Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This has been a truly appalling year for transparency in this country, and the community is demanding to know: what else have politicians got to hide? For instance, we've had the Clover Moore fake document saga; sports rorts; the outrageous price paid for Leppington Triangle; Cartier watches; and the ASIC chairman's massive tax bill. Honestly, it's no wonder that the community's trust in the government and in our institutions is at an all-time low. And now, rather than addressing all this dodgy behaviour, the government has gone and cut the funding of the Australian National Audit Office even further, even though it's the very agency tasked to scrutinise government spending of taxpayers' money.

For heaven's sake, surely independent oversight of this nature is a fundamental pillar of a good democracy, and just as surely the ANAO has demonstrated time and time again the important work it does. Remember, it was the National Audit Office that uncovered the shameless pork-barrelling of coalition seats using community sports programs, and only last month the Auditor-General referred the Leppington Triangle deal to the Australian Federal Police after the Commonwealth paid a thumping $30 million for a piece of land worth just three million bucks. No wonder, I suppose, that the Audit Office is in the government's sights and has lost nearly a fifth of its funding since the coalition came to power. It seems secrecy is in their DNA, which also goes to explain the government's woefully inadequate federal integrity body.

Frankly, that will be a toothless tiger. For instance, it will not conduct public hearings into allegations of corruption and it won't be able to report or make public findings of corruption. Moreover, there is no remit to look at conflicts of interest and it will rely on self-referrals by MPs. Even worse, it will actively discourage whistleblowers, because Public Service whistleblowers would risk being turned away or even prosecuted for making allegations, even if they have a reasonable suspicion of corruption. Frankly, we'd be better off with nothing rather than this appallingly designed integrity agency. No. What we need is a powerful independent body that can hold public hearings, make findings of guilt, lean on a broad definition of corruption and accept referrals from any member of the community. In other words, we need an integrity agency that actually has the resources and powers to do its job and to do it properly.

I regret to add that, in my home state of Tasmania, things are just as bad. Indeed, the Tasmanian government has officially been named Australia's most secretive government, with the Tasmanian Ombudsman last week confirming Tasmania is the worst jurisdiction at releasing information. Indeed, approximately one-third of requests for information under the right-to-information law are refused by Tasmanian authorities, which is a rate of refusal 750 per cent higher than Australia's most open jurisdictions, Victoria and the Northern Territory.

And that's just the start of it, because, as revealed by an Australia Institute report released today, Tasmania has weaker political donation laws, less government transparency and more limited public accountability than the other jurisdictions. Indeed, the report finds that, as other states fix their accountability mechanisms following a public corruption scandal, Tasmania routinely does nothing to fix the problem and, if it does make an attempt, it's often unsuccessful. For example, you just need to look at the 2018 state election, where the Tasmanian Liberal Party spent a record $4 million to ensure its re-election, but we simply don't know where all that money came from. Then there's the refusal of the Premier to tell us which businesses shared in the $26 million COVID hardship grant program—nor can we be assured that Tasmania's so-called integrity commission will give us any answers, because, according to the Australia Institute report, since its establishment in 2009 the Tasmanian Integrity Commission has made no misconduct findings, held no public hearings and referred no cases to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

In closing, all of this secrecy is simply not good enough, and the community is sick of it. Instead we need effective national and state integrity bodies with teeth, and we need to end the culture of secrecy and impunity which has become so commonplace in our parliament. A good place to start would be a well-funded, independent and genuinely effective National Audit Office that can build on the good work its already done in the public interest time and time again.

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