with people who have referred matters to you, and I think the Chair's characterisation of the evidence we've had is accurate. There's a raft of complaints about the lack of any meaningful response that comes from your organisation. If I was hearing your evidence correctly, you don't have any actual concrete plans to try and fix that. You're considering things. You're potentially waiting for this committee's report. You're talking amongst yourselves. But there don't seem to be any actual concrete plans to fix that, or did I miss something? Ms Kilgour : We do have contact with referrers. We do have mechanisms at the minute where, when people make their referral, they get an acknowledgement from us. If they tell us in their referral that they've got further information to provide to us, we will be in touch with them to get that further information. If they— Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Sorry, Ms Kilgour. I'm not asking about the current system. If the evidence we've got is accurate and reflective, the current system is not producing what I would call user satisfaction. My question isn't asking you to repeat what the current system is. We've heard evidence about that. My question was quite different. Do you want me to rephrase it, or do you understand it? Ms Kilgour : No, it's fine. I appreciate that, but I was just trying to say it's not that we don't talk to referrers. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I come back to: that wasn't my question. Ms Kilgour : Like I said, we are having a think particularly about those matters where we go past the 90-day service standard and whether there is a more automatic process for us to get in contact with people and talk to them. For us to do that, we would have to make a few system changes in our internal processes, and that is actively under consideration. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: 'Think about', 'Going to have to'—all of this is the future imperfect tense. Sorry, I did grammar in the eighties. I could be wrong on that. But it's all something that may happen in the future. My question was: are there any actual concrete plans? It seems to me the answer is no. Would that be— Ms Kilgour : There's work under way to improve the way that we are having ongoing contact with referrers. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: But, if I heard you correctly, you're contemplating some kind of automated response after 90 days, you're concerned that the automated response may not be particularly accurate and may not be tailored to people's concerns, and therefore you haven't done it? Or did I, again, misunderstand your evidence? Ms Kilgour : I was saying that there has been a suggestion that we could do an automated email at the 90-day point. My concern is that, for some people, that might not be appropriate, so we are considering whether you'd do that for every referral or whether you'd only do it for a particular class of referrers. For other referrers, it may be that we have to do more bespoke communication and updates. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I don't run a $60 million plus organisation. You have a $60 million plus organisation. Surely you could do something more than an automated referral after 90 days. You could maybe generate a standard referral and then employ somebody to look at the case, look at the referral and actually craft it so it's meaningful to whoever has done the referral. Are you considering doing that? Ms Kilgour : Yes. That's what we're considering doing. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Why didn't you— Ms Kilgour : That's why I was saying we are working on a number of ideas about how to improve in response to some of the feedback that you've received through your inquiry. Can we do this stuff better? We have a current process where, like I said, on a case-by-case basis we have contact with referrers, but we know that for some matters, we're not meeting the 90-day timeframe and we need to intervene, particularly at that point, I think to say: 'We haven't met the service standard. We apologise for that. This is what's going to happen now.' Senator SHOEBRIDGE: You have three staff to help people who are having issues with the stresses of being caught up in the NACC. Is that right, three people? Ms Kilgour : That's the witness liaison service, but there are about 40 officers in the assessment area. Between the intake area and the assessments people, they may also be contacting referrers to talk to them about what's happening with their referral. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Sorry. You've got people dealing with intake issues, and their job is to get evidence and understand what the complaint is and then refer it through the system? Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Are they trained to do the kind of work that the witness assistance service people do? Ms Kilgour : Like I said, the witness liaison service people are social work and psychosocial trained. They get reserved for the most traumatised people that come before us. All of our intake and assessment officers as well as the investigators have all done mental health awareness training, and we'll be doing more training with people about how to communicate effectively with people who come before us. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: So what's the threshold for someone getting the benefit of—you say you have three, but you've got one out on loan—a witness liaison service officer? I can't tell you how many whistleblowers I've spoken to in my career. There can be people who are very robust and can manage the stress, but there's a whole raft for whom, if they're taking on the tax department or the defence department or another powerful government agency, it's incredibly distressing. They're worried about losing their career. They have troubles with their families. A fair chunk of whistleblowers have that kind of stress. What's the threshold for that class of referrer getting access to your one of your two currently working witness liaison service? Ms Kilgour : Anyone who's a witness before us—whistleblowers will be witnesses before us—will be getting a service from the witness liaison officer, and it will be crafted. Like you said, some people are robust and don't want too much. Some people they need a lot of support, and so whistleblowers who come before us who do need support are given them support through that witness liaison service. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: You said everyone gets access. Ms Kilgour : Everyone who's a witness before the commission gets the service offering. Referrers are a little bit different because a lot of those referrers just send us a web form which may be their only communication with us. They don't need the witness liaison service. But there will be some referrers who aren't witnesses in an investigation per se. They're at the start of the process and they might need a witness liaison service to support them with— Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Absolutely. Ms Kilgour : talking about the impact of the matter on them and how they want us to communicate with them. We will do that on a case-by-case basis. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: To be clear, that's what I'm asking you about. I'm asking you about the people who are on the hook, waiting two years for you to get around to finalise their complaint. I'm not asking about the tiny subset of witnesses in an actual hearing. I might ask you on notice to actually tell us how many such witnesses there have been. Do you know how many witnesses you've actually had in hearings? Are we talking about a dozen, two dozen, 50? Ms Kilgour : I'd have to take it on notice because I don't have the number in my head for over the three-year period. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: It's a tiny subset. Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: It's a tiny subset. I'm not asking you about that tiny subset. I'm asking you about the hundreds of people who have been on the hook, waiting forever for you to respond to their complaint, stressed at work, wondering if blowing the whistle is going to have them lose their job. Maybe they've already lost their job. They're the people I'm asking you about. It seems to me they get the scraps left over from currently two witness liaison officers whose primary work is to help witnesses. Is that right? Ms Kilgour : No, I don't think that's a fair characterisation of what's happened. Sorry. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: How am I wrong? Is it not the scraps left over, which is how you described it? You said that their primary role is to help witnesses and then they provide a sort of ad hoc occasional help with others. Ms Kilgour : I think what I'm trying to explain is that for many, many referrers who come to us, they don't need that level of witness liaison support. Just talking to one of our assessment officers might be enough for them to engage with us, give us the information and get updates about what's going on. There are a small number of people who have, in our interactions with them, expressed distress, trauma and concern at those moments, and it's only been a small number. Maybe we've missed some people who feel that way, but, when it comes to our attention that someone needs that extra support from the witness liaison service, they will get that extra support. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: It's a very different issue, isn't it? Being in the workplace, perhaps with your boss who you've made a corruption allegation against, and continuing to go to work—that is a very different scenario to somebody who is stressed about being called before a NACC hearing. They're very different things, aren't they? Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: And yet you've got the same two people, two people out of a $60 million budget, dealing with those two cohorts when, I would imagine, they require very different skill sets. Why aren't you considering actually resourcing some well qualified good people who can help all the people who have been talking to us about how stressful it is waiting for a response, about how stressful it is whistleblowing and how stressful it is to be getting zero response from the corruption commission? Why haven't you got anyone whose primary job is to actually help those people? Ms Kilgour : What I would say is that those people, generally speaking, will be talking to our assessments area. I agree that there are some cases where we have dropped the ball and we haven't done a good enough job of talking to those people. But, where they are in contact with us and they do display the need for the witness liaison service, that's the resourcing that we've got at the minute. I'm not saying that's the answer or the final position. We always have to keep thinking about: how do we improve? Do we need to put more witness liaison services into the referral space? I appreciate what you're saying about how some people have not had a good service from us. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Did you hear the evidence from the DPP about how much of their case load comes from the NACC? Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: It's either one or two in 1,526 prosecutions—or maybe it's nought. But it's somewhere between nought, one and two in any given year of their 1,500-plus successful prosecutions coming from the NACC. Did you hear that evidence? Ms Kilgour : Yes—so far. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Are you telling us you've got a surge of prosecutions ready to go? Ms Kilgour : No, we don't. We've got 33 corruption investigations underway at the moment. Some of those will possibly resolve via the prosecution route. We just did Operation Esk last week and Operation Lota, which I referred to, a couple of weeks ago. Yes, the numbers are small, but that's again across all the anticorruption commissions. The number of prosecutions that you get out of your corruption investigations is generally a subset of how many corruption investigations that you undertake. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: So on average you're getting one successful prosecution a year through the Commonwealth DPP. That's the average, isn't it? Ms Kilgour : In the first three years of the operation of the commission, that's been the number of cases that have warranted that process. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: In terms of actual criminal penalties, do you know what criminal penalties have been affected? It's only three cases. You must know what they are. What were they? Ms Kilgour : The Western Sydney Airport prosecution, Operation Pelican, will be one of them. He was sentenced in New South Wales for criminal offences. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment, but the magistrate converted it to community corrections. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: One community correction. Ms Kilgour : Operation Lota, which is the Queensland case that I talked about with the bribery, was sentenced up in Queensland for criminal offences. He had been remanded in custody for about 26 days by the time he went before the magistrate. He pled guilty. I'll take that one on notice because I think she gave him time served because he was prepared to leave the country immediately. They're the two that I can think off the top of my head. Some of the others I can't remember off the top of my head, but I can get you a full list. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: There have only been three successful prosecutions through the Commonwealth DPP. I will come to the Queensland one in a second. That was a prosecution by the Queensland Police Service is my understanding. Ms Kilgour : We always have to hand the prosecutions off to law enforcement. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Was it the DPP? Was it a Commonwealth DPP matter? Ms Kilgour : No. We were able to do that with Queensland Police, so it was dealt with in the Queensland system. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: We'll come to that in a second. I'm asking you about the three. You've only had three successful prosecutions with the Commonwealth DPP in three years, and you can't even remember them. How do you expect the public to have any faith in you? You're the acting commissioner. We've got the acting CEO. You can't even remember what they were. Ms Kilgour : I might have them here in the briefing book. I just don't have all three of them. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: There are only three. Ms Kilgour : I know. I'm sorry. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: What were they? CHAIR: Senator, I think we've established this. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: They might be there in the briefing book. CHAIR: You can put that one on notice, and we can move on. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: They might be there in the briefing book. Why don't we wait and see? Ms Kilgour : How about, in the interest of time, I take it on notice and give you a response. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: You talk about public confidence. This is why. No-one can see your work. You can't even remember your work. That's why the public has no confidence in you. It's not going on the wrong podcast. It's that you're doing nothing. That's the problem, isn't it? You're doing nothing. Senator DARMANIN: I don't think that's the evidence that we've heard, Senator Shoebridge. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I'm asking you to correct me if I'm wrong. They were so minimal, you can't even remember what they were. Ms Kilgour : No, I'm sorry. I can't at this exact moment. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Going to the Queensland one, you cited that as a case—but that was a Queensland police prosecution. Ms Kilgour : No, it was a joint investigation between us and Queensland police. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Between you, the AFP and the Queensland police, but it was Queensland police prosecutors running the case in the Queensland Magistrates Court. Ms Kilgour : Because that was a quick way to deal with the matter because he was about to flee the country. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: It was Queensland police who led the investigation with a reference to you and a reference to the AFP. We should say thank you to the Queensland Police Service, not the NACC, for that, shouldn't we? Ms Kilgour : It was a joint investigation between the agencies. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Who led it? Ms Kilgour : We do a lot of joint investigations. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Who led it? Ms Kilgour : It was a joint investigation, so it was a partnership. It wasn't a 'Who is leading?' situation. It was the three agencies collectively— Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Well— CHAIR: You've clearly made your point. Let's move on. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Okay. Then I'll ask you to take on notice who led it. In which office was the evidence held and the primary work being done? Was it in your office, was it in the AFP's or was it in the Queensland police's? I'd ask you to give me that on notice. Ms Kilgour : Okay. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: There is currently a very live public discussion about a $560 million grant scandal where, according to analysis by the Centre for Public Integrity, in the order of 73 per cent of the funding went to government seats. There's been a huge amount of public discussion about it. I couldn't tell you how many media reports there have been or how often it was raised in parliament. Are you aware of the matter? Ms Kilgour : I'm aware of the matter. I'm aware of the Centre for Public Integrity's report. CHAIR: Can you just inform the committee where the relationship to our terms of reference is at this point, Senator Shoebridge. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: This is about public confidence and communications. CHAIR: Well, let's make sure we're keeping the questions within the frame of the terms of reference. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Indeed. Acting Commissioner, you're aware of the matter? Ms Kilgour : I'm aware of the matter. I'm aware of the report. I spoke to Catherine Williams from the Centre for Public Integrity yesterday actually, because I hadn't had a chance to speak to her before. But I read the report and I asked her, 'Do you need to make a referral of corrupt conduct to the NACC Act arising from the work that you've done today?' Her advice to me was no. I said, 'If that position changes, please let me know.' Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Has anyone referred the matter to the NACC? Ms Kilgour : As far as I'm aware, no, we haven't received any referrals about it. I'm conscious that you're about to have a Senate inquiry about it. If things come up through the Senate inquiry that we need to have a conversation about, there's a pathway for that to happen. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Yes. Just pausing for a moment, on a major national discussion on a matter that some people have called corrupt, some people have called pork-barrelling and some people have made other statements about—the government has a different narrative on it—do you find it surprising that not a single person has thought that the NACC might be useful in resolving this? Do you find that surprising? I do. Well, I kind of do. Ms Kilgour : After my conversation with Ms Williams last night where she and I spoke at length about this and she said, 'Kylie, we've been very clear that we are not alleging corrupt conduct in this matter,' I'm not so surprised. I appreciate the issue and the discussion that's being had about if this is good practice around grant funding or not. But, if it's not corrupt conduct, it's not something that's going to be in my jurisdiction. It might have to be dealt with by another agency, like the ANAO or somebody else. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: And you're relying upon the assessment of somebody from the CPI? Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: You have power, don't you, under section 40 of the act? Ms Kilgour : We have our own motion power. If, during the public discussion, more information becomes available that suggests we need to use that own motion power, we can dip into that process. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: How many investigation staff do you have? Ms Kilgour : I have about 64 across various types of roles. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Have you asked any one of those 64 staff members to have a look at this and maybe get back to you on it? Ms Kilgour : Not so far because what I did was I read the report and I spoke to Ms Williams about it. I am conscious that a Senate inquiry has been announced and that there may be more information coming our way as a result of those inquiries. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: To be clear— CHAIR: This is not really going to the communications issues in our terms of reference at the moment. As the acting commissioner has noted, there is an inquiry into that that will be underway. I'm sure you'll be very active in that process. I've allowed some room on this because I understand that it is currently in the public domain, but it is not the focus of this inquiry. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: I just have one final question on this. CHAIR: One final question. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: To be clear, you spoke to Ms Williams yesterday. This matter has been in the public discourse for well over a week. You haven't requested any of your staff to do even a rudimentary review and your due diligence, if I could describe it that way, was to make a phone call yesterday. Ms Kilgour : After I'd read the report and I had been become aware that there was continuing media suggesting that maybe we should be looking at this, I was concerned about whether I was missing something in the report. I called Ms Williams and had a conversation with her last night to get clear in my own mind as to whether this is a matter that I should be asking people to do some work on right now. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Did you look at the New South Wales ICAC's review of a very similar scandal? Ms Kilgour : I've read those reviews when they were published, and I'm looking forward to the outcomes of the inquiry. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: That's a corruption commission that has a high level of public confidence, the New South Wales ICAC. Ms Kilgour : Yes, I appreciate that. CHAIR: Senator Darmanin. Senator DARMANIN: I wanted to go back to the conversation around the allocation of staffing. You talked about having 206 FTE, and you've got your organisational structure. In the context of the witness liaison officers, you had to make decisions around making changes. This is one thing that I think is a bit clearer now than it was before we heard from you on this question of how you allocate resources to fill gaps and address this question that the Chair also asked around unspent budget to address some of these challenges. In addition to this, you in your submission and the NACC Inspector have identified staff retention as a major challenge. Can you talk a bit about what you think is the driver of the retention challenges that you've got? Ms Kilgour : I think it's not one thing. Every individual makes choices about their career and when they want to work. If I think about some of the themes that have emerged, there was definitely a period in 2023 when the commission first started—you need to remember that a bunch of staff from the old ACLEI were mogged to become the NACC. For some of those people, the new jurisdiction of the National Anti-Corruption Commission wasn't necessarily what they wanted to be working on. They were happy doing their law enforcement integrity work, and this broader jurisdiction of Commonwealth public officials, which is vast, wasn't quite their thing. Some people decided to move on to other roles. Some of our staff are young, particularly the ones who come into intake and triage—some of our younger investigators in the intel analyst space and in the CP space. They do a bit of time with us and then they get a promotion either internally over to other functions in the commission or into other APS agencies. One of the other things I've observed is that, because the integrity conversation more broadly in the Commonwealth is about more than just us, there are a lot of Commonwealth agencies who are setting up their own integrity units and their own integrity practices, and our people get poached for that. We also have some people who've retired. We've had some people who've resigned because of personal matters in their own lives. It's not just one thing; it's a bunch of things. We've got the attrition rate here somewhere. Senator DARMANIN: I was going to ask if you could share— Ms Kilgour : The attrition rate shifted. I might ask the acting CEO to talk to you about this, because he's more up to date with the figures. I'd say the attrition rate is reducing over time. What we were talking about in 2023 and 2024 is a bit different now in 2026. Senator DARMANIN: I'd appreciate if you could take us through the turnover over from the inception of the organisation and how that compares to like organisations, if you've got that data. Mr de Wet : While they don't have a benchmark for other organisations, I can talk you through the trend for us at a commission level. In 2023-24, at a whole-of-commission level, we were sitting at around a 28 per cent rate of attrition. In the last completed financial year, 2025-26, it was at 15 per cent. So that has been a positive trend for us. We are seeing very high levels of participation in recruitment exercises run across the commission. I note the focus that the inquiry itself has had on our evaluation team. As Ms Kilgour alluded to, year 1 was particularly challenging for the commission. We had a lot of churn. In that area, within the evaluation branch, it was sitting at around 48 per cent attrition, which was very high, and in 2025-26 we actually saw that come down to 18.2 per cent. So, encouragingly, across all areas of the commission, we are seeing improved ability to retain the skilled and capable people that are coming in. Senator DARMANIN: That's useful. Thank you. Of the 266 FTE, what's the current vacancy number? Mr de Wet : As of the most recent pay, which I think was 9 September—understanding the 266 is an ASL measure and there's also FTE, but I'll give you FTE—we were sitting at 246 FTE across the commission. We additionally had a number of recruitment exercises underway. I think it was at least 12. So we are forecasting---understanding we will still have at least an attrition rate of around 15 per cent—that we should be close to around 260 by the end of the financial year 2026-27. Senator DARMANIN: I wonder if you could—sorry, I've lost my train of thought. In terms of intake and triage, I think, Ms Kilgour, you talked about there being a younger cohort in that area. Ms Kilgour : Yes, they are more junior roles. The APS classification on them is generally for some of our more junior roles—is that correct? Mr de Wet : Yes. Senator DARMANIN: So they're junior but not necessarily younger, or maybe both. Ms Kilgour : I think there's a correlation. It's good that people progress in their careers. Senator DARMANIN: Yes, absolutely. What does the staff retention in that area, intake and triage, look like? Ms Kilgour : It's a bit bumpier. Have we got the exact— Mr de Wet : We don't have the subset of that, but that's grouped into the broader Evaluation Branch figure that I gave you earlier, which is sitting at around 18.2 per cent. Senator DARMANIN: Okay, so you don't have the kind of more granular— Mr de Wet : Yes, we don't break it down by intake and triage or assessments or the like. It sits under the broader Evaluation Branch. Senator DARMANIN: The inspector has recommended that that area in particular be adequately staffed and resourced. Ms Kilgour : Yes. Senator DARMANIN: Do you think it would be worth looking at that area in a bit more detail—or do you in another way? Ms Kilgour : We have actually, just in the last little while, got a new director in that area. We've had a bit of turnover in the team. I think she had about four new starters in the last couple of months, and I think we are now pretty much up to the FTE count in that space. Mr de Wet : Yes. Ms Kilgour : I think we've put some stuff in our submission, as well, about how for that entire branch—because intake, as well as the assessors, is frontline service work and it's hard work—doing work to think about how we support those people better in their roles when they're with us, as well as how we make sure that we're calibrating the business around understanding that people are probably going to do that job for two years, and that's probably enough. How do we make sure that we're ready for the fact that that's going to be a sort of constant space where people are going to do two years and then they're going to go, and we need to keep the pipeline running? Senator DARMANIN: Yes. In previous discussions throughout this inquiry there's been, I think, some commentary around that area being difficult, and I think you don't have a direct line into that area. Is that right? And how you manage— Ms Kilgour : We have a callback system to manage the volume of calls, as well as for work health and safety reasons, so that people aren't just on a call line 24/7. I think when the commission first started people could call us. Unfortunately, we had a number of interactions with some members of the public that were highly abusive to our staff, and that's why we shifted to a callback service. We have a service standard of calling people back within two days, and we are meeting that service standard. It just gives staff a bit more time to listen to the message. We might have something on file that we can pull out so that we understand better, when we're talking to that person, what they might be calling us about, as opposed to a cold call sort of service. Senator DARMANIN: Yes. Those are some of the measures that you're talking about when you say that you're looking at working on how you can support them. Can you talk a bit more about what else you're doing to support that team in particular? Ms Kilgour : When I'm talking about that, I think we're thinking about what the training is. It's more about the training that we do for people about how they stay resilient or how they manage difficult callers when they do have those difficult interactions. Vicarious trauma is very important to me as well. Sometimes, what is being told can be quite distressing information for the person who's receiving it as well as for the person who's telling us the story, so it's important that we're giving people those professional development skills. It's more that sort of stuff, as opposed to the callback thing. Senator DARMANIN: Yes. Okay. Maybe more broadly, Senator Shoebridge talked about some of the impact of the changes over the last little while in the senior part of the organisation. There are lots of acting roles. Clearly, there's been media scrutiny and interest in the work of the NACC and lots of commentary. What impact would you say some of those things is having on the staff? Obviously, you've got lots of excellent staff who are doing really good work and are really committed to making the organisation successful. What's the organisational culture looking and feeling like both at the senior level and throughout the organisation, and what kinds of things are you doing to support staff and think about how, perhaps, some of the broader impacts are affecting the staff that are really a bit of a thing over here compared to what the core of their work is and what they're really committed to doing? Ms Kilgour : I'm really clear that we are an agency of 250 staff and that everyone who turns up every day to do their job turns up with great commitment to the mission and great commitment to public service. Yes, it's difficult when people have to be in acting positions, particularly when sometimes you've got to do it for a bit longer than you might have expected. But we sit in the chairs we sit in, performing our functions and duties, and it's not about us, particularly, as individuals; it's about the fact that we play our role in that broader team. I have been absolutely supported and so happy that I've had Jamie and Penny appointed as acting deputies, because we could've had a situation where I had to act and Ben would've been the only deputy, and that would've been a very bad situation for us in terms of managing the workflow and managing all the different issues that we have to manage as the statutory office holder group. They have made a flying and fast contribution and have built really good relationships with all the staff that they work with. I would say, overall, that feedback that I have had from staff is that staff morale is generally good. Like I said, people are turning up to do their jobs, and it's not about me and it's not about who the commissioner is. It should be about what the institution is here to do, and that is my focus. Senator DARMANIN: Do you have an HR strategy that you're working towards? Mr de Wet : It's a good question and, as you'd appreciate, with census results released recently, that will form part of our census action plan. As Ms Kilgour alluded to, what we have seen in recent times is, again, that our staff reflected that we had an 85 per cent completion rate of our census—very high levels of staff participation—and a very strong sense of purpose. Again, as Ms Kilgour said, everyone who turns up every day turns up for the right reason. There are things that we will be looking to improve on, and we will come out with those in the plan—things like: you can always do more communication, as some of the sentiment in the hearing today has suggested, both internally and externally; and how we as a leadership group present and help guide the commission. But, again, overarching sentiment is that there have also been increased levels of engagement with senior management in the last three months, and that's been well received by staff. I would also like to put on the record, in relation to Senator Shoebridge earlier comments about characterising us as an organisation in crisis, that I think the fact that Mr Reed is on planned leave, noting that, while it had originally been planned to be recreational leave, he is currently on carer's leave, is an entirely normal part of business. The communication of Ms Kilgour, Ms Lowe and Ms Shakespeare's appointments was made in advance and was well received by staff, so I would not characterise our commission as an organisation in crisis. Senator DARMANIN: I have a couple of quick questions on another topic: artificial intelligence. You indicated that you're trialling an AI tool to assist with referral assessment. Could you provide us with an update on how that's going and what some of the lessons that you've learned to date are. Ms Kilgour : This is very much the acting CEO in his substantive role who leads a lot of this work for the commission. I'm going to let him give you the chapter and verse on it. Mr de Wet : Note that the trials that have been alluded to publicly have been undertaken in a very limited and controlled way. That has been deliberate because I think AI is such a ubiquitous technology that you run the risk of acting in haste and repenting at leisure. We undertook a targeted trial across the entire commission, noting that the technology itself is often a technology in search of a problem, as we wanted to understand the best-use cases where it might be deployed. As you alluded to, our intake, triage and assessments areas have identified a possible use case. That would see, at a minimum, the deployment of possible agentic AI workflow. So a referrer necessarily engages with a web form and lodges a referral. The agent, when deployed, can look at it and make an initial assessment and ask: 'Is this within jurisdiction? Does it make a prima facie claim of corrupt conduct?' It can work on our ability to proceed faster through that first-stage assessment pathway. The committee would appreciate that the DTA is on the record as saying, 'You have to eat your data vegetables before you enjoy your AI desserts.' We are spending a lot of time and effort making sure that the data foundations upon which we will build these models over time are sound. Ms Kilgour touched on this earlier by noting that the AI strategic direction for the commission will never see machines or technology automate decision-making. It's being treated as an augmented intelligence component within the commission. So it's really important that our staff have the capability alongside the technology that, if they're presented with an outcome of an initial assessment of a referral, they actually understand what it is that that technology has looked at. I think there is tremendous opportunity here. We are approaching it cautiously. For the benefit of the committee, we operate in a protected ICT environment, and our data estate is significant. Understanding that sensitive information is managed in a case management system—evidence that's captured through digital forensics and the like—you cannot run a technology over all of those without ensuring the appropriate safeguards. That is a lot of where we're going to be directing effort and investment to the extent that it's possible, so that we free our people up to do the things that people do best. My apologies for the long-winded answer; I have a lot of interest in AI. That's how we're approaching it. Senator DARMANIN: That's great. It's very comprehensive. Do you have a sense of a timeline about how this will progress? Mr de Wet : We do have an indicative timeframe. The first stage for the commission is an enterprise-wide Copilot rollout, which is happening next month. That is the first instance where we will run artificial intelligence on our protected tenancy, without any interaction external to the NACC environment. That's one of the protective controls that we're instituting further on down the line—I'd say in three to six months. We're envisaging the access to public generative AI through those whitelisted technologies, understanding the security vulnerabilities that are created as soon as you enter the web up to the level of official—that will happen in three to six months. The evolution of the application in our assessments area will be subject to our ability to deploy that within our architecture safely. I would hope that within six to 12 months we would have a reliable deployment of AI in one form or another within that function at least. CHAIR: Thanks very much. Deputy Chair. Dr HAINES: One thing that comes up time and time again not only in this inquiry but more broadly, which really speaks to transparency, communication, trust in the NACC, is the importance of public hearings. But, as we know, public hearings can only be held if they're in the public interest and if there are exceptional circumstances. Fundamentally, the person that needs to be satisfied is the commissioner. Is the exceptional circumstances test something that you have been giving thought to since coming into the role, Ms Kilgour? I note that in October last year at an anti-corruption conference you said that absolutely a public hearing will happen but there just hasn't been the right matter. So could you just give us an update on where you think this exceptional circumstance is? I note that the New South Wales ICAC commissioner pointed out that there are different approaches to the term 'exceptional'. What are your thoughts? Ms Kilgour : What the chief commissioner was referring to is that there's some slightly different case law between Victoria and New South Wales on what is exceptional circumstances. The legal team and I did go back and have a look at those two cases. The interesting thing about the New South Wales case is that it's not actually a case about an anti-corruption commission and consideration of exceptional circumstances. It's about motor accident compensation schemes. The Victorian case is about IBAC and exceptional circumstances. If you think about it from a legal perspective, the case that I probably have to lean into the most when I'm taking guidance on what I can and can't do is that Victorian Court of Appeal case. It does say that you have to be satisfied that there are clearly unusual and distinctly out-of-the-ordinary circumstances that you're dealing with. That is a very high bar. There's also some discussion in that piece of case law about rareness. So that's a pretty high bar. But, if I think about when I was at IBAC and the kinds of matters that we did where we were satisfied that we'd met the exceptional circumstances case, if we had similar cases in the Commonwealth, those would be the cases, I think, for which we'd be able to do public hearings. For example, there was Operation Watts, which was the case involving ministers in the then Labor government who were involved in using electorate offices for improper purposes to do various activities. That was conducted in public mostly, but there were also a number of private hearings in that matter for some witnesses. Operation Bredbo was a police misconduct matter. Again, we did private hearings in that matter before we did public. That involved a senior detective of some 30 years in the Victoria Police force who had some interesting relationships with organised crime figures in Victoria. He was running what I would call a side hustle helping organised crime figures to mediate civil disputes. We did that matter in public. Operation Esperance was about the V/Line and some bribes that were being given to the CEO in V/Line. In those sorts of cases, we were able to establish clearly unusual, distinct, rare circumstances—that the CEO of V/Line was taking bribes from organised crime figures; that a senior detective was working on the side. So, if we had cases like that, I think those would be the kinds of cases you'd see us get into the public hearing space. Dr HAINES: So am I right in saying you would be looking to case law to help you make that determination? Ms Kilgour : Yes, case law is helpful, and we do have to think about that because the other thing you need to be mindful of is that, as soon as we serve someone with a summons that we're going to go to a public hearing with them, they're highly likely to take us on judicial review about whether we have met the threshold under the act. Dr HAINES: Yes, I understand that. I think it's of note that you say this. The previous commissioner was on record saying that he would know exceptional circumstances when he saw them. So he seemed to have a different interpretation. Ms Kilgour : I'm not sure. You'd have to ask him about his interpretation. But I can speak about my interpretation. I'd be leaning heavily into that case law as well as thinking about the kinds of cases where IBAC was able to satisfy itself that those sorts of cases were exceptional circumstances. When we get cases like that, then, absolutely, we will do them in public—when we get to the right matter. Dr HAINES: Is this something that you think should also be included in the review of the act, when we do that review? Ms Kilgour : I think everything has to be under review; when you do a statutory review, everything's on the table. And I appreciate the exceptional circumstances. Policy design decision is a hotly contested space, so I imagine it's going to be something that we have to come back to and talk about some more. Dr HAINES: One of the things that's been suggested to improve public communication and understanding is that the commission could publish information about decisions not to hold public hearings—not the specific details, but a basic rationale, such as: 'The commissioner decided a public hearing wasn't justified because the matter was very sensitive, or the seriousness of the conduct wasn't of the highest order.' Is that something you could do? Ms Kilgour : I did do that in Operation Myrtleford. That's the only report so far that I've been responsible for finalising. Down the back of that report, I did put an explanation—I think, about four pages—about the decision and how exceptional circumstances, plus the public interest, were weighed up by the team. So, yes, I think it is something that we could perhaps do as an appendix in all of our public reports, so that, if there is ever a question about, 'Why didn't you do that one in public?' there's a very quick ready reckoner where you can see that's the explanation and it's transparent. Dr HAINES: I think that would be helpful. Ms Kilgour : Yes. Dr HAINES: Finally, over the course of this inquiry we've had a lot of evidence from people and organisations outside the commission about what needs to change, so it seems only fair to give you the same opportunity. I'll leave it up to you how you respond. But could I ask the acting commissioner and deputy commissioners: is there one particular change that you think would strengthen the commission's performance and its functions? I'll start with you, Ms Shakespeare. Ms Shakespeare : I think having greater clarity around the level of engagement that we can support with referrers is probably the area coming out of this inquiry that appears to me—we need to clearly work through what the administrative arrangements are that are going to support people's expectations around what the commission can provide them where they've made a referral. I have thoughts about that. I think it is a process that we need to work through, as an organisation, though. Dr HAINES: Thank you. And Ms Lowe? Ms Lowe : A recurrent theme today has been around communication—clear communications, timely communications—and I would agree that where we need to continue to improve is around the clarity and timeliness of our communications and the transparency of our communications. I would suggest that's part of the reason why there's been such a focus on that in recent months. This committee process has drawn attention to some practical improvements we can make—and we're not waiting for the report from the committee; we've already started making some changes. One example that springs to mind is this. A number of individuals were concerned that they were receiving outcome letters that gave them an indication of the types of things that might have meant that we didn't proceed with the matter, and some of those examples clearly didn't relate to their particular circumstances and they were frustrated that we were, for example, citing 'out of jurisdiction' when it was completely within jurisdiction. In recent weeks, we've made changes to those template letters to remove information that's not relevant to the particular circumstances. So a continuous improvement program around communication is where I can see that we can have quite a big impact. Dr HAINES: Thank you. I might go to you, Dr Gauntlett. Dr Gauntlett : Although it hasn't been discussed [inaudible] today, it would be to increase the number of mandatory referrals that the commission receives. They're a particularly important form of referral for us, because an agency head has often decided that there could be serious or systemic corrupt conduct, and what can then happen is often that we have a very high probability that that will lead to an effective corruption investigation. If we look at the mandatory referrals that come in, we need to increase the number and quality of those referrals being received. I know there has been some discussion in relation to the referrals themselves. I would note that our staff work extremely hard in this space, but we do need to become effective and expeditious at considering those referrals and providing feedback when we're not going to investigate a matter or refer a matter on. I'd also emphasise the role the commission has in referring it to other agencies for investigation, or keeping—or then ensuring that other agencies look into a matter that we're satisfied that the corruption issue has been appropriately dealt with. Dr HAINES: Would you suggest that there's a stronger KPI around the mandatory referrals? Could you expand on that a little? Dr Gauntlett : I don't know if there's a stronger KPI in relation to mandatory referrals, but there is certainly an education function about trying to get Commonwealth agencies, when they see a corruption issue, to refer it straightaway to us to enable us to use our statutory powers to then look at things like whistleblowers and things of that nature, to ensure that we get the best evidence, and not to, in a sense, investigate the matter themselves for a while and then refer it to us or perhaps not think of the importance of it. There's a whole-of-Commonwealth issue about education, where when you see a corruption issue—and, of course, the agency head has to be aware of it—you inform the agency head and then provide it to the NACC so that we get a good-quality referral with the documentation that often goes with it. Once the mandatory referral is provided to the commission, there is an ongoing obligation to provide the commission with relevant information as it becomes available. That enables investigations to proceed expeditiously to outcome. It means we do not have to use as many notices and things of that nature, and it also often means that there is a sort of coherence approach between the underlying agency and National Anti-Corruption Commission. Ultimately, what generally happens is we're looking at the conduct of an individual public official within that agency; we're not looking at the agency in its entirety. So obviously issues such as conflicts of interest are dealt with in terms of those referrals too. Dr HAINES: Thank you. I'll go to Mr de Wet, and then I can give Ms Kilgour the final word on this one. Mr de Wet : In my substantive role and my acting capacity, I'm probably focused more on the administrative side of the commission. The thing that I probably would like to see continue, not necessarily change, is the understanding of where the commission finds itself three years in, where we are very often compared to our state based counterparts, who have had a longer time in the game and a longer time to mature capability, process et cetera. This committee understands the speed at which the commission was established, the way in which government supported it to do so and the fact that, from day one, we were receiving referrals while trying to build everything else behind it. And I would say all 250 staff have done a really good job. We are on the right upwards trajectory, but we are not there yet. The ongoing demonstration of understanding as we continue on that pathway is very helpful to us. Dr HAINES: And the one change you want to see? Mr de Wet : I think my colleagues have largely covered those. From my lived experience of the commission, I don't have a definite answer for you at this point in time, I'm sorry. That's possibly from a very optimistic view that I take in relation to the way that our people are using the resources available to us and the positive pathway we've taken forward. I think there have been a lot of helpful elements of the submissions in relation to our improved communication and the like, and those are things on our side that we need to improve. I don't think it's anything that I would suggest we need changed on our behalf. Dr HAINES: Ms Kilgour, the one thing you would change? That's if it's just one thing; I imagine there are others. Ms Kilgour : Can I say two? Dr HAINES: Yes. I would love you to. Ms Kilgour : I agree with everything that everybody has said, but it was a bit remiss that I didn't mention this during earlier questions about communication with referrers. One of the things we are also doing at the moment is a redesign of the web form so that, when people are trying to send us information, we're giving better guidance to people about whether the matter is going to be in jurisdiction or whether it's actually going to be corrupt conduct. I think some of the disappointment that people experience is they really think they're referring something to us that is our business. When we have to say to them, 'I'm really sorry, but it's not,' that can be a very disappointing experience, especially if they haven't heard from us for a long time. I appreciate some of the submissions that you received where people felt ignored or that we didn't care about their matter. So there is some of that front-end stuff that we can do about explaining better to people about whether we're the right agency to help them or not. The other thing I'd really like us to do is a program of public inquiries. Public hearings are a separate issue in the investigation space, and you understand that well, but we do have a power to do public inquiry into corruption risks. When I think about an uplift of people's understanding about the issues going on in the Commonwealth that people should be worried about and what the definition of corrupt conduct is and what it isn't, a program of public inquiries addressing some of those strategic corruption priorities that we have in our corporate plan might be a good tool for people to tune in, see us at work and hear more about the things that we should be worrying about with respect to corruption prevention issues in the Commonwealth and about things people are actually doing really well in the Commonwealth as well to prevent corruption. Again, one of my observations is that the number of mandatory referrals we're receiving is not as high as some of the other anticorruption commissions. That's probably a good thing about the health of the Commonwealth, and we should actually be promoting that and talking about the fact that a lot of the other integrity reform work that has gone on over the last few years has worked. Dr HAINES: I guess there's an alternative to that, isn't there—that agencies are not reporting, for a host of other reasons. But I take your point. Ms Kilgour : It is possible. It's hard to prove one way or the other, but I'd like to sit in the optimistic space where we are getting the referrals from the agencies that we should be getting. I understand what Dr Gauntlett was saying—that sometimes people don't come to us as early as we would like—but I think there is a healthy reporting attitude in the Commonwealth. Dr HAINES: Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you for your evidence today. If you've taken questions on notice, please provide your answers to the secretariat by 1 October. That concludes today's hearing. Thank you to all witnesses who appeared and to Hansard and Broadcasting for their assistance. Committee adjourned at 12:27