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

[by video link] This motion talks about the 966 days since the government announced that it would introduce legislation for the establishment of the Commonwealth Integrity Commission. The motion also says that the Labor Party announced on 26 July that it would establish a powerful, transparent and independent national anticorruption commission. But the Senate has actually already done its bit. Almost two years ago the Greens' bill for a strong, independent and properly resourced corruption commission with teeth passed this chamber. In fact, it's been 696 days since the Senate did that. The bill has been languishing in the House of Representatives on the long list, because the government doesn't want a strong anticorruption watchdog. It certainly doesn't want the version that the Senate has passed, because it has teeth and would work to clean up corruption. It's perhaps unsurprising that the government doesn't want to touch it with a barge pole, considering the litany of scandals that continue to plague it and many of its ministers. Instead, we see that the government announce almost three years ago that it's going to do its own bill—it's coming. Two years ago, it described the bill as imminent, and I think it's now been about six months since the second round of consultations was concluded. It's sham consultation, because the experts keep making suggestions to the government about how to fix the government's weak proposal, and the government keeps ignoring these suggestions because it doesn't want a strong corruption watchdog. It wants a fig leaf, so the bad behaviour can continue—and everybody knows this.

The Greens have been pushing for a federal corruption body for more than 10 years now. Our first motion to kick off this conversation was in 2009, and we've not let it drop for the succeeding 10-plus years. It's great that commitments have now been made by both of the big parties, but words are cheap. And, as I say, it's been 696 days since the Senate passed my bill, and the government's doing absolutely nothing to progress a strong version; it keeps on kicking its own weak version into the long grass. In that time, public confidence in the integrity of this place, in our democracy, has continued to decline. In fact, Australia has dropped out the top 10 in Transparency International's global anticorruption rankings, which are also known as the corruption perceptions index. People want better, they deserve better, and they can smell a rat.

In the absence of a federal corruption watchdog—and I might point out that the Commonwealth is the only government among all our state and territory governments that doesn't have a corruption watchdog; every state and territory has one or is in the process of setting one up—Australians have to rely on a patchwork of measures to find out about the dodgy dealings of this government. We've had the ANAO, the Audit Office. There have been Senate inquiries. There have been orders for the production of documents. There have been some FOI challenges. There have been the state and territory corruption watchdogs. There has been investigative journalism. Those measures have revealed an absolute dog's breakfast of scandals, a litany of scandals, in addition to the ones that are listed in the motion and that Senator Gallagher discussed in her contribution. The list is as long as your arm.

There have been overpayments to offshore companies for water licences with no water. There have been millions of dollars handed to an inexperienced business, registered to a shack on Kangaroo Island, to run offshore processing facilities—multimillion dollar contracts for those gulags that keep getting renewed despite myriad complaints, breaches of local laws and a failure to meet KPIs. There has been pork-barrelling of the Safer Communities Fund by Minister Dutton and others. There have been millions of dollars of public money handed out to gas companies headed up by Liberal Party donors. In particular, the most recent one, which we just examined in an inquiry at the start of last week, is $21 million of public money going to the company Empire Energy to open up fracking in the Beetaloo basin, against the wishes of the traditional owners, and make a dangerous experiment with our groundwater and our climate through hydraulic fracturing for shale gas. Of course that company has very close connections with the Liberal Party, and it's headed up by one of its largest donors. Perhaps it's not one of its largest donors—they have so many—but one of its significant donors. The list of scandals continues. There are so many involving Minister Angus Taylor that I would run out of time if I were to list them all.

The fact remains that there is a real dearth of transparency and integrity applying to this government, and it is at an all-time low. The Australian public are having their confidence in the institutions of our democracy damaged as a result. Centre for Public Integrity analysis released just last week found that, of the grants programs that the ANAO has audited since 2019—sports rorts, sports rorts 2, the car parks, or a bit of 'pork and ride'; the list goes on—which have dished out $10 billion in public money, every single one has been found to be flawed, with problems that have ranged from minor improvement to serious maladministration. This has gone beyond an occasional slip-up. This is now a pattern of dodgy behaviour that is shaking the confidence of the Australian public in our institutions of democracy.

Now, I don't think much of this government, as I'm sure everybody knows, but I do think that the parliament and our democracy should be held in high regard, and, as such, the people that are involved in running it on a day-to-day basis should be acting with more integrity and more transparency and to the utmost standard—the public interest. And yet we see, time and time again, ministers that would have gotten kicked out of the ministry 10 or 20 years ago are Teflon now. That minister stays in their role and often gets a promotion or, at worst, gets moved to a different ministry. So the standards of this government are lower, I think, than they have ever been before in the history of our parliament, and that saddens me greatly because the people deserve better.

What we've got is a patchwork of integrity measures to try to hold this dodgy government to account, and too many things slip through the cracks. The ANAO, which have been just fabulous, considering they run on the smell of an oily rag, have been critical in bringing dodgy behaviour to light. But very few consequences have flowed from the behaviour and misbehaviour that they've identified. Government ministers are Teflon-coated. They bluff their way from scandal to scandal. Mainly their hides are saved because the next scandal comes along to distract from the last scandal.

We won't fully understand the scale of the corruption, fraud, dishonesty and exploitation without a strong federal corruption watchdog. A few weeks ago, a group of high-profile former judges, including Mary Gaudron, Margaret White, Paul Stein, Tony Fitzgerald and Margaret McMurdo, called on the government to make good its promise to introduce a corruption watchdog bill. That promise was made almost three years ago, and a draft bill still hasn't seen the light of day. They said:

A National Integrity Commission is urgently needed to fill the gaps in our integrity system and restore trust in our democracy.

I agree with that, but imagine what we'd actually find if we had a rigorous, independent and well-resourced integrity commission with strong investigative powers. Imagine what a difference it would make if consequences actually flowed for corrupt behaviour and the findings of such. Imagine how busy a federal corruption watchdog is going to be when we finally get one. It's what Australians want and it's what they deserve.

A recent Australia Talks survey found that 89 per cent of respondents thought that most politicians in Australia will lie if they feel the truth will hurt them politically, 72 per cent of respondents strongly disagreed with the statement that politicians are usually held accountable for their actions and 88 per cent of respondents want a federal corruption watchdog.

Since the government originally said it was going to legislate this commission within 12 months of taking office, it's missed numerous deadlines. It ignored the criticisms of its original draft framework and, when an exposure draft for its proposed Commonwealth integrity commission was finally released, nothing had changed. It completely ignored all of the input from the experts in that first round of consultations. All of the same experts made all of the same criticisms of that exposure draft, because it's weak and ineffective. That's exactly what the experts described it as. The Centre for Public Integrity analysed those submissions. There were over 200 of them made by various organisations and all but two opposed the Commonwealth bill in the version that it was drafted. So 198 submitters, experts in the field, opposed the weak version of a corruption watchdog that this government is trying to fool the public with. It's nowhere to be seen and its draft principles are so weak. The experts keep saying that in repeated conversations, and the critiques and commentary keep being ignored by this government. That's because this government doesn't want a corruption watchdog and, if it's going to be dragged into having one, it's going to make it as weak, toothless and piecemeal as it possibly can. But the experts are calling the government out on that and the Australian public realise that's what's going on. They don't want a Clayton's corruption watchdog; they want a real watchdog, with teeth, that's going to start to clean up the absolute dodginess and scandal plagued incidents that this government keeps dishing up for its delectation.

Those 200 submissions that I mentioned made several points. They criticised the narrow definition of 'corrupt conduct' and the high bar to commence investigations, because making the bar so high means that most of this dodgy behaviour wouldn't be captured by the government's version of a so-called corruption watchdog, which is no doubt exactly why it was designed that way. The submitters also criticised the limited ability of the commission to act of its own volition and to act on public tip-offs. Instead, the government's version of the commission would have to wait to be asked to investigate dodgy conduct by the very same government that it would then investigate. So you can see the rub there: no government is going to dob itself in. That's exactly why the Morrison government has designed their version of the corruption watchdog to be so weak.

The experts criticised the lack of protection for whistleblowers in the government's version. They criticised the different standards for law enforcement agencies and the public sector. In fact, the police union representative has also strongly criticised this. Why have two tiers of standards? Why not hold everyone to the same high standards, including politicians? That's what Australians want. But this government is not going down that path, because it wants to protect its own.

The experts also criticised the fact that there was no power to hold public hearings or to report publicly about public sector corruption. Again, they don't want this to have any sort of reforming impact. If they keep it all secret, like this government likes doing with so many things, maybe the dodgy conduct can continue. That kind of defeats the purpose of having a corruption watchdog, as so many of the successful state anticorruption bodies have shown. An effective integrity commission would restore confidence in the political process. But the government's ineffective, weak version would not; and, worse, it would remove pressure from the government to do a decent job, and it would give the impression that action would be taken when it would really just be business as usual, behind closed doors, like the Australian public have come to expect from this dodgy government.

We need a strong, independent and well-resourced corruption watchdog. We need one that can investigate the wide range of dodgy conduct that we've seen from this government. We need it to have broad investigative powers and we need it to have public hearings so that dodgy conduct can be brought to light and a deterrent effect can occur. I'm pleased to say that the Greens National Integrity Commission Bill does all those things. It was passed by this Senate 696 days ago—coming up on two years now. If the government would just bring it on for debate, by the end of the month we could have the strong, independent national corruption watchdog that this motion calls for. Let's get on with it.