Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last year, Transparency International released a report which concluded that Australia is perceived as a nation where corruption has worsened significantly over the past eight years. Who has been in government over most of the last eight years? It's the Liberal-National coalition, and it's therefore little wonder that this government still has not appointed a Commonwealth integrity commissioner and it's little wonder that last year it cut funds to the Australian National Audit Office. This is a government that doesn't like to be scrutinised. This is a government that wants to bury or hide its real activities away from the people who would otherwise expose it for what it is doing. And, if it does appoint an integrity commissioner, I have no doubt that it will do so in a way that limits the person's ability to properly investigate the government's own behaviour, because it has much to hide.

Over the years the government have been in office we have seen a litany of rorting, whether it's to do with infrastructure rorts, whether it's to do with sports funding or whether it's to do with, in more recent times, board and government agency appointments, which the member for Isaacs, who's here in the chamber, has made public statements about on more than one occasion. With respect to the sports rorts funding, I say this on a project on the border of my electorate and the electorate of Spence. The City of Salisbury missed out on a $500,000 grant for a $6 million project for a new athletics centre simply because there were no votes in it for the government. They knew that putting money into that project would not give them any return. For organisations that make submissions for these grants, it takes a lot of time and effort. It is not a simple process, and then to be treated so shabbily by this government who don't even follow their own guidelines is, quite frankly, something that no government should do and something they should be highly criticised for.

We then saw it with board appointments—in particular, the most recent one, the interim Inspector General of Water Compliance. This appointment has been criticised not only by people in my own state but by people from the government's own side of politics. A lot of these appointments are critical in decision-making across the country. We then come to the Community Crime Prevention Program, and the facts with respect to that are absolutely clear: 70 highly ranked projects were cut and 53 hand-picked projects were then funded to the tune of $5.6 million. Why? Because this government was trying to shore up its votes in some of the seats that it needed to win.

Only today there was a joint media release from the Law Council of Australia, the Community Legal Centres Australia, the Women's Legal Services Australia and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services. It was headed 'Family Court merger opposed by 155 stakeholders'. That statement goes straight to the heart of safety, and I'll quote just one part of the statement from the Women's Legal Services spokesman Angela Lynch, AM, who said:

Our opposition to the proposed merger of the family courts is centred on ensuring the safety and best interests of the child and the safety of adult victim-survivors of family violence in family law proceedings. Safety must come first in family law.

That statement says it all. If this was a government that was concerned about community safety, it wouldn't be merging the two courts and it would be listening to the voices of the people who know. But instead it doesn't do that. What it does is continually look for how it can make political gain from using public funds for its own electioneering. It treats public funds as nothing more than a slush fund for the government to use come election time. We saw that very clearly with respect to the funding relating to this motion.

I go back to what I said earlier. Applications for all of these projects are not only time-consuming but go to the heart of the integrity of government, because guidelines are set and people think that if they follow the guidelines they might be eligible for the funding. To have their funds rejected by a minister who then just makes up his own rules is shameful, and, quite frankly, the government ought to stand to account for doing that. (Time expired)

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