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This year, 1 July is notable for more than just tax reasons – it’s also the day thousands of New Zealanders become eligible for Australian citizenship, the day minimum wage workers get a pay rise and the day some psychiatrists are allowed to start prescribing MDMA.

It’s also the official first day of the national anti-corruption commission. Coincidentally, this week the long-running corruption investigation into former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian published its findings.

In this weekend’s column, I take a closer look at how the new commission will operate and the challenges of investigating leaders.

Today, Australia’s long-anticipated national anti-corruption commission (NACC) opens for business.

Despite bipartisan support for the idea of a commission, it took several years of debate for Parliament to agree on the specifics of what it should look like. One sticking point was whether corruption hearings should be public. As Opposition Leader Peter Dutton put it last year:

“I don’t want a show trial… I don’t want a situation where somebody has their reputation trashed and after a couple of years they don’t even know whether or not the investigation is still at hand.”

Speaking a year earlier, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison named names:

“What was done to Gladys Berejiklian, the people of NSW know, was an absolute disgrace... I’m not going to have a kangaroo court taken into this Parliament.”

Morrison was referring to the resignation of former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who stood down in October 2021 when NSW’s anti-corruption body (ICAC) publicly announced it was investigating her.

That investigation concluded this week, nearly three years after Berejiklian was first questioned. It found “serious corrupt conduct” on Berejiklian’s part but did not recommend criminal prosecution.

What does the Berejiklian saga tell us about the challenges that will face the new federal commission?

Morrison is not the only politician to have questioned the fairness of ICAC’s public investigation into Berejiklian.

Berejiklian herself did not conceal her frustration in her resignation speech:

“[This] could not happen at a worse time, but the timing is completely outside my control as the ICAC has chosen to take this action during the most challenging weeks of the most challenging times in the history of NSW [the COVID lockdown]... I have been given no option.”

Berejiklian’s policy for her ministers had been that anyone at the centre of a corruption investigation should stand aside while it was underway and could then return to office if cleared. In her own case, however, Berejiklian believed this would create too much uncertainty for NSW, and she decided to leave the job (and the Parliament) for good.

Despite her frustration, Berejiklian acknowledged ICAC was acting within its rights to pursue her case publicly. In NSW, ICAC only needs to be satisfied that a matter is “in the public interest” to justify a public investigation. On its website, ICAC argues public inquiries “are an important tool in exposing corruption [and] can also increase the public’s confidence in the integrity of investigations.”

The Federal Government agreed with that broad principle when determining the function of a national corruption commission, but opted for a slightly higher bar: the national commission can hold public hearings, but only if it believes they are in the public interest and that the circumstances are “exceptional”.

Exactly how the word ‘exceptional’ will be interpreted remains to be seen. However, we can look elsewhere for clues.

For example, while the new commission’s has a higher bar for public hearings than ICAC, it has a lower bar than Victoria’s equivalent body, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC). When Victoria’s Premier, Daniel Andrews, became the subject of an investigation, those stricter rules led to a very different outcome.

Victoria’s IBAC has a third requirement to permit a public investigation: it must be in the public interest, the circumstances must be exceptional and the publicity must not “cause unreasonable damage to a person’s reputation, safety or wellbeing.”

The state discovered what this looked like in practice when Premier Daniel Andrews was investigated over his involvement in the awarding of a public grant to a Labor-aligned union. That investigation began in total secrecy, and would have continued that way if it hadn’t been leaked to and reported by The Age.

Andrews attacked The Age’s reporting as a “smear” and “innuendo”, but the investigation was real. Months later, IBAC published its findings. While it made no findings of corruption against any person, including Andrews, it did conclude the grant had been awarded “unethically”.

The national commission’s middle ground approach may mean it will avoid the contrasting complications of the Berejiklian and Andrews investigations. Exactly how it will achieve this balance, though, will be a controversial question, especially since there are already suggestions several high-profile figures may find themselves referred for investigation.

In a well-intentioned attempt to save money, I sat down at the start of this year to add up how much I spent on various things a month. The results were… confronting. Let’s just say if I’d been setting my monthly budgets from scratch there might have been slightly less takeaway involved...

Enter the Up Tracker! Up lets you set monthly limits for any spending category you like. And rather than setting and forgetting, you can check your progress on all your Trackers in one place. In a damn nifty move, Up actually automatically categorises a huge range of expenses, so your little pocket account is doing some of the heavy lifting.

No better time than a quiet weekend to get cracking and start tracking. I've also hooked you up with a boost - just enter the code TDA10 when you sign up for a $10 bonus.

After weeks of trying to fill the Succession-shaped hole in my heart, I’ve finally found it.

Season two of ‘The Bear’ is out on Disney+ and it’s every bit as good as the first season. It’s set in a kitchen and can be a stressful ride at times, but it has really beautiful moments too. Perfect for wintry weeknights on the couch.