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

I thank the member for her question. I might just quickly touch on the electoral issues as well. The government has instituted a number of reforms in recent years with respect to donations, many of them relating to foreign donations, and I'm very happy to provide a summary of those to the member individually. Of course, giving the analogy of the state prohibitions that have existed in some states with respect particularly to property developers, there are issues at a federal level with those types of laws which go back to a range of decisions of the High Court on constitutional matters, going back to the ACTV decision and the implied freedom of political communications. So those comparisons, if I might say so respectfully, aren't perfect comparisons.

With respect to the integrity commission, as the member is aware—and we've discussed the model that the government has for an integrity commission, and I know that the member prefers some features of some other models to those that the government is proposing—there's been serious design attention to that integrity commission body. We have allocated $106.7 million of new money to the integrity commission over the forward estimates. That excludes the $40.7 million of existing funding for ACLEI. By comparison, members opposite promised $58.7 million. So, the commitment we've given to that integrity commission is almost $89 million greater. Obviously there have been other priorities for the government whilst, as the opposition have noted, hundreds of thousands of Australians have, very sadly, lost jobs or are in zero hours now because of the COVID pandemic. But we are now revisiting the issue of the integrity commission, and our legislation, and no doubt you and I will have further conversations on that.

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