Mr Cowdery vs Mr Hatzistergos: DPP Sock it to the AG

On four occasions over recent weeks I have drawn attention to the yawning chasm that exists between Mr Nicholas Cowdery the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions and Mr John Hatzistergos the NSW Attorney General (one, two, three, four).

Today's article by Lisa Carty in the Sunday Herald shows that things have deteriorated. By anyone's reckoning the strong inference from this article is that Mr Hatzistergos dislikes negative publicity. Well, sir, that's too bad! Here the public has every right to stand beside Mr Cowdery in calling a spade a spade. Your department is in a state of perpetual crisis because:

1. Employees are under-resourced and over-worked and many positions remain vacant
2. Budgetary cuts
3. Extravagant expenditure on corporate consultants ($10,933,326.33 spent from 2000-2008), the blow-out in costs on building the Parramatta Justice Precinct, the blow-out in implementing the JusticeLink computer system, and so on.
4. The administrative policies and decisions to outsource work that ends up increasing costs and impeding services.
5. Both the Office of the Protective Commissioner and the Office of the Public Guardian were running in deficits in 2006/07, 2007/08 and in 2008/09.
6. Lawlink is not an efficiently organised website.

Need we go on because the woeful list gets longer?

How much money was spent by the NSW Attorney General's Department in hiring the 200-seat Metcalf Auditorium at the NSW State Library on 1 April 2009 and 5 June 2009 so that Mr Laurie Glanfield and his merger implementation team could speak to less than 30 "stakeholders" in the disability sector?

Mr Hatzistergos is quoted:
''The DPP has always argued it should be independent … I think it is fundamental to that independence that they are able to manage their resources. I haven't had this problem with any other agency I have had to deal with where there are these constant demands for additional resources because 'We can't cope'.''

I beg your pardon sir! All of the agencies controlled by your department are in crisis and have not been given the employees and funds they need to serve the public. The man who wields the decision-making power about employee levels is the Director General Mr Glanfield. In various instances he also has the authority to approve the budgets of some agencies inside the Attorney General's Department. One might infer that it would be far more interesting for the public to have detailed explanations from Mr Glanfield justifying the decisions he has made concerning restrictions on staff, outsourcing, deficiencies in the shared corporate services, and so on.

So before Mr Hatzistergos begins accusing Nick Cowdery of not being competent to run the DPP's budget, he ought to recall that "people who live in glass houses should not throw rocks".

The article incredibly includes this ridiculous bit of mud-slinging:

"Ironically, his [i.e. Cowdery's] performance in relation to proceeds-of-crime cases has been a sore point with Mr Hatzistergos, who says the value of property and cash seized from criminals has fallen despite Mr Cowdery being given a bigger budget."

Since when does the DPP have control over which criminals are successfully arrested by the NSW Police? Are the NSW Police somehow derelict for failing to bust "rich criminals"? The confiscation of assets gained by criminal activity is a matter that the DPP prosecutes and the proceeds upon conviction are placed in the hands of the NSW Trustee and Guardian (formerly Public Trustee NSW). However the facts of life are these: It is usually the small-time crooks who are busted and successfully prosecuted. That's why the level of value in property and assets seized is usually small. In the cases where rich criminals are under investigation those dudes often have hidden assets overseas and the resources do not exist for either the NSW Police or DPP to pursue. Who do you think you are trying to fool, Mr Hatzistergos?

Mr Hatzistergos has set Mr Laurie Glanfield the task of reporting on the DPP. Good grief!

One can imagine more disinformation about the DPP being distributed in future press releases.