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

I'm very aware of the arguments against the initiatives that we are taking here. I saw so many totally innocent people completely destroyed in the Fitzgerald inquiry on police corruption in Queensland. I'll just give you one example. Any policeman that gave evidence against the corrupt police group that the Fitzgerald inquiry was investigating had child pornography put on their computers. There were, I think, something like 32 policemen and people who had done the right thing, who had the courage to do the right thing and who had their lives completely destroyed. They went to jail. Two of them committed suicide, I remember. I don't know how many ended up committing suicide. But they were the good guys. So I can see the inherent dangers here. I can also see the ineffectiveness of what has been done in Queensland. What we're doing here has been done in Queensland, and I'll come back to that.

But the other side of the argument is that, if we had had in place what the honourable member is putting up here today, would we have got into that situation in Queensland? There was a member of parliament called Ray Jones, an ALP member in Cairns, and he said that there were allegations of cattle thieving and drug running in the police force. He got a lot of publicity out of it, and I subsequently found out that there were two murders associated with this group. I rang him up, and he said, 'I don't know what you're talking about—never heard of it. I don't know what you're talking about.' I said, 'You're the front page of the Cairns Post and the Courier-Mail!' He said, 'I never heard about it,' and he hung up on me. If we'd had a crime and corruption commission, he would not have had to fight that fight, and I would not have been charged. The police had me up on two charges—the corrupt police. I wouldn't have had to go through that trauma if we'd had the means to do something about it, which we did not have in Queensland and which is being put in place here today.

There's just one other aspect of this that I would like to bring to the attention of the parliament. In Queensland, they have a criminal justice commission. They change the name fairly regularly, but the last time I looked it was called the Criminal Justice Commission, and it's a body similar to what we're setting up here. It was felt that that was inadequate, so they added an integrity commissioner as well. Now, in Queensland there were 17 applications for development, and nothing had happened with them. The front of the Sunday Mail, the second-highest circulation newspaper in Australia, had allegations that the minute a certain person left the ALP's set-up in the government of Queensland to become a lobbyist, all 17 of these proposals went through in the space of 13 months.

The Queensland Integrity Commissioner was looking at this and got a very intimidating letter from the Premier of Queensland asking about her travel, and the Integrity Commissioner—it was quite excellent, what she did—immediately gave to the Criminal Justice Commission the letter from the Premier, which a lot of people would believe was intimidating. So then what happened was the Premier raided the Integrity Commissioner's office, took the computer which had all the information on what was going on—there was no-one in the office at the time—and sacked the entire staff of the Integrity Commissioner in Queensland. The Integrity Commissioner's contract was up a few weeks after that, so needless to say her commission was not renewed.

So how effective was the CJC? Utterly ineffective. How effective was the Integrity Commissioner? Utterly ineffective. But I would still contend that if we'd had what is being proposed by the honourable member here today, we would not have had 42 murders— (Time expired)

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