Ben Harvey: Real breach of trust came from successive premiers who failed to hold Chris Field to account

West Australian taxpayers were taken for a ride by Chris Field, but the real breach of trust came from the four successive premiers who failed to hold the State’s long-serving ombudsman to account. Field went to the office as little as two days a week, felt it was demeaning to submit annual leave forms, ran his department like a feudal lord and used his position to further his Walter Mitti-esque delusions of diplomatic grandeur. And Alan Carpenter, Colin Barnett, Mark McGowan and Roger Cook let him get away with it. Why? Perhaps because Field never came close to giving their governments a black eye. The $450,000-a-year Field earned was the best investment any of those premiers made. The Corruption and Crime Commission report into his wild spending as head of the International Ombudsman Institute (a body most of us never knew existed but which Mr Field appears to rank alongside the United Nations and the World Bank in terms of importance) was launched in late 2023. By that time Mr Field was into his fourth five-year term. Fourth! Why wouldn’t you keep rolling over the contract? For 17 years the Office of the WA Ombudsman was exactly what politicians and bureaucrats wanted — benign. If only CCC commissioner John McKechnie, the reluctant author of Field’s demise, was so amiable. What would Cook give to have Auditor-General Caroline Spencer become so genial? The last thing someone in power wants is a completely independent, uncontrollable public servant — armed with all the powers of a royal commissioner, no less — swaggering around the halls of power demanding answers. Eliot Ness? No thanks. Give us someone from Utopia. Tuesday’s CCC report did not directly address the issue of how successive governments failed to hold the ombudsman to account, but it was clearly on McKechnie’s mind. The second-last page of his 124-page report contained this observation. “In the second century Juvenal posed the question: Quis custodiet custodes? Who guards the guards? For many years the answer in respect of the ombudsman has been ‘no one’.” The Swedes invented the word ombudsman. It means “representative of the people”. Chris Field was a representative of himself.