Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Republic) Share this | Hansard source

One of the most important issues of faith that a government has with the Australian people is to spend taxpayers' funds responsibly. But this government, the Morrison government, has abused that privilege with the Australian people: sports rorts, grassgate, regional rorts, dodgy land deals in Western Sydney. The ever-growing list of scandals surrounding the Morrison government have clearly shown why Australia needs a powerful and independent anticorruption commission and how the Morrison government has done everything in its power to try and stop it.

There was the infamous sports rorts and their colour coded spreadsheet, a program which the National Audit Office found:

There was evidence of distribution bias in the award of grant funding.

And:

The award of funding reflected the approach documented by the Minister's Office of focusing on 'marginal' electorates held by the Coalition as well as those electorates held by other parties or independent members that were to be 'targeted' by the Coalition at the 2019 Election.

Then there was grassgate, one of a number of scandals linked to minister for energy who used his position to water down environmental protections for native grasslands which a company he part owns cleared on a farm in New South Wales. It's a serious abuse of power by a minister in the Morrison government, and abuses of power are regular, unfortunately, under this government.

A favourite of the government has been the Building Better Regions Fund, where we've seen 89 per cent of projects and funding between the 2019 election and the end of 2020 going to coalition seats. There were 112 out of 330 projects in round 3 and 49 out of 163 in round 4 approved by the former Deputy Prime Minister's hand-picked ministerial panel, against departmental recommendations. Then we saw this government somehow blow $30 million on land in Western Sydney that was later valued at just $3 million. We still don't have any credible explanations for why the Morrison government came to pay a developer 10 times what the land was worth. This is a disgusting abuse of taxpayers' funds.

A national anticorruption commission would be able to help uncover the truth about these dodgy deals. It would mean that ministers were held to account in the same way as those in New South Wales, which has been able to quickly refer questions to its anticorruption commission. It's now been over three years since the Morrison government claims to have started work on its weak, ineffective and opaque Commonwealth Integrity Commission. The Prime Minister and the then Attorney-General promised to have draft legislation ready by the end of 2019, but the submissions that have finally been made public by the Attorney-General's Department have again confirmed that the Morrison government's proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission is a dud: it's weak, it's secretive and it's lacking in independence that instead of exposing corruption would cover it up.

The Law Council of Australia says:

… the draft legislation has significant shortcomings—both in the scope of the corruption it can investigate and in the unnecessary complexity of the mechanisms it requires …

It further says:

… draft legislation should be substantively revised and amended before it is introduced into Parliament.

The Australian Federal Police Association in its submission said the draft legislation has 'serious deficiencies' because it doesn't allow the public to refer cases to the commission. The Police Federation of Australia is rightly outraged that, while inquiries into police officers would be held in public, inquiries into members of parliament would be private. How dare you treat police officers that risk their lives every day like that. What a massive double standard and abuse of the service of police officers to treat them like that. It's no wonder that the Centre for Public Integrity has denounced the proposed Integrity Commission as 'the weakest watchdog in the country'. In its current form, this is a commission that would be unable to instigate its own inquiries into government corruption, would be unable to hold public hearings when a corruption investigation relates to politicians and public servants and is likely to be prevented from investigating any of the multiple scandals of this government.

After eight long years in government, the Morrison government has failed to take action to tackle corruption and the abuse of taxpayers' funds. Labor is committed to a powerful, transparent and independent national anti-corruption commission, and it is long past time that the Prime Minister stopped stalling and instituted a National Integrity Commission.

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