Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start by congratulating the member for Mayo, not just on putting forward the private member's bill, which the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters reported on and we're taking note of, but also on the speech she just made about transparency and integrity in politics, because it is fundamentally important. I start my speech by congratulating my Labor colleagues who are members of that committee on their dissenting report, because it is fundamentally important that we deal with the influence of big money in politics. That is a subset of this point: we rebuild the trust—the ongoing rebuilding of trust—of the Australian people, not in democracy per se but in the way all of us, collectively as politicians, practise democracy. The member for Scullin described the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters as a fundamentally important committee because of its role in safeguarding the institutional framework of democracy. He put that extremely well. The institutional framework of democracy is what we have in our country to guarantee that we have a political system that serves the people. I'm not the first person to say that democracy is not perfect, but it's the best system that we have. That is very true, but the responsibility of all of us who have the privilege of being elected to be members of this parliament is to continue to strive to make that democracy better. It's a strange argument to say that something that was introduced in 1983 should always be the standard. This government likes to refer to Bob Hawke and is perhaps at times trying to emulate Bob Hawke, but it's no Hawke government. The member for Barker should be aware that what the Hawke government put in place in 1983 was groundbreaking, but it's 2020 now and we can't just sit on our laurels. We must continue to strive to make our democracy better.

We in this place all know that trust in politicians and politics in Australia has been on a decade-long decline. Last year we were looking at 26 per cent of the community who had trust in politics and politicians. It is true to say—and it is welcome—that some trust has been regained recently because of the way in which politicians from across the political spectrum, at state and federal government level, have dealt with the health crisis of COVID-19. But it's a shame, isn't it, that it took a global pandemic for something to shift in Australian political behaviour and for our community to start to show some trust?

So here's a moment that we should all be taking to build on that trust, and not have it be a fleeting moment in time. It is a moment when Australians are looking at their leaders and saying: 'Yes, you are putting the national interest before your own interest. Yes, you are acting on data and the advice of experts and scientists and making difficult decisions that aren't always electorally popular but are for the good of the people. We respect you for that, even while we have to make sacrifices because of your decisions.' We need to take this moment in time to bring in broader reforms to the way we behave as politicians and the way this parliament operates and democracy operates, to build on trust and to have better politics. We need to reform question time, not just because the procedures are outdated but because the way politicians behave in question time is embarrassing. We should be ashamed of some of the things that we see. In my opinion, we need to put in place a code of practice for politicians as to how we behave in parliament so that when schoolchildren, adults and older Australians watch question time in parliament they say, 'That's how leaders behave,' not, 'That's how children are taught not to behave.'

We need to have a government that has a genuine commitment to transparency, a government that will answer difficult questions, look at difficult issues, take Australians into their trust—as has been done a number of times during this pandemic—and say: 'This is hard. We don't always have the answers. Yes, we got some things wrong, but together let's work towards solving this problem.' That's how we rebuild trust.

We need to look at constitutional reform first and foremost—and, gee, over the last week and a half haven't we seen why we need it? We need to have an Indigenous voice to parliament. We need to recognise the First Nations people of this country and we need to adopt all of the recommendations of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, including truth-telling. Australia's history is a difficult history. It's difficult for our First Nations people. It's difficult for us to have to acknowledge the way in which they have been treated since day one. But you cannot have true reconciliation and move forward until you have truth-telling. History isn't perfect. That's why we have to learn our history properly and then learn from our history. It's not just symbolic to say that our Constitution has to recognise First Nations people, and it's much more than symbolic to say that we should have a constitutionally recognised voice to parliament.

If we have four-year terms in this parliament, if we give governments time to govern and less time to campaign, perhaps we can have governments that have three-, five- and 10-year plans for our country. We might even have, one day, a Liberal-National government that is brave enough to stand up and say: 'Climate change is real, and we're going to take real actions to deal with it, on the advice of scientists, experts and data. We might feel a bit of electoral pain from our base for a little while, but we're going to put those measures in place and you're going to see the good results.' We'd then go to a vote, after a four-year term, being able to point to the improvements in our way of life because we'd actually have dealt with one of the greatest threats facing countries around the world, which is climate change.

We need a federal ICAC. Sports rorts has shown that. The most recent export rorts, which were raised in question time yesterday, with 97 per cent of grants to small business for exports before the election going to Liberal seats, have shown that. We know it's not enough to act honestly, to act with integrity; we have to be seen to act honestly, to act with integrity. And we have to be willing to be held up to high standards. We need to meet them but also we need to be willing to be held to those standards and, quite frankly, investigated if there is any suggestion that we haven't met them.

When David Thodey did a review of the Australian Public Service, he said:

To build trust in the public sector, all participants in the system—the APS, Parliament and ministers (along with their advisers) as well as third parties—must operate with high levels of integrity.

They're simple words and they're true words. Not only must we act with high levels of integrity; we must be seen to act with high levels of integrity. And we must not be scared of transparency. That is what the bill that the committee considered was about and that's what reforming democracy is about.

There is a moment in time now that we must grab. Question time yesterday saw ministers and the Prime Minister revert to name calling and personal attacks in response to questions about government policies, like robodebt, which have caused real pain and harm to citizens. We can't have that continue. We can't snap back to politics the way it was in 2019. We have to build a better future out of this pandemic. We have to take this fledgling opportunity, when there is some growing trust in Australian politicians, to build a better democracy.

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