Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm incredibly proud to be a parliamentarian. I'm incredibly proud to represent my community of Dunkley. Every moment I spend in this chamber I genuinely consider a privilege. It's been hard over the last few days and the last few weeks, and perhaps even over the last few years, to always feel proud about how politics is played out in this place. The minister's contribution to this debate just then can be summed up in the phrase: 'In our view, the end justifies the means.' Most of us were taught early on that the end doesn't always justify the means. Actually, if you want to be a real leader, if you want to be part of a government that leads the country, that has the country's trust and that people can look at and say, 'Everything they do, whether I agree with it or not, is done with the best intentions, with integrity, with morals and ethics,' then the means matter as much as the end.

No-one is saying that a program that delivers funding to help communities be safer is a bad idea. The member for Shortland wasn't saying that grants legitimately given, having gone through a proper process with integrity, that help communities to feel safer and be safer, shouldn't occur. What we're saying is that the way in which those programs are administered matters. That's the point of this debate. That's what people speaking on the government side should be trying to grapple with. That's why the Auditor-General is so important. That's why we should have an integrity commission in our national politics. That's why we have processes in this parliament that are supposed to be about scrutiny and debate, because it's not just the end that matters; it's the means, particularly when we're talking about taxpayers' money and getting elected to run a country. It matters.

It's why, before COVID hit, there'd been decades of serious decline in Australians' trust in government and their belief in, of all things, the democratic process. Twenty-six per cent of Australians had trust in their politicians before COVID. At the height of the bushfires, about one-quarter of Australians had trust in this federal government. Over the last year, there was some recovery in trust because of the way in which people in this parliament conducted themselves during COVID. There was an extraordinary increase in the trust in government—to about 70 per cent at the state level and 60 per cent at the federal level—by November last year. But what we have seen from recent ANU research is that it has gone back down again, extraordinarily quickly, to the low 50s. Exercises like the one that the minister for homeland security or whatever his correct title is—I apologise—engaged in with this community safety fund are part of the reason for this decrease. It's not the first time. As the member for Dunkley, I had to help three environmental groups to put in new applications for funding because they had had funding announced from a grants program that didn't exist at the time. This is why this is important. (Time expired)

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