Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

Of all the people in Australia, I probably am the most qualified to speak on this. I don't say that out of some vain hubris. A group of policemen in Queensland murdered 42 people. That's a matter of public record. For twenty-one of them, in the Whisky Au Go Go fire, it wasn't intentional, but they still murdered them, Forty-two people were murdered. We had no integrity commission. I tried to do something by myself, and I'm sure other members did; at least one ALP member did. And it was terrifying, absolutely terrifying. We had no integrity commission and nothing of that nature, and it led to the most dreadful of outcomes. The Fitzgerald inquiry had nothing to do with government corruption. It was about the police force murdering people. It was discovered that the commissioner of police himself had been providing protection—I don't think he had any idea of the extent to which the thing had gone. But, regardless of that, here's the thing: if you don't have an integrity body, then this can happen. And when you do have it, it can terrify people who should be terrified.

In Queensland, we have the most extraordinary situation where the Premier raided the Integrity Commissioner's office when she wasn't there, took all the files, and then closed down the Integrity Commissioner's office by taking all the staff away. She has precedent for that. She ordered Robbie Katter, the leader of our party in the state parliament, to publicly state something, and, 'if you don't, I'm going to punish you'—flagrantly illegal, threatening a member of parliament to force him to do something that he didn't want to do and hadn't intended to do. A clear breach of the section in the crimes act. Now, two bodies looked at it and neither of them would go there: they wouldn't say she had been right, but they wouldn't say any action should be taken. Now, if it's a parliamentary committee of integrity, the two major parties get together and they have a little tete-a-tete, and, 'I won't pick on you if you won't pick on me'. That's what happened in the Robbie Katter case.

The second case is far, far more troubling—that a government closes down the Integrity Commissioner—but it proves the necessity for an Integrity Commissioner, because if the Premier could go to such lengths, clearly there is something bloody awful in the Integrity Commissioner's files—something that no-one has now. The files have been taken by a government department and they have vanished. With the heroism of this lady sitting here in front of me, the member for Indi, maybe we will never have a situation in the federal parliament where 42 human beings get murdered by a group of corrupt policemen. And, far from saying that the Queensland Integrity Commissioner does not have teeth, what this actually proves is that they have very, very real teeth, so much so that a government has moved to completely destroy the Integrity Commissioner.

I don't think any decent people on either side of this parliament would say that we don't need something. There are grave dangers. There were so many innocent people hurt in the Fitzgerald inquiry. I can get physically sick even thinking about the wonderful, heroic coppers that had child pornography put on their computers. Judge Vasta was hung, drawn and quartered without the slightest bit of evidence ever being produced, and he has gone to his grave now. So there is a terrible downside. But if you add to the downside and have a look at what was happening in Queensland then, and is happening again now, my point about the Integrity Commissioner in Queensland is that whatever was in those files was so damaging and so serious that the government would take the most incredible action to close it down. And that is proof positive of why you need an Integrity Commissioner. They have got onto stuff that needed to be put on the public record and was so serious for the government that they would take this measure to close it down. So I applaud the member for Indi and her statement on the need for a federal integrity commission, and I'm proud to be in her little group of crossbenchers and proud to be with Andrew Wilkie and all the others who have been pushing for this. Even though I know the terrible downside to this sort of initiative, clearly we must go with it.

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