Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, I present the committee’s report of the inquiry into the annual report of the Integrity Commissioner 2006-07, together with the evidence received by the committee.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

I am pleased to present the committee’s report on the first annual report by the Integrity Commissioner. The Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, or ACLEI, was established on 30 December 2006 for the purpose of providing independent oversight of Commonwealth agencies that have a law enforcement function, and the Integrity Commissioner’s 2006-07 report covers the period from the commission’s inception to 30 June 2007. This first annual report provides a review of the process and history that led to the creation of the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, which is of course the first Commonwealth integrity agency of its kind. In receiving the annual report, the committee was satisfied that it complied with all the reporting requirements. The inquiry has allowed the committee to satisfy itself that the development of the structures and processes that enable ACLEI to conduct its work is well advanced.

The committee noted the observations in the annual report on the staged implementation approach to developing ACLEI’s operation and determining its workload requirements and therefore to assessing the adequacy of its resources. ACLEI’s pressing need for additional resources to undertake its increasing workload has been recognised, I am pleased to say, by the provision in the 2008 budget of $7.5 million in additional funding over four years.

ACLEI is a significant addition to Australia’s anticorruption apparatus. It was established to strengthen this apparatus both at the structural level and at what could be described as a cultural level. The commissioner’s annual report makes the point that ACLEI was created to address the risk of corruption rather than in response to identified corruption practices. This pre-emptive health and maintenance approach to fighting corruption is to be commended. As they say, the best time to check your gutters is in summer.

Indeed, under section 15 of the relevant act, which sets out the functions of the Integrity Commissioner, one of the commissioner’s responsibilities is to ‘maintain and improve the integrity of staff members of law enforcement agencies’. From my experience of working to establish the Ethics Office within the United Nations, I am a strong believer in mainstreaming ethics and values into staff and management training and advice within the context of any relevant agency or institution as a necessary and effective part of anticorruption efforts. It is critical to recognise the crucial role of both people and processes in ensuring public confidence in the integrity of our public institutions and to remember that, without good institutions, good people will fail, and without good people good institutions are ineffective.

Looking forward, it is perhaps this creation of a culture of integrity aspect of ACLEI’s function that in time will be considered the best argument for extending ACLEI’s current jurisdiction to other Commonwealth agencies with a law enforcement function. Such an extension is contemplated by section 224 of the act and is noted in the committee’s report.

I also note the Integrity Commissioner’s comments with respect to the positive relationship that already exists between ACLEI and, on the one hand, those Commonwealth agencies under ACLEI’s jurisdiction—that is, the AFP and the ACC—and, on the other hand, the four state based law enforcement integrity agencies. It is to be anticipated that this Commonwealth-state interaction will benefit agencies at both levels.

I would like to take this opportunity to endorse the remarks made in the Senate by the chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, Senator George Campbell, and to thank my fellow committee members and the secretariat for their work. I thank the witnesses who appeared before the committee. I want to commend and congratulate the Integrity Commissioner, Mr Philip Moss, and his staff for their work and, of course, I recognise and value the important contribution made by Professor John McMillan, who was the acting Integrity Commissioner for the first six months of ACLEI’s existence. Finally, I would particularly like to acknowledge the fine work of Senator Campbell in leading the committee this year.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like the member for Fremantle, I am delighted to speak on this first report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, or ACLEI as it is known. I have joined the committee in opposition and this is my first committee in many, many years. It is proving very interesting and I would like to thank the secretariat of the committee for their excellent work and the chairman of the committee for his good work as well as ACLEI, who appeared before the committee to provide very useful and interesting evidence which forms the basis of this report of this parliament.

There are some concerns about the operation of ACLEI and the support that has been provided to ACLEI by the government. That is what I would like to speak on in the five minutes that I have to address the House tonight. I am particularly concerned, as is the opposition, that ACLEI is not being funded with the resources that are necessary to ensure that the overseer of both the Australian Crime Commission and the AFP has the necessary resources to with confidence be able to guarantee the public and the government that corruption allegations or matters referred to it are able to be entirely thoroughly investigated. In evidence to the committee, Commissioner Moss did say:

... you start with our present allocation and then the assumption is that over time, as our capacity develops and as the need becomes clear, further resources would be given to us.

The committee noted in its report that ACLEI is operating at a loss in 2007-08 of $0.523 million—$523,000—and has received permission from the government to operate at such a loss. In the budget just announced it was provided with another $750,000 for this financial year. As the resources are needed and the requirement is growing, I would have thought that the government would have committed much greater resources to ACLEI in this budget and going forward than we have seen in the budget in May. In fact, the former shadow minister for homeland security, Arch Bevis, made those points before the election but, as with so many promises, once the election was out of the way, it went the way of the wind.

Commissioner Moss also made the point that there had been a change in the way that matters were being referred to his commission. He said that there were four areas where the work is growing for ACLEI, making it harder for them to exist with the tiny staff that they have now. Not only are there now 45 corruption issues that have been referred to ACLEI in the last couple of years but there is a change in the nature of the work they do. The committee noted that they are now more likely to be involved in contemporaneous and even imminent matters and that those issues demand more timely assessment by ACLEI. It also said that previously many of the cases notified to ACLEI by the ACC and the AFP had been subject to at least preliminary investigation, but that is no longer the case. The burden of original assessment has shifted towards ACLEI. It is also the case that ACLEI have developed their access to more information sources enabling better assessment of an issue before it has grown and as a consequence they are taking longer to be able to assess them properly. Finally, because their operational knowledge is growing as a new agency they are able to undertake broader and more meaningful inquiries than they previously were able to.

The committee expressed its concern about the impact of this increased workload on the organisation’s capacity and indicated that we thought that the government should provide greater resources to ACLEI in order for it to be able to do its job properly. The former commissioner for ACLEI, Commissioner McMillan, indicated that at least 50 extra staff needed to be employed by ACLEI. I note that in this budget there are sufficient resources for three extra staff but the former commissioner indicated that at least 50 extra staff were needed. So ACLEI is dwarfed in size by the Victorian and New South Wales agencies that do a similar job and yet it has to cover about 6½ thousand AFP employees let alone the ACC and now it is reaching into other aspects of the government. So the committee, while it does support greater reach for ACLEI’s activities, has indicated that ACLEI needs a much higher resourcing for staff for it to be able to do its job successfully. (Time expired)

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for statements on the report has expired.