Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the National Integrity Commission Bill 2013. This is the third straight time that the parliament has had the opportunity to consider this bill. I am the third leader of the Australian Greens to put this bill before the Australian parliament. I do so at a time when there is a tremendous public appetite for reform in the area of politicians' entitlements and an appetite for reform around the issue of corruption more generally.

This legislation would establish a National Integrity Commission, which is, effectively, a corruption and standards watchdog. The National Integrity Commission would have three arms. It would have a National Integrity Commissioner, who would be responsible for the investigation and prevention of misconduct and corruption in all Commonwealth departments and agencies, and amongst federal parliamentarians and their staff. As its second arm, it would have a watchdog that ensures that law enforcement has some independent oversight—so it would be responsible for the investigation and prevention of corruption in the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Commission. Finally, and perhaps most germane to the issue of the day, it would also consist of an independent parliamentary adviser—that is, an adviser who would provide independent advice to ministers and parliamentarians on conduct, ethical matters and on the appropriate use of their parliamentary entitlements.

So, this legislation seeks to expose corruption—not just corrupt behaviour but also behaviour that is completely inconsistent with the standards demanded of us by the Australian community. It would not just police and expose that corruption but would play a very important preventative role as well. Through both the function of advising MPs around the use of their entitlements and other related issues, and the function of investigating cases where corrupt conduct is foreseeable, it would provide for much more proactive findings in addressing issues of corruption.

Turning to the independent parliamentary adviser, its role would in effect be that of an independent umpire that has the ability to make judgements around the appropriate use of parliamentary entitlements. This is a very important issue—it is an issue that obviously has come to public attention in recent weeks because of the level of abuse that exists around the issue of parliamentary entitlements. People have never held politicians in lower esteem than they do at the current time, and it is in part because of some people in this place seeking to use their entitlements—those that allow us to do our job—in a way that furthers their own personal self-interest. We have seen people claim family holidays as work expenses, and we have seen people travelling to weddings, rock concerts and so on and claim these as professional business expenses. We had the spectacle of the former Speaker of the House travelling by helicopter to do a trip that I do very regularly by car. One has to wonder about how someone can come to a view that that gross excess is acceptable. After having done this trip regularly myself, I believe she was also guilty of gross stupidity, because I suspect she would have travelled there faster had she driven there rather than taken the time to board a publicly funded helicopter.

The issue here is this: collectively, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars are being spent in areas that are simply not consistent with what we would all accept is good practice, and at a time when the Treasurer tells us that the age of entitlement is over, that we are facing a budget emergency, and that we need to tighten our belts. What message does it send to the Australian community that we here, as opinion leaders, are prepared to engage in those gross excesses?

It is hypocrisy of the greatest order, and it is why we need to have an independent umpire make judgements on whether something is a legitimate business expense.

One of the areas, I think, that most of us will agree on is that there is a large area of grey when it comes to deciding what is a work expense and what should be classified as something that is a claimable or reimbursable expense—for example, as a portfolio holder in the area of health and as somebody who until recently was not a government minister, being asked to open a conference interstate. Was that something which I was entitled to claim as a professional business expense? There are areas of grey in that. What if the trip included a meeting with a candidate for office from my political party? What proportion of the trip should be claimable? All of those are areas that I think we need some advice on. That is why an independent umpire will take the discretion out of the hands of politicians, many of whom have shown they cannot be trusted, but would also put some clarity around some areas where there are legitimate debates about whether they should be classed as reimbursable expenses.

So here we have an opportunity to do something in a way that ensures that we actually get some movement on this issue. Instead, what we saw from the government was a classic political response, right out of the Yes Minister handbook. When you are in trouble, when there is a lot of public pressure on you as a government and you do not want to act, what do you do? Call for a review or an inquiry. That is what you do: you call for a review or an inquiry. So now we have the fifth review in a short space of time into parliamentary entitlements. We had the Belcher review, where we had recommendations, many of which still have not been acted upon; we had the Williams review; and we have had two Auditor-General reports. Of course, in an effort to shift this from the front pages of the newspapers, we ensure that there is yet another review into parliamentary entitlements.

I note that the panel composition does not include any member or former member from the crossbenches. There are a number of former Green MPs, former Democrat MPs and indeed other former crossbenchers who are no longer in this place and who would have been able to make a valuable contribution to this issue. Instead, we see both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party represented on this panel, and of course what we will see is weak recommendations—a ploy to ensure that we do not talk about it until the review hands down its findings, and hopefully by that time the issue will have left public consciousness. It is classic distraction tactics. I implore the Prime Minister, if he is going to go ahead with this review, that there be representation from the crossbenches, including from the Greens.

The office of independent parliamentary adviser would ensure that there would be a legally binding code of conduct for all MPs to sign up to. That would ensure that we are very clear about what is expected of us, and then we would ensure that that independent umpire would offer impartial and consistent advice to MPs on what they can and cannot claim.

It is my view that the issue of parliamentary entitlements goes to something much, much deeper. I think it goes to a complete disengagement and disillusionment with the current political discourse in this place. It reflects an anger at the level of political debate that we have here and at the very negative and adversarial partisan politics that have come to dominate the current parliament. I think we have a unique opportunity to go some way to address that, to ensure that the work that we do in this place is made easier, not harder, because the community understand that we are acting in their interests and not in our own interests. There are other things that we should do that are not, of course, the substance of this bill. I think the method for the election of the parliamentary Speaker, and indeed the President of the Senate, needs to be reviewed. We need to make some significant changes to our standing orders, including the way we engage in question time, and there are much broader issues around issues like political donation.

Let me come to the other arms of this bill, because this bill is not simply about workplace expenses, as important as that issue is, but about the issue of corruption more generally. We have in every state in Australia some version of an anticorruption commission, and yet here in the federal parliament we have nothing. There is a view that somehow we are immune to the sorts of corruption scandals that have engulfed state governments. Let me run through some of those, because corruption at a state level has been clearly identified and established, and individuals have been prosecuted.

Only recently, in South Australia we saw the chief executive of a state government agency charged with two counts of abusing public office. In Victoria, my home state, we have an education department financial manager who funnelled $2.5 million from schools into his pocket and the pockets of his relatives and other departmental officials. Some of the money was spent on overseas trips, on lavish parties and so on. Last month, IBAC, Victoria's version of the anticorruption commission, charged nine people, including two mid-level public servants, with allegedly funnelling $25 million from Victoria's public transport department into a range of family-linked businesses over seven years. How was that money spent? On real estate, luxury goods, jet skis and a grand piano. We now have IBAC turning its attention to revelations of a fraud worth up to $1 million involving the botched school computer system. There are now growing calls in Victoria for the powers of IBAC to be ramped up because of what we have seen exposed.

I am not going to go into the now infamous revelations that have occurred in New South Wales around ICAC—their anticorruption commission—but it is fair to say that the corrupt activity engaged in by former state Labor ministers Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, along with the exposure of illegal donations from property developers to a number of state Liberal MPs, is now legendary. The question is this: does anyone think that that behaviour is limited to state parliaments, that it does not cross state boundaries, that somehow the Australian parliament is immune? Yet here we are with the federal parliament being the only jurisdiction left unchecked against the very real threat of internal corruption and maladministration across the Public Service and, indeed, our law enforcement agencies.

It is absolutely clear that, given the widespread and established corruption charges that have been dealt with at a state level, we need, as a matter of urgency, a federal anticorruption watchdog. Counsel assisting the New South Wales ICAC, Geoffrey Watson QC, said:

I have seen things that show that federal politicians are not immune from temptation.

Information that was gathered by the New South Wales corruption body left him 'convinced of the need for a federal ICAC'.

Transparency International is the organisation charged with exposing corruption wherever it occurs. Transparency International director Neville Tiffen stated that it 'is almost unbelievable that the Commonwealth does not have an ICAC'. He went on to say:

Detractors say that there is no need for a federal ICAC because there is no evidence that corruption exists at the federal level. This is a nonsense.

They must believe behaviour changes as you board a plane for Canberra. Without a federal ICAC, we simply do not know the level of corruption that exists ...

If you do not look for it, you will not find it. If anything that the recent scandal around parliamentary entitlements shows us it is that there is behaviour that is unacceptable and that, in some cases, it will border on corruption if we do not have the structures in place to expose it. If you do not look, you will not find it.

Transparency International has also criticised Australian law for its low and ineffective penalties that punish corrupt behaviour. A report in 2009 highlights that Australia made little or no effort to enforce the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. We have a very poor record when it comes to stamping out corruption in all of its guises. As recently as late last year, Transparency International released a report that said that Australia had dropped for the second consecutive year in its annual rankings in the corruption perceptions index, slipping outside of the top 10 nations. When it comes to comparing ourselves to some low-income countries, of course we do better, but is that where we want to set the benchmark? Of course we do not. We are now slipping outside of the top 10 nations when it comes to transparency. Let's be clear: corruption is a cancer. It impacts all levels of community life and it is a drag on business. We need to ensure that we stamp it out wherever it occurs and whatever guises it occurs in. So, we are slipping in global standing and we are slipping in the standards that the Australian people expect from us as parliamentarians, and the recent scandal surrounding parliamentary entitlements is symptomatic of something much broader. Who is to say that, if we were to look a little deeper, we would not find not just abuses of parliamentary entitlements but broad and wide-ranging corruption within all levels of our parliamentary agencies? That is why we so desperately need this bill to pass.

The review into entitlements is a small step forward—the concern, of course, being that it is simply to create the illusion of action when both sides of politics are committed to inaction—but it is nowhere near enough. We need much more. We need a federal anticorruption watchdog. We need an independent body that has the powers to hold all Commonwealth agencies, all departments and all federal parliamentarians and their staff to high standards of transparency. We can and should do better. We need to ensure that we have powers to provide oversight to our law enforcement agencies to prevent corruption within the AFP and within the Australian Crime Commission. We need an independent umpire to provide advice to ministers and parliamentarians on conduct and ethics and on the appropriate use of parliamentary entitlements. We can have these reforms right now. We do not have to wait until the fifth review into parliamentary entitlements is conducted. We could act now. If we had a government and an opposition who were prepared to support this bill, we could show that we are committed to ending corruption in all of its forms and to ensuring that parliamentary expenses are used as intended—that is, for parliamentary business.