Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is remarkable that the Prime Minister felt that it was so important to bring back the parliament just so that we could engage in a filibuster to prevent the debate of importance legislation and important motions. What a waste of precious public funds.

Part of the intent was to prevent debate on the implementation of a national anticorruption watchdog. Let me say a few words about that. It is said that the likelihood of someone entering into a corrupt or conflicted action is a measurement of two things. People engage in corruption if the level of financial or personal benefit that can be obtained is measured against the likelihood of getting caught. If you can make a lot of money and there is little chance of getting caught that is a recipe for corruption. Here in the federal parliament, when you include the federal public service, we bring in $300 billion more in revenue than all of the states combined. Every year, there are thousands of contracts signed, grants awarded, money transacted and benefits received. Despite all this money, we have very little institutional protection to deter misconduct in the federal parliament. Our system is vulnerable to corruption and the government and the opposition have no plans to change it.

Consider our lax political donation laws, where disclosure is set absurdly high and the public cannot know who bought influence from whom before an election. Consider what happened when Brickworks gave $263,000 to the federal Liberals during the last election, including one single donation of $150,000 one month before the election. The CEO of Brickworks, Lindsay Partridge, had a long history of financial support for the Liberal Party, and when there was implemented a policy that touched on his business, a policy that the Liberal Party opposed, there was an aligning of the stars. He offered all of the financial, campaign and media support that he could muster.

Within weeks of being elected, the Abbott government closed down the Clean Technology Innovation Program. For those who are not aware, this was a program funded by the carbon price to offer grants to companies to improve their energy performance. According to Brickworks' annual report, they had already received $3 million in federal grants before the scheme was closed, but they had in the pipeline another $14 million of grants that had not been contracted. A few weeks after the scheme was closed, a number of grants were contracted, according to the public register. Brickworks subsidiaries received a total of $17 million from a carbon price program that improve the company's energy bills by $11 million a year, benefits they are still enjoying. So here we have $263,000 of private money flowing one way before the election from the CEO of Brickworks, Lindsay Partridge, to the federal Liberal Party, and then a few months later we have public money—an estimated $14 million of taxpayer money—flowing the other way, from a scheme closed down by the Abbott government into the Brickworks site. So for every dollar that Mr Partridge donated in that election year his business got $53 in public money for his capital equipment. A few months later he got another commercial benefit when the carbon price was repealed, with the support of the member for Fairfax, it must be said, who also enjoyed financial benefits for Queensland Nickel once the carbon price was removed.

We cannot be sure whether this is corruption, but the whole thing stinks. The decision to award millions and millions of dollars in grants from a carbon price program that Tony Abbott and his cabinet ideologically loathed, in the midst of a budget emergency, may have been a legitimate exercise of executive power but it may not.

Without a national anticorruption watchdog to pour over the details, to examine the transactions, we will never know what went into the cabinet's decision when cabinet members looked down the list of possible grant recipients and saw Brickworks, their political allies. We need donations reform—we need it now—and we need the establishment of a national anticorruption watchdog to improve Australia's governance, to restore faith in our political system and to wrestle power from those wealthy vested interests and put it back into the hands of the Australian people.