Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What an absolute farce that this afternoon the Senate has tried to require the Prime Minister to have some shred of integrity and disclose a report that somehow magically exonerated himself and his ministers and that they haven't even the guts to table. This whole situation is just so wrong. The Prime Minister should have released the Gaetjens report into the conduct of his ministers abusing public funds and spending public money with extreme arrogance without the Senate having to ask him to do so. Yet, having had the opportunity today to think twice and to disclose that report, we've had the Leader of the Government in the Senate come in and say, 'It's cabinet-in-confidence, and it would not be in the public interest to disclose this report.' It certainly wouldn't be in his government's interest to disclose this report because what is patently clear is that this government turns a blind eye to corruption, particularly when it is in its own ranks.

We all know that there's another opportunity for the government to disclose other documents tomorrow which go to just how much the Prime Minister was behind 'sports rort No. 1'. Of course, there's another sports rorts saga. Just when you thought it was safe to play sport again, there's yet more rorting—you're going to be accosted by a Liberal MP trying to give you money for a swimming pool you don't even want, when all you want is bushfire funding support. But that's another matter.

We have the extreme arrogance of this government in trying to cover up what is so obviously corruption of the highest order. I can't believe that they think they're going to get away with this. Is it any wonder that confidence and trust in democracy has been absolutely bottoming out for several years now? There's only now a tiny majority of people that have any trust in our democracy, and that is incredibly damaging and corrosive. On the flipside, the vast majority of Australians can see the clear need for a federal corruption watchdog, and that is clearly what's needed here. When you have ministerial standards that are clearly so weak that not even this blatant rorting is found to have breached them, they're not worth the paper they are written on. Not only is it about time that those standards are strengthened and independently enforced; it's perfectly clear that we actually need an independent corruption watchdog. We can't have the fox in charge of the henhouse any more. We can't have the PM's mate who used to be his chief of staff and who's now running the department just say: 'Nothing to see. Everybody go back to sleep. She'll be right. Watch the Prime Minister make a fool of himself and be distracted in some other way.' That is not how our democracy is supposed to work.

This is a debasement of the obligation of all of us in here to act in the interests of the public. This government is so arrogant it thinks it's going to get away with this. Well, it's got another thing coming. None of us in this chamber will let this lie. We have more OPDs coming this week for more documents that we will seek disclosure of. Even the press gallery is up in arms about the flagrancy of this secrecy. We've had secret governments before, mostly of this persuasion, but this is the worst that we have seen. Even previous Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary reports have been made public. Even the children overboard report, which was extremely damaging for the government, was tabled.

Clearly, the Liberals used to have some standards and now they have none! These ministerial standards are clearly not worth the paper they're written on. The Prime Minister is not enforcing his own standards. It's kind of interesting that the excuse given for not disclosing this report is that it's cabinet-in-confidence. Well, last time I read the Prime Minister's ministerial standards they didn't mention cabinet. They are in fact a document that the Prime Minister himself has written and is responsible for implementing. So something even more dodgy is going on if that process is now subject to cabinet deliberation.

No-one is going to buy this attempted fob-off by the Leader of the Government in the Senate today, and it's perfectly clear that this is exactly why support for this government—and, frankly, for both major parties—is on the decline. We've seen disclosure of inconvenient reports before; today we've seen sheer arrogance from this government, which thinks it can get away with bribing electors in marginal seats with public money and then have absolutely no transparency and accountability about it.

We will not let this rest. It's exactly why this chamber passed a bill to set up a federal corruption watchdog. I note that the government didn't vote for it, but everybody else voted for it. It passed this chamber and, gee, I wonder why it's been sitting on the bottom of the list in the House of Reps for five months? It's pretty clear to us that the reason the government said, reluctantly, a year and a half ago that, yes, we needed a federal watchdog but have done absolutely nothing to deliver one is that they know they've got an awful lot of skeletons in the closet. Some of them have been revealed in recent weeks. Perhaps there are more to come. But if we have the system that we've got at the moment, where it's the Prime Minister's whim either to choose to enforce or to turn a blind eye to flagrant breaches of the ministerial standards and to get his former mate—his former chief of staff—just to say, 'There's nothing to see here,' then nothing will get fixed in this government. The rorting will get worse, the arrogance will get worse—if we thought it could possibly do so; I'm sure they'll find a way—and public confidence in our system of democracy will continue to decline.

That is the most damaging thing of all. We have a responsibility here to act in the interests of the community and of the planet. If our citizens don't even think that this place speaks for them or represents their interests anymore then this government should bear full responsibility for that. Bring on the election, we say. We cannot wait to see the back of this terrible, self-invested and arrogant government!

Once again, big money is calling the shots. The government is trying to buy seats to win an election. It's getting massive donations from all sorts of vested interests, from big corporates through to the coal and fossil fuel sector. And, of course, there was $2 million from the gambling lobby in the year just before the election. This is democracy for sale, and there are no checks and balances to stop the hubris and the self-interest of this government. In my view it's criminal, and I think this is exactly why Australians are hanging their heads in shame about their government. Certainly, the rest of the world is looking at our government and laughing. They're laughing at the climate denial, they're laughing at the extreme arrogance of the continued rorting and the fact that big money seems to rule decision-making in this place. This is not how it's meant to be.

It's not just that we've seen sports rorts saga No. 1 swept under the carpet; now there is sports rorts No. 2! And of course there is the ongoing saga with Minister Angus Taylor, who has had very dubious dealings with various water companies and various land-clearing issues involving family companies. He was then referred to the AFP for potentially doctoring documents. Again, the AFP have said, 'Look, it's going to take too long to look at it; we're just going to park this.' There is no independent, external investigative body that is holding the government to account—that is even holding them to standards that governments gone by have held themselves to. This government has just given up on accountability and transparency. They just 'reject the premise of the question'. If we hear that phrase one more time I am sure we'll collectively feel even sicker than we do, witnessing the conduct that happens in this place every single day. There is no accountability. The Australian people desperately deserve a federal corruption watchdog. It's going to be very busy indeed.

For 10 years the Greens have been pushing for this. It has been 16 months since the government said: 'Sure, fine. We'll do something about it. We agree.' This was because the election was just around the corner. A year ago this government said an ICAC, a corruption watchdog, was 'imminent'. That was a year ago. We have not seen a draft bill. A bill passed this chamber to set up a corruption watchdog—one with teeth, one that would actually have covered the scandals that we have seen throughout the news since the election, and even before. It would have been a government watchdog with teeth, but this government just does not want the transparency, it doesn't want the scrutiny, it can't hack the accountability. It's continuing to try to sweep things under the carpet. Well, the Australian people are not fooled by your fool at the helm. They deserve better, and we all look forward to them having their say at the next possible opportunity.