ABSTRACT
This chapter takes inspiration from Frank Pearce’s insistence that “It is not possible to explain . . . systematic continuous [corrupt] behaviour in terms of the ‘greed’ of a few individuals” and that anti-corruption prosecutions “by condemning an infraction as illegal and abnormal serve to dramatise an imaginary social order” (1976: 93, original italics). In June 2016 former New South Wales (NSW) government minister and right-wing Labor Party “numbers man” Eddie Obeid was convicted in a criminal trial of wilful misconduct in public office. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) earlier found that Obeid acted in a corrupt manner as a member of Parliament in relation to the matter at hand: benefitting his family’s (undisclosed) interests in harbourside cafés leased from a government instrumentality. A further corruption trial of Eddie Obeid, his son Moses, and former NSW minister Ian Macdonald, over a coalmining licence, is set for 2019. ICAC also found over 2012–2014 that Obeid misused his public position for his family’s private benefit in relation to water licences for their farming interests and in relation to a private health company. Although justice will be seen to be done and the process justified, this is mere small change compared to large-scale corporate corruption. The Obeid family are not General Electric or Westinghouse. Why, then, the public theatre? The chapter argues, following Pearce, that such charades act out the fantasy that the normal workings of capitalism are uncorrupted and that abnormal aberrations can be rooted out to the public benefit. The earlier cartels and anti-competitive price fixing of monopoly capitalism so revealingly shown by Pearce to be endemic are now supplemented by newer corporate criminal opportunities under neoliberalism. In the focus on the lining of private pockets, our view is averted from the larger damage to public wellbeing of privatization and contracting out of public resources, not to mention the harms of deregulation’s untrammeling the new carpetbaggers.
