Phillip Arantz

Philip Arantz was a Detective Sergeant in the New South Wales Police.

In the 1970s he was involved in a long-running and highly-publicised battle with the NSW government after his dismissal from the Police Service, and Arantz claimed that he had been victimised for his whistle-blowing actions, which had exposed systematic police corruption.

In 1971, while working on a computerisation program, the computer expert discovered that the NSW police service had been systematically under-reporting crime statistics for years. The obvious inference of this revelation was that police were trying to conceal corruption, which allegedly extended up to the Police Commissioner himself, and the widespread police involvement in organised crime.

Arantz took his allegations to senior police but they were dismissed out of hand. Eventually Arantz, now recognised as one of Australia's pioneer "whistle-blowers", realised that Norman Allan (who had been Commissioner since 1962) was at least aware of the scheme, if not directly involved in it, and that he wanted to suppress Arantz's revelations.

The frustrated Arantz eventually leaked his information to the press, so an enraged Commissioner Allan began a vicious campaign to destroy Arantz's credibility. As a result, Arantz was suspended, forced to undergo a psychiatric assessment, and, finally, dishonourably discharged from the force; it took him years to clear his name. Meanwhile both Commissioner Allan and New South Wales Premier Robert Askin had retired (respectively in 1972 and 1975), avoiding the taint from the scandal. It wasn't until 1989 that Arantz and his claims were finally vindicated [Sydney Morning Herald, December 22 1989, Page 8 - A year of shifts and reversals] , by which point Askin and Allan were long since dead.

Arantz went on to write a book about his experiences, entitled "A Collusion of Powers".

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