Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The shadow Attorney-General just complained about a form of words that has been used that journalists are not above the law, which is very strange to complain about on a day where the shadow Attorney-General said this:

It shouldn't be the case that simply being a card-carrying member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance exempts you from all legal sanction.

Literally today the shadow Attorney-General said the same thing that he's complaining about here. It's absolutely remarkable! You might forgive one's memory for being short over the course of a week, but not an afternoon! It's just absolutely remarkable.

Heading back to these memory lapses, amongst earlier questions with respect to the Commonwealth Integrity Commission like 'Does it amount to a sham?' and 'Do we hate the idea of accountability?' was this scholarly question: 'Why would you call it the Commonwealth Integrity Commission and not the national integrity commission?' That is a hard-hitting question, isn't it?

He answered his own question by saying, 'Because Labor came up with the name "National Integrity Commission"'. It's like the Monty Python skit with the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. It is just absurd. Then the shadow Attorney-General asked me why I had changed my view on an integrity commission—something I've never done. I've always said I have an open mind to it. It would have to be designed properly, but I have never changed my view. The shadow Attorney-General, when asked specifically about the need for a National Integrity Commission in 2013, said:

I'm not convinced that there is a need for yet another integrity officer …

I'm not the one who's changed views here. The Integrity Commission simply needs to be designed correctly, properly and cautiously, which is what's going to happen.

The next question the shadow Attorney-General asked was: 'When is it going to happen?' Labor proposed that, if they came into government, they'd take 12 months of consultation before they even had a draft. I can inform the shadow Attorney-General that, since announcing our commitments and a detailed model in December 2018, the drafting is going very well. It's been noted in the course of my consultations around the religious discrimination bill, which is about 50 pages, that that is a complicated exercise. The preliminary draft that I'm working on for the Commonwealth Integrity Commission is in excess of 300 pages. This is an immensely complicated set of circumstances, particularly in trying to ensure that the new body, the Commonwealth Integrity Commission, which would have two halves to it—one being the law enforcement integrity half and the other being the public sector integrity half—fits in to the very layered framework that already exists between the Australian Federal Police, the Ombudsman, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, the Inspector-General of Taxation, the parliamentary committees, the Australian Public Service Commission and the Parliamentary Service Commission. All of these bodies need to be part of the overall design so that you have the proper system of referrals. These could have been questions that could have been put today and dealt with in a sensible manner, but, instead, we get the question, 'Why have you changed your view?' which isn't correct. As to the question of when, I expect that we will have a full draft out for public consultation in the not-too-distant future. I'd expect that that would be before the end of the year. I'd expect that consultations on a 300-page draft will take some time, as will the committee process.

There are probably few organisations more important in the recent history of the Commonwealth to get right than this one. For a person who's been involved in justice for as long as the shadow Attorney-General has, it surprises me that he has so little eye at the moment to some of the awful things that have happened at a state level under these bodies. I mean, innocent peoples' lives and careers were destroyed by the overreach of executive power. It seems to be precisely the same thing that you seem to be concerned about in the context of AFP raids. My answer to you on those is that it is of course my role, as Attorney-General, to stay completely out of the AFP's investigations, which are their own. So, when you ask me questions like, 'Why did they do it?' it is asking for me to intercede in some kind of evidentiary assessment on the judgement of the Australian Federal Police commissioner, which is precisely the thing that I'm stopped from doing in the proper conduct of my role. It's absurd grandstanding, and we all know it is. Getting this Commonwealth Integrity Commission right is very, very important. Making rhetorical statements about some lack of care is ridiculous. We will do it properly. (Time expired)

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

See this speech in context