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

I think words like these, words I would join issue on, are a correct description of the difficulty and complexity of an integrity commission—words such as these:

I think the lesson to be learned is that anti-corruption bodies are difficult to get right and must be very delicately designed.

They are of a quantum akin to examination bodies and people cheating in exams, or matters of that nature.

But the question also went to why the government has chosen not to engage in a consultation period around this very complicated integrity commission and has chosen to do other things. Why have we chosen to do other things? The government chose to focus all of the resources of government on dealing with a global pandemic which threatened hundreds of thousands and millions of Australian jobs. So what types of things were we focusing our time and energy on? We were looking at developing flexibilities inside the industrial relations system to save hundreds of thousands of jobs. We looked at passing privacy legislation so we could establish a COVIDSafe app which would allow states like New South Wales to successfully contact-trace.

Opposition members interjecting—

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