Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I respond to a number of the issues that have been raised in this chamber today. Let me deal firstly with the member for Isaacs, who ran through his standard list of talking points. The fact, though, as he is very well aware, is that the Morrison government is delivering on our commitment to establish a Commonwealth integrity commission. It will be the lead body in our successful multiagency anticorruption framework.

We recently concluded a nationwide consultation process on the legislation, with 330 written submissions and 46 consultations, meetings and roundtables. The government will consider the feedback received through this extensive consultation process to inform further refinement of the draft legislation before it's introduced to the parliament. We have put in place funding for the Commonwealth Integrity Commission, with $106.7 million committed in the 2019-20 budget, in addition to the $40.7 million of funding for the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, which will transfer to the commission a total of $147.4 million. The member for Isaacs did put out at least one highly misleading media release that I saw, but the fact is that the funding is there.

Of course, we've taken into consideration a number of very important design matters. It's clear from the design of the scheme that only the most serious types of criminal conduct are to be considered by the Commonwealth Integrity Commission. We do not want to have public resources wasted on referrals which are purely for political purposes, like the member for Isaacs' nine referrals to the Australian Federal Police. Now, you may ask: how many of those nine referrals were successful? Was it nine? Was it eight? Was it seven, six or five? Actually, the number is zero. That is nine wasteful political stunts by the member for Isaacs. We are not going to squander taxpayers' money to appeal to his apparently limitless appetite for empty political stunts. On the contrary, what we are doing is carefully designing the Commonwealth Integrity Commission so that it will be an appropriate and effective body, the lead body in Australia's successful multiagency anticorruption framework.

While we're talking about stale Labor Party talking points, the member for Bean rolled out the usual canard about wages growth that we hear from those on the other side. According to the International Labour Organization, the facts are that, over the period of the last year, COVID has had a dramatic impact on wages in just about every country. In the first half of 2020, monthly wages either fell or grew more slowly in two-thirds of countries as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Now, let's turn from that to see what has happened in Australia. The facts are very different to the stale Labor talking points trotted out by the member for Bean. The facts are that real wages have increased in Australia over the past year. So all this talk from the member for Bean is at odds with the fact that the wage price index grew by 1.5 per cent over the year to the March quarter 2021. The consumer price index was 1.1 per cent over the same period. Now, it's interesting to draw a historical contrast. In the period when the Labor Party were last in office, there was a cut to the real minimum wage in three out of their six years. The member for Bean wasn't here then, but he may want to go and look at the history.

By contrast, I'm asked some excellent and important questions, some substantial questions, by the member for Curtin, who brings to this place very serious experience in the whole area, certainly, of tertiary education but also of the law. She asked: how are we working through these issues in relation to women's safety? In the 2021 budget, we've delivered $85 million in additional funding for the family advocacy support service, which uses an integrated method of support to assist families to transition between and manage matters across both legal systems. It integrates frontline legal services with non-legal social supports in the court setting. This is all about delivering the best outcome for Australians who are caught up in these processes. This is a very unfortunate but regrettable necessity, so we are committing significant extra funding, particularly to support women experiencing family violence.

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