Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

Like the member for Fremantle, I am delighted to speak on this first report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, or ACLEI as it is known. I have joined the committee in opposition and this is my first committee in many, many years. It is proving very interesting and I would like to thank the secretariat of the committee for their excellent work and the chairman of the committee for his good work as well as ACLEI, who appeared before the committee to provide very useful and interesting evidence which forms the basis of this report of this parliament.

There are some concerns about the operation of ACLEI and the support that has been provided to ACLEI by the government. That is what I would like to speak on in the five minutes that I have to address the House tonight. I am particularly concerned, as is the opposition, that ACLEI is not being funded with the resources that are necessary to ensure that the overseer of both the Australian Crime Commission and the AFP has the necessary resources to with confidence be able to guarantee the public and the government that corruption allegations or matters referred to it are able to be entirely thoroughly investigated. In evidence to the committee, Commissioner Moss did say:

... you start with our present allocation and then the assumption is that over time, as our capacity develops and as the need becomes clear, further resources would be given to us.

The committee noted in its report that ACLEI is operating at a loss in 2007-08 of $0.523 million—$523,000—and has received permission from the government to operate at such a loss. In the budget just announced it was provided with another $750,000 for this financial year. As the resources are needed and the requirement is growing, I would have thought that the government would have committed much greater resources to ACLEI in this budget and going forward than we have seen in the budget in May. In fact, the former shadow minister for homeland security, Arch Bevis, made those points before the election but, as with so many promises, once the election was out of the way, it went the way of the wind.

Commissioner Moss also made the point that there had been a change in the way that matters were being referred to his commission. He said that there were four areas where the work is growing for ACLEI, making it harder for them to exist with the tiny staff that they have now. Not only are there now 45 corruption issues that have been referred to ACLEI in the last couple of years but there is a change in the nature of the work they do. The committee noted that they are now more likely to be involved in contemporaneous and even imminent matters and that those issues demand more timely assessment by ACLEI. It also said that previously many of the cases notified to ACLEI by the ACC and the AFP had been subject to at least preliminary investigation, but that is no longer the case. The burden of original assessment has shifted towards ACLEI. It is also the case that ACLEI have developed their access to more information sources enabling better assessment of an issue before it has grown and as a consequence they are taking longer to be able to assess them properly. Finally, because their operational knowledge is growing as a new agency they are able to undertake broader and more meaningful inquiries than they previously were able to.

The committee expressed its concern about the impact of this increased workload on the organisation’s capacity and indicated that we thought that the government should provide greater resources to ACLEI in order for it to be able to do its job properly. The former commissioner for ACLEI, Commissioner McMillan, indicated that at least 50 extra staff needed to be employed by ACLEI. I note that in this budget there are sufficient resources for three extra staff but the former commissioner indicated that at least 50 extra staff were needed. So ACLEI is dwarfed in size by the Victorian and New South Wales agencies that do a similar job and yet it has to cover about 6½ thousand AFP employees let alone the ACC and now it is reaching into other aspects of the government. So the committee, while it does support greater reach for ACLEI’s activities, has indicated that ACLEI needs a much higher resourcing for staff for it to be able to do its job successfully. (Time expired)

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