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

Well, the Labor proposition is that because the government wants to take the time to properly design and consult on something as important and as complicated as a Commonwealth Integrity Commission, that somehow the Labor Party is the paragon of integrity—because we want to take the time. The reasons I find that proposition fairly hard to take seriously are three-fold. First, when Labor announced a commitment to an integrity commission, they radically under-funded their proposal, allocating $58.7 million. In our previous budget we allocated $106.7 million, which is on top of the $40.7 million of existing funding.

The second reason I find their proposition hard to take seriously is that they themselves said that this is a complicated matter that would take time to draft and then require time to consult on. Indeed, the member for Maribyrnong said, 'As you would appreciate, a reform of this magnitude is complex and would require extensive consultation and design work.' In their own policy document they said that, if they were elected, a draft would be produced 12 months after the election, which time we are well inside.

The third reason I take with a grain of salt their proposition that they are paragons of integrity is that when this issue was first raised with the shadow A-G he said, 'I'm not convinced there is a need for another integrity officer.' A bit of a problem with a skiing trip was the context of that being raised. They have no model themselves, so that means that they haven't once declined to support the Greens' model but then supported the Greens' model. Another reason I find their proposition difficult to stomach is that the Labor Party themselves have tried to—

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