Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to take that interjection. Again, it was a National Party MP defending a pretty dodgy bill. The bill was brought forward by the Liberal Party, but the Liberals and Nationals are in cahoots together—and they're not helping the country out at all.

What the government should do is come in here and, with some courage, admit that it's been outed and that it's been wrong, show it's committed to fighting corruption and bring in a national corruption watchdog. Every state has one, and they do a good job. There are MPs—and a lot of Liberal MPs, by the way—falling over like ninepins in state parliaments, particularly New South Wales and Victoria, because there are corruption watchdogs that can look at and check these things. But what do we get at a federal level? We get: 'Oh, no, we don't have a problem.' We've heard MPs in this parliament say that we don't need a federal corruption watchdog because we don't have corruption at this level. That's not what should be happening now. That's the bill we should be debating, if this government was sincere, rather than covering the backs of the government's mates and not doing the real job that needs to be done.

What you also see with this bill is that the government doesn't care about fighting corruption, because it is only targeting people with a blue collar. Let's be frank: that's what's going on here. If you're a traditional blue-collar worker, look out! The government's after you, in one way or another. It's after you; it's after your union. But, when it comes to fighting corruption across the board, if you're a white-collar worker, hanging out in corporate boardrooms, everything's okay. If you're in the upper echelons of society, nobody's going to go after you while this government is in power. How long will it keep turning its back on what is so clearly needed?

What is clearly needed is a national anti-corruption watchdog. It should have been introduced long before now. We've had them for such a long time, and done some important work in our state governments, exposing the depth of the problem. It's also worth putting on the record that the Liberal-Nationals around the country are getting a real name for themselves of working together to water down anticorruption measures. In New South Wales, where 10 or 11 Liberal MPs have fallen over because they were caught out by the investigations of the anticorruption watchdog, what does the Liberal government do? The Liberal-National government in NSW turns up and weakens the law.