Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

are on the record and he can speak for himself, and that is fine. I want to bring to the attention of the chamber the following: section 135.2 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, which pertains to obtaining a financial advantage that people are not entitled to receive. That is the section of the Commonwealth Criminal Code that Centrelink uses to prosecute people for wrongfully claiming welfare allowances and entitlements. There are roughly, according to what I looked up this morning, 10 prosecutions a day around the country. That is what happens, if you are in improper receipt of welfare entitlements, to people who are living right on the edge of poverty or in fact well below the poverty line.

Politicians on the other hand can sail along on baseline salaries starting at around $200k a year. If we make a mistake in here the federal police do not move prosecutions under that section of the Criminal Code. We are allowed—in some cases for years—to leave it lying under the carpet and then come forward and say, 'Oops, I am sorry, I am going to repay that.' We saw the way the disgraced former Speaker of the other place handled it. She kind of dug in bitterly until it was obvious to everyone in the country, except her and the Prime Minister, that flying a chopper to a Liberal Party fundraiser and emerging like some kind of Bond villain is so far outside entitlements that it does not pass any kind of test you would want to put on it.

The gargantuan double standard that applies appears to be invisible to everyone inside this building, but I can honestly say that it is really highly visible to everybody outside. Maybe it is like asking a fish to notice water; maybe it is just really difficult because it is what we swim in in here. That sense of cocooning and isolation that occurs in this building I think touches all of us in some ways. We are in here for weeks at a time and then fly home and reconnect with the rest of the world and with the real world. That isolation distances us and is maybe why there is this denial. We should really call out, this morning, politicians from the Liberal, National and Labor parties who are saying: 'We don't need something like this to apply to us. The states and territories are different. The police forces are different. The public sectors are different. We are above all of that. We are above reproach. There is no evidence.' The reason there is no evidence of corruption at that high level of Commonwealth politics is that nobody is charged with looking for and finding it. There is that gap in the institutional architecture that people have been quite happy to gloss over, this morning, and pretend that we do not need, and it is precisely the problem.

Some senators, probably inadvertently,—I am assuming good faith on this—clearly do not understand what the bill does, so I just want to come to what the actual proposal is. The proposal is for a national integrity commission and it has three main offices, and this is where some confusion was expressed by, I think, Senator Fawcett this morning. The idea is that the agency or the entity has three limbs. One is to absorb the existing Commonwealth Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner. It is not that we are proposing to establish a new law enforcement integrity office, it is to absorb the existing functions and operations of that body that is charged with investigating alleged corruption in the AFP and in the Australian Crime Commission.

A lot of the powers that are based on the Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner Act of 2006 we do not propose to modify, but the two new limbs that would come into being would be the national integrity commission, which is modelled reasonably closely on the New South Wales ICAC that has been devastatingly effective at going through and routing out the unthinkable corruptionthat was rotting away at the hearts of the Liberal-National Party and the Labor Party in New South Wales. So that is one limb—the national ICAC.

I think that maybe it does make sense in your party rooms when you are working out your tactics to say: 'We are above all that. There is simply no evidence of any such thing.' Are we going to wait for the kind of gruesome corruption scandals that disfigured politics in the states that led to the establishment of those anticorruption bodies? Do we have to wait until it is just rotting out there in plain sight, or could we move pre-emptively to set up such a body to begin to restore confidence in the institution in which we hold so much trust in in here?

I forget whose contribution it was said, 'How gross of the Greens to come in here off the wake of a hideous parliamentary entitlements scandal and talk about entitlements'. Sorry, that is what we assume this chamber is for. The third limb is to establish an independent parliamentary adviser, effectively an integrity commissioner for MPs. We were talking before about that grey area between legitimate use of entitlements. For example, I was criticised in TheWest Australianfor taking a charter to the Lake Way uranium drill site out the back of Wiluna. It is about 1,000 kays from Perth. The Aboriginal mob in the north-east goldfields are really concerned about what a uranium mine on a lake bed would mean for country and culture in that part of the world. I guess I could have rung them and said, 'Come to Fremantle.' I chose to go to them. I would consider that legitimate use of a charter entitlement. It is expensive because WA is larger than Western Europe. I would consider that a legitimate entitlement. Most of us, quite frankly, use the entitlements legitimately, as far as I am concerned.