THE classic political scandal, Rodney Tiffen writes in Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption in Contemporary Australia, involves the media and the parliamentary opposition working in tandem. A newspaper or broadcaster unearths a case of scandalous behaviour and, if it’s embarrassing for the government, the opposition pursues the issue under the protection of parliamentary privilege. The media reports the parliamentary debates and keeps digging, and the opposition uses new revelations to intensify the political pressure.

What happens, though, when a newspaper unearths what seems like scandalous behaviour – bribery by a company half-owned by the Reserve Bank, for example – but the rest of the media largely ignore it? Combine that with a reluctance to pursue the issue on both sides of parliament and you’re left with a scandal that isn’t. Or at least not until this week, after Four Corners covered the story of Securency, the company that markets Australia’s polymer banknotes, in a report presented by the Age’s Nick MacKenzie.

Over the past twelve months MacKenzie and another member of the Age’s investigative team, Richard Baker, have published a series of articles detailing serious allegations of bribery carried out overseas by people acting on behalf of Securency, which the Reserve Bank half-owns with the British company Innovia. The allegations were first published in a feature length article in the Age (and a shorter version in the Sydney Morning Herald) on 23 May last year. Securency staff were alleged to have paid “multimillion-dollar commissions to shady middle-men” in a campaign to...

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