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

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The time line for that commission was such that Labor supported, as the Leader of the Opposition said, the Commonwealth integrity commission before the last election. They said that they would need a 12-month period after that election to ready a bill, so that would have been May of 2020 this year. They further noted—in fact, the shadow AG went on to note—that as well as drafting they'd need time for consultation. Eminently sensible. The shadow AG said:

… we also acknowledge that designing a body as complex and as significant as this is properly the work of government, with all the resources available to government.

So, whether Labor, had they been in government, would have devoted all of the resources of government in May this year at the height of a global pandemic to a complicated, significant, complex, intensive consultation period on an integrity commission, or whether they would have applied all of the resources available to government to dealing with the pandemic, is, thankfully, something we will not find out, but it would have been a very strange decision.

It is also true that the government received its first draft of the bill in December of last year, which I might note is much earlier than their time line of 12 months. One of the things that I have been doing is looking at ways in which you can improve that draft bill, and one thing that I am absolutely convinced that that draft must have is a mechanism to prevent vexatious, baseless, politically motivated time-wasting referrals. And why is that? That's because of the shadow Attorney-General, who has an Australian record of 10 baseless—

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