Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

If I need to withdraw, I withdraw. Responsibility is something this Prime Minister dodges at every chance. So, too, the once-pivotal doctrine of ministerial responsibility has withered to a farce under this government. When a corruption scandal breaks, the Prime Minister's immediate reaction is always to deny and shut down all discussion of it by launching sham inquiries conducted by former Liberal staffers or, at best, by individuals or bodies with no powers and no experience in investigations. Those investigations are, of course, always carried out in secret.

It has now been almost three years since the Morrison government claims to have started work on its weak, ineffective and secretive Commonwealth Integrity Commission, but all we've seen from the Morrison government is delay, broken promises and increasingly pathetic excuses. The so-called Commonwealth Integrity Commission proposed by the Prime Minister and his Attorney-General would be by far the weakest and most secretive in the country. It's the sort of integrity commission you establish if you don't really want an integrity commission. It wouldn't be able to investigate anything that occurred before its establishment, which means that every day of delay is another day of dodgy conduct which couldn't be looked at. It wouldn't be able to act on referrals from whistleblowers. It wouldn't be able to initiate its own investigations. It wouldn't be able to hold public hearings. It wouldn't even be able to make findings of corruption!

What the Prime Minister is proposing is not an anticorruption commission. It's a cover-up commission. It's a sham, a bureaucratic bunker into which the Prime Minister could sweep evidence of his government's corruption, scams, favours for mates and other unlawful conduct. What the Morrison government is proposing isn't an integrity commission. It's a cynical marketing ploy designed to deal with a political problem—not the problem of corruption itself, but the problem of corruption being revealed. That's why the Morrison government's proposed integrity commission has been universally ridiculed by legal authorities and integrity experts across the nation as a sham body designed not to reveal corruption but to conceal it. The ever growing list of scandals surrounding the Morrison government, including sports rorts, 'grassgate', the member for Hume's forged document and the $30 million airport land rort demonstrate why Australia urgently needs a powerful and independent national anti-corruption commission, and why the Prime Minister and— (Time expired)

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