Fatima Payman (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a young person, I appreciate that learning about life and its challenges is tough enough, let alone having to question the integrity of the people you are supposed to trust, the people who are meant to think of the collective good and the people who create legislation that will benefit everyone in our society. When I hit the 2020 campaign trail in Western Australia, both doorknocking and phone banking, I heard from young people first-hand, from all walks of life, who were put off by politics and the voting process altogether. I heard them say things like 'government can't be trusted', 'they're all crooks', 'they're good for nothing', 'they're self-interested and corrupt', 'they don't listen' and 'they do nothing'. All they heard about on the news in the past nine years were countless numbers of rorts, cases of misconduct and corruption and a lack of transparency when the previous Prime Minister secretly appointed himself to five ministries. So you can imagine how disappointed and in despair young people felt, the same young people who will one day be the pioneers and leaders of our tomorrow, the same young people who are full of ideas that could potentially hold the key to the issues we currently face. Labor listened and committed.

Before the election Labor promised we would be a government that Australians could be proud of, both nationally and globally, a government committed to integrity, honesty and accountability, unlike those who came before us. Our priority since been elected has been to legislate a powerful, transparent and independent national anti-corruption commission by the end of the year. This is an essential step to fulfil our promise to the Australian people.

The Albanese government's National Anti-corruption Commission will be built on the following six design principles. The commission will have a broad jurisdiction to investigate serious or systemic corrupt conduct across the Commonwealth public sector by ministers, parliamentarians and their staff, statutory officeholders, employees of all government entities and government contractors. The commission will operate independent of government with discretion to commence inquiries into serious or systemic corruption on its own initiative or in response to referrals, including from whistleblowers and public oversight. The commission will be overseen by a statutory parliamentary joint committee empowered to require the commission to provide information about its work. The commission will have power to investigate allegations of serious or systemic corruption that occurred before or after its establishment. The commission will have power to hold public hearings in exceptional circumstances and where it is in the public interest to do so. The commission will be empowered to make findings of fact, including findings of corrupt conduct, and refer findings that could constitute criminal conduct to the Australian Federal Police or the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. Finally, the commission will operate with procedural fairness, and its findings will be subject to judicial review.

This legislation also provides strong protections for whistleblowers and exemptions for journalists to protect the identity of their sources. This is the level of accountability the Australian people expect, what they voted for and what they deserve. For so long Australians have felt their trust in the conduct and discourse of the federal government crumble and they remain scarred, but I stand here today proud to be a Labor senator, a part of the Albanese Labor government committed to healing and restoring the public's faith in our political system.

I remind the Senate of the wise words of William H Hastie, which are displayed on the wall of Old Parliament House. He eloquently said:

Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming, rather than being. It can be easily lost, but is never finally won.

To uphold our duty to the true essence of democracy we first need to ensure integrity and transparency is established so that people feel confident in the legitimacy and accountability of the government and its intentions of serving the best interests of all Australians. I thank Senator Waters and all of my other colleagues here in the Senate for their advocacy and effects in striving to see the establishment of this National Anti-corruption Commission.