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Victoria’s peak anti-corruption agency and the Victorian Ombudsman have warned that investigations will be shelved and public sector maladministration left unchecked after the state government failed to adequately resource their work in Tuesday’s budget.
Both agencies took the unusual step of revealing to this masthead their funding for next financial year, which is not reported in the government’s budget papers.
Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission chief executive Alison Byrne said her agency’s “disappointing” budget outcome would result in staff redundancies and further delays in responding to complaints.
She said there was already a backlog of more than 1000 complaints on IBAC’s books that had not been assessed within the agency’s 45-90 day target. IBAC’s $69.2 million budget for 2026-27, which includes about $63 million to cover operating costs, leaves the cash-strapped agency $6 million in deficit.
“We have deferred and delayed investigations, complaints and matters,” Byrne told The Age. “We have accepted a backlog of complaints. With next year’s budget, we are at a point where there is nothing left to reprioritise and there are no more trade-offs to be made.”
The Victorian Parliament’s Integrity Oversight Committee on Tuesday tabled a report calling on the government to review the budgets of IBAC and the Ombudsman, warning that an increase in complaints had put their existing resourcing under strain.
Ombudsman Marlo Baragwanath said the funding provided to her agency for the next financial year was about $1.2 million shy of her expected operating costs, and that future, forecast deficits would increase pressure to cut staff and investigate less.
She said the bleak fiscal outlook – which continues a 10-year trend under the Andrews and Allan governments – strengthened the case for the annual budgets of the Ombudsman, the Auditor-General and IBAC to be determined by an independent body.
“Until this underfunding is addressed we will not have the funding to do our job, meaning serious matters won’t be investigated,” Baragwanath told The Age.
“We are already having to not investigate things we would like to. And we won’t have the resources to do more to support vulnerable community members.
“No government can be trusted to set the budget for integrity agencies. Why would you fund these agencies to provide more exposure of government maladministration, inefficiency and corruption? That is why the integrity agencies have repeatedly called for an independent and transparent funding mechanism.”
Tuesday’s budget provides $22.9 million for the Ombudsman’s operations across 2026-27, which the government claims is a 6.6 per cent increase on the allocation for the current financial year.
This figure includes a one-off sum of about $330,000 already allocated to meet the cost of more complaints provoked by changes to the state’s bail laws and about $150,000 in revenue generated by the Ombudsman through its own educational services.
Baragwanath said that when these amounts were set aside, the base increase is $898,000, which is a 4 per cent boost to current funding and slightly below the 10-year average increase in funding.
The gap between what the Ombudsman receives from the government and what it costs to do its job is forecast to grow every year. By the time Baragwanath’s 10-year term expires, the agency’s operating deficit is projected to be $5 million.
The current budget for the NSW Ombudsman, which has a comparable jurisdiction to its Victorian cousin, is $58.5 million.
IBAC’s budget for last financial year was $66.9 million. The increase for next year is about 25 per cent of what IBAC asked for.
Total funding for the state’s integrity agencies is less than a rounding error within Victoria’s $114.5 billion budget.
Byrne said money was only part of IBAC’s problem and it also needed greater powers to examine multibillion- dollar contracts at the centre of private-public partnerships used to build and operate major infrastructure projects and a broader remit to investigate corruption.
“Legislative reform needs to go hand-in-hand with the money,” she said.
The relationship between the Victorian government and its integrity agencies reached a nadir under former premier Daniel Andrews, who was openly dismissive of a series of reports by IBAC and the Ombudsman into the politicisation of the public service, the use of public money to promote partisan interests and what former IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich described as “grey” corruption.
The Victorian Ombudsman, IBAC and Auditor-General Andrew Greaves last year issued a rare, joint public statement renewing their call for their annual funding to be quarantined from the normal budget process and instead determined by a parliamentary committee or independent commission or tribunal.
Since the joint report was published, the agencies have not received a substantive commitment or response from the government.
The integrity agencies are exempt from efficiency dividends used to squeeze savings out of government departments and were ring-fenced from former top bureaucrat Helen Silver’s review of the public service.
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