As Finance Minister and leader of the government in the NSW Upper House, Damien Tudehope is a robust politician who has retained a reputation for personal integrity.

This might explain why he was holding his head this week when a private member’s bill was finally introduced to overturn his government’s legislation from seven years ago that changed the outcome of court proceedings.

That statute retrospectively validated unlawful conduct by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption which had declared people corrupt without a basis in law.

To those unfamiliar with the fear of ICAC among those in public life, it might seem strange that the government of Dominic Perrottet did not introduce its own bill to set things right. It did, after all, state repeatedly that the problem would be given “active consideration” and addressed “in a timely manner”.

In the end, it fell to One Nation’s Rod Roberts, whose private member’s bill is a modest first step towards subjecting ICAC to the same rules that apply to others who engage in unlawful conduct.

The Roberts bill, which is likely to be put to a vote next week, restores the legal rights of three innocent men – John McGuigan, Richard Poole and John Atkinson – whose pending victory in court was destroyed by the Coalition’s validation Act.

Roberts proposes to give effect to last year’s unanimous recommendation of a government-dominated parliamentary committee that called for ICAC’s actions against these men to be assessed in court without the benefit of the validation Act.

The Roberts bill also makes provision for lawyers to strike down unlawful corruption findings against a fourth man, Travers Duncan, who died this year while waiting for NSW to restore his right to clear his name.

Some will see the Roberts bill as excessively modest. But the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

It only restores the legal rights of those who were already before the Court of Appeal and had secured admissions from ICAC before the validation legislation came into effect.

It would therefore address only the worst cases of injustice.

It falls short, however, of a full repeal of the validation legislation, which is the best way of dealing with retrospective laws that strip people of legal rights and protect wrongdoers.

Yet it still deserves support if only to show respect for the separation of powers. It will also remove some of the baggage from ICAC’s troubled past and allow the commission to move on under its new leadership.

This affair has been festering for seven years, casting a pall over the principle that everyone is subject to the law – especially a commission that is supposed to be a bastion of integrity.

There was once a time when Coalition governments would have acted promptly to protect equality before the law. But as Roberts told parliament on Wednesday, he had been forced to introduce his bill because Perrottet’s government was dragging it heels.

“We were told in June, and again in August, that the matter was under consideration, but nothing has happened. I can see the leader of the government holding his head, and so he should,” Roberts said.

Proponents of anti-corruption commissions view them as a bulwark for integrity. Properly designed, that can be so. Yet from start to finish this affair was all about the failure to defend equality before the law.

It has left the appearance of weak governments jumping at shadows and abandoning principled lawmaking in order to avoid offending an over-mighty commission.

There are clear lessons here for those in Canberra designing the National Anti-Corruption Commission. But will the lessons from NSW be ignored?

On Monday, the Liberal Party’s Paul Fletcher told the House of Representatives that the committee running the inquiry into the government’s NACC Bill had declined to publish a submission from another of ICAC’s innocent victims, lawyer Nick Di Girolamo. Di Girolamo had been accused of fraud at an ICAC public hearing yet was never declared corrupt and never charged with any offence.

After what Fletcher described as “voracious” media coverage, Di Girolamo received death threats, as did his family.

Fletcher told parliament that when Di Girolamo was hauled before ICAC, the commission’s then counsel assisting, Geoffrey Watson, “fed the hysteria by labelling Mr Di Girolamo a ‘shyster’.” With Di Girolamo’s permission, Fletcher quoted parts of the suppressed submission including his account of what happened when he walked into an ICAC public hearing: “As I walked into the inquiry on the first day, someone yelled out ‘suicide is an option, Nick’.”

Fletcher said it was troubling that the committee examining the NACC bill had declined to publish the submission, “which leads me to wonder how many other submissions highlighting some of the negative consequences of current design features of state anti-corruption commissions have similarly been suppressed by the committee, with the Labor majority presumably following direction from the Attorney-General.”

Di Girolamo’s submission goes into some detail about Watson’s time at ICAC. It also includes an extract from a report tabled in the NSW parliament on Watson’s conduct. That report is by Bruce McClintock KC, who was then Inspector of the NSW commission.

Last Friday, McClintock told a NSW parliamentary inquiry that many of ICAC’s difficulties could be traced to one counsel assisting and one commissioner.

Di Girolamo’s suppressed submission is closely related to a submission he sent to a 2020 inquiry on reputational harm at ICAC. That submission is on the website of the ICAC oversight committee of the NSW parliament.