Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy President. I was using that purely as an example because the inference was made by Senator Brandis about the honourable good member Bob Carr in terms of his period as the Premier of New South Wales. But if they are that precious I will refrain from touching that nerve that hits them so severely when we talk about the current Queensland government and their nepotism and their activities that have been in the media for some time now. It is a concern of the Queensland Liberal-National Party, no doubt, by the degree of defence that has been contributed towards them in this chamber today.

The United Nations Convention against Corruption is the first binding global instrument aimed at combatting corruption. We know that. Certainly Senator Brandis would be aware of this with his involvement on the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and the Senate estimates program, which I am involved in as well. We hear from regular departments about their particular activities. It is an area where it has certainly established mechanisms for the prevention and criminalisation of corruption as well as for international cooperation and asset recovery.

Today in an inquiry by another committee that I am involved in—the Human Rights Sub-Committee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade—we were actually looking at this particular area as well, with regard to sex slavery and child slavery and with regard to what leads to the corruption and involvement in that sort of activity globally around the world and how, hopefully, we can eliminate that through the assistance of organisations like this, because it is an insidious trade. After you go through the most criminalised activities in the world, those being arms and drugs, third comes the trade of sex exploitation through the human trafficking of people around the world. So I am certain that instruments like the United Nations Convention against Corruption will assist with regard to establishing fair measures to eliminate those sorts of activities around our centre—because we are neighbours to the Asian rim, which is a high trading area of that sort of trade through our region. (Time expired)