Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the minister's explanation. The very point of this inquiry was because we have a major problem with white collar crime in Australia. I think anyone who's read a paper over last six months would have noticed the good work of many of the senators, including Senator Pocock, who have worked very hard to expose this endemic problem—that we have regulators that don't actually enforce the laws that this parliament enacts. Therefore, the answer here is not to enact new laws and have ever-longer statute books but it is to look at why these enforcement agencies are unable to enforce these laws. That is why we proposed this inquiry with the support of the Greens.

The approach that the committee has taken here has been to identify a bunch of cases, some of which are open and some which are closed, and to ask for information about how ASIC has gone about doing its business. Its business, of course, is not to walk around the halls of Parliament House in Canberra and say how good it is. Its business is to enforce the laws and to ensure that we have an economy and a country where people have confidence that, if you break the law, you will face civil and criminal penalties. In order to investigate ASIC's approach to enforcement and ultimately to prosecution, it is necessary to have access to files; otherwise, how can we determine what's gone wrong here? What has gone wrong is that there are a litany of white collar crimes which are well documented in the newspapers and in the media almost every day, where ASIC does not pursue criminal and civil penalties, and, as a result, this fuels the confidence of white collar criminals that they can break the law in Australia and they can get away with it.

Our approach, to be clear, has been a mix of the tools and the powers that are vested in the Senate to inquire and investigate. They are the usage of public hearings. They are the inquiry through obtaining documents, and we have asked over 100 questions on notice. ASIC has filed 13 PII claims, 11 of which have been rejected by the committee. In terms of these case studies, we have asked questions about Nuix, ALS, Super Insider Trading and Magnus Technologies. In relation to Nuix, there is a large body of allegations of insider trading and faulty prospectus issues going back to 2020-21, where ASIC has decided to take no action and has told the committee that those cases are closed. Then you look at ALS, where there are allegations of fake gold certificates being issued into the market, where ALS itself admitted fault, admitted that it had issued certificates for fake gold and had engaged McGrath Nicol to do a review.

And then we have the super insider trading issue, where you have dozens of executives of the boards of AustralianSuper, NGS Super, Rest, First State, Hostplus and Intrust Super and a number of other funds who appear to have engaged in trades on the basis of inside knowledge during the pandemic before the market was told about revaluations or devaluations.

All these matters were reported widely. In relation to Magnus Technologies, insiders and whistleblowers provided three warnings to ASIC—written warnings—that market sensitive information was being leaked and insider trading was occurring. In all these cases, nothing has been done. There has been no attempt to secure criminal or civil penalties, and ASIC has closed these cases. We have sought these files, but ASIC has filed PII claims.

In relation to this review, which has been running for eight months now, there have been a number of conduct issues at ASIC which have come to the attention of the committee. The Chair of ASIC has had an issue where the AFR reported that Mr Longo made an abject apology to staff a week after making a statement, but the incident was deemed serious enough to trigger a Treasury assurance review, escalation to Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the manager's resignation. That is in the Financial Review of 30 January 2023. Then there is the issue of the deputy chair and the uncovering of a $200,000 Treasury investigation, where the deputy chair was subject to a very serious investigation, after dozens and dozens of allegations were raised about the deputy chair's conduct at work, and a number of these findings were upheld. So we have discovered a number of conduct issues on the commission itself.

Further, this motion to establish this inquiry was opposed by ASIC itself, and freedom of information files have shown that in internal emails, before the Senate considered voting on this motion, the chairman said: 'This is extraordinary. What can be done to narrow the breadth of the terms? Can the PJC do this?' And in further FOIs we find that internal ASIC staff talk about the use of Dorothy Dixers in this parliament in order to push away negative media attention. This is an organisation which I think has significant cultural issues. It tries to control the parliament through these internal tactics, but it also has serious governance issues on the commission, which we haven't been able to get to the bottom of through a public examination. I think that there are too many governance issues in this body for it to be sufficiently focused on its main job, which is law enforcement.

This brings me to the point of the role of the executive government where, effectively, we have seen over the past few months a position where the executive government have, regrettably, now started to run cover for ASIC. This started back at estimates in February this year, where Senator Gallagher said, 'Based on the deputy chair's evidence'—in relation to the governance issues that I just flagged—'there was a review done and no adverse findings were made.' Then we have a PII claim filed by the Treasurer to ensure that the allegations and the report—a $200,000 report—are to be kept secret from the public. The Treasurer has decided to use his powers to stop the public from seeing what is actually in this report about the Deputy Chair of ASIC. Then, only a couple of weeks ago, we have a letter from the Assistant Treasurer, Mr Jones, who suggests that we should in fact just do all this work in secret. Mr Jones says:

I urge the Senate Economics References Committee to reconsider this approach and to provide ASIC with a chance to present its claims in-camera.

This is the point I wanted to make today, which is that we have a major problem with white-collar crime. The Senate has issued this inquiry to get to the bottom of this and to do it in public, in sunlight, and what the government is trying to do, and what ASIC is trying to do, is to push this under the covers and into the dark. They want to cover up the governance issues on the commission, they want to allow ASIC to interfere with the parliamentary process, and they don't want these closed case files to be examined by the Senate. Therefore, we cannot do our job as a house of review and we cannot investigate why ASIC is deficient at law enforcement.

It is very regrettable that a government that was elected on the basis of being transparent and having a commitment to integrity wants all this to be done in secret. ASIC, of course, want to do all their meetings with the committee in secret, even though these are closed files, because they don't want to have any scrutiny on why they haven't put people in jail, why they haven't been able to secure civil penalties, why all these people breaking these laws get away with it. That is the sickness here: we are trying to do this in the sunlight but the government, through Minister Gallagher and the Treasurer and Minister Jones, are seeking to support ASIC's objective to keep it all in the dark, to stop the inquiry and for it all to go away. Why should we be surprised? When this motion was voted on in this chamber the Labor Party voted against the idea of having this exact inquiry.