Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I think the minister doth protest too much! There's a bit of sensitivity over this and over the rorts we have seen on his watch particularly as minister but on the Morrison government's watch overall.

It's been almost a thousand days since the Morrison government promised the Commonwealth Integrity Commission. Look at some of the legislation they've managed to pass in this place, in my own portfolio, and rushed into the House, like legislation on superyachts. Yet a thousand days, and they cannot legislate a national integrity commission. It's a thousand days of delays, excuses and scandal.

If you've ever wondered why the Prime Minister in particular has been so reluctant to institute a real anticorruption commission, you just have to look at the last few weeks alone to see a clue. Maybe it's because of car park rorts, where the Prime Minister and the minister for urban infrastructure—admittedly not the one we just heard speak, although he's had his own scandals—allocated $660 million of funding according to a list of top 20 marginal seats. Or maybe it's to do with the purchase of the Leppington Triangle, where the Morrison government spent $30 million on land later valued by its department at $3 million—something the minister who was at the table speaking previously thought was a very sensible idea. Maybe it's to do with sports rorts, safer communities rorts or regional rorts—we haven't heard a lot about that one; it is the regional jobs and investment program and the Audit Office's current investigation of the Building Better Regions Fund. Of course there's robodebt. We've had the minister when he was Minister for Home Affairs and au pairs. We've had the energy minister's use of forged documents. We've had the then Minister for Industrial Relations refusing to cooperate with an AFP investigation into how her office made an unlawful tip-off to a police raid.

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