Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I should not take the bait, should I? I should not take the bait.

Part of it is around interpretation, and then some of it is actually about straightforward integrity. As far as I am concerned, when flying yourself like Cruella De Vil into a Liberal Party fundraiser, you should not need to pick up the phone to ask whether that is okay. That is just completely not okay. That is about tightening up the entitlement system to make those things just basically off limits.

But then I think that for the grey area we would all appreciate the ability to ring up somebody to support MPs and to support staff in particular on making those judgement calls, because we are employed by the taxpayers, a lot of whom are struggling under what is happening in the economy at the moment. The last thing they want to see here is the kind of flagrant abuse that has been in the papers and on the front pages in the last couple of weeks.

So we think this is a relatively uncontroversial bill. This is not a stunt. This is about bringing forward a matter that I would have thought most people would be intrinsically in support of: to complete that gap in the institutional architecture. Everybody else—no matter how flawed or how much you could critique how the anticorruption bodies around the country have run in practice, you have seen continual amendments; Premier Baird is proposing amendments to ICAC even as we speak—has to keep track with custom and practice and corruption, quite frankly. This is for us to complete that gap in the architecture and not to hold the conceit that we are above all of that.

The best way to keep us above all of that is to have a watchdog on the beat, not just around the areas of ambiguity but around the areas, quite simply, of criminal conduct and corruption. I do not think we should assume that this institution is necessarily somehow above the fray of human conduct that occurs and that requires those checks and balances and those accountability mechanisms in every other tier of society where people exercise power or enormous budgets in the public trust. We are not seeking to override state and territory anticorruption bodies; we are seeking to learn from them.

If there are other offers—and I guess I would particularly address these comments to the opposition, who have not ruled it out but are showing no interest at all in doing anything with these ideas—if you think this can be improved, if you think there are better ways of going about it, either come at us with amendments or put your own bill into the field. Announce something—anything but sitting on the fence. Given what people have been put through with Mrs Bishop's tip-of-the-iceberg scandal over the last couple of weeks, surely now is the time to come forward and finish the job.