Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Effectively, the answer from the minister is that Australia will just lag behind its overseas peers, because that answer did not address the fact that in comparable jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, the US, Canada, France and Singapore, they effectively use deferred prosecution agreement schemes. In particular, as I said, they assist law enforcement by freeing resources to focus on other crimes, noting that—and this is the important part—the average foreign bribery case in the OECD takes over seven years to prosecute. It involves many millions of documents, which you've got to work through, and multiple countries, but it also has uncertain outcomes. When you have the deferred prosecution agreement scheme, you suddenly go from seven years down to getting an outcome. In relation to that success, 671 million pounds in global penalties was paid by Rolls-Royce in 2017. That was a successful DPA scheme. In 2020, Airbus paid 3.6 billion euro in global penalties in multiple different countries. The answer given by the minister does not stack up to the evidence that is actually on the record and, in particular, to the fact that they are already utilised in comparable jurisdictions, and they are getting outcomes. But Australia can just lag behind, and, perhaps later on down the track, we may or may not have a look at a deferred prosecution scheme.

In the context of the failure to prevent offence and the bill's broad definition of an associate, which includes subsidiaries and contractors, a DPA scheme would provide an opportunity for a corporation to self-report in circumstances where it detects foreign bribery conduct by one of its associates. However, self-reporting would not compel the DPP to offer a DPA. It would remain entirely at the DPP's discretion and could be pursued in parallel to a criminal investigation. Given this, why is the government opposed to a measure such as a DPA that could help combat foreign bribery?