Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to just make a few short remarks about this bill. Further and more detailed contributions are going to be made by Senator Larissa Waters and our other members in the Senate but I do just want a place a few matters on record. Establishing this Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission to enforce the codes of conduct that should regulate parliamentarians' behaviour has been a long time coming. Recommendation 22 of the Set the Standard report was that the houses of parliament should establish this body within 12 months. The IPSC was initially expected in October 2023 but that timeframe has since been delayed until October 2024.

Both houses of parliament have now endorsed codes of conduct for behaviour, but one of the things that we strongly believe and why we are pleased to see legislation coming here is that, without an independent body to investigate breaches, those codes have been unenforceable. It's for that reason that the Greens support the establishment of an IPSC to hold MPs accountable for bad behaviour.

We do have some concerns that some of the provisions in this bill don't go far enough, as far as had been mooted and had been recommended. We think there should be higher fines for MPs and more consequences for ministers where there is an adverse finding and that it shouldn't be up to the Prime Minister to determine what happens to ministers who misbehave. We are disappointed to see that the bill doesn't allow the IPSC to suggest appropriate parliamentary sanctions to be imposed on MPs by the privileges committee, because this is something that recommendation 22 of the Set the Standard report actually specified and actually proposed. We are disappointed that that hasn't been picked up.

We're also disappointed that there's no requirement for the privileges committee to report its reasons if it departs from IPSC recommendations. This is important. The 'I' in IPSC stands for 'independent'. Part of the reason that the public ought to have faith in this is that it may well be the IPSC that recommends action be taken. When that comes here—if it comes here—and, for constitutional reasons, it is only able to be dealt with by the privileges committee, if the privileges committee doesn't do what the independent body has recommended, I think people will be entitled to know why. If we've set up this independent body and then someone does something wrong and a sanction is recommended, but the privileges committee or a committee of the parliament—that is, the parliament itself—decides to depart from that, then, at a minimum, we say there should be reporting of reasons because the public must have confidence that politicians will be held to account. A strong and transparent process is needed for that confidence.

On those issues that are flagged—and potentially others as we work our way through the bill, but certainly on those—our leader in the Senate, Senator Waters, will move amendments in the Senate to address those omissions. I want to pay tribute to the work of Senator Waters and, indeed, all of the other members across parliament on the leadership task force as well as Greens deputy leader, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, and all of the other members of parliament for their work on the codes of conduct. The Greens think that having an IPSC to enforce these codes of conduct is a very important step in making parliamentary workplaces safer.

Finally, to conclude my brief remarks, it is worth noting that as well as the work of people within the parliament, this progress would not have happened without all of the brave staff that spoke out. Many of those staff spoke out with great fear and trepidation, but they were brave. They brought their stories forward and they forced us to act. The request that they had is, indeed, a request that pretty much everyone else in this country would have—namely, that that this place set the standard rather than be a national shame; it is about time.

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