Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Integrity Commission Bill 2013. This bill seeks to establish a National Integrity Commission—better known, as the Greens would call it, as an ICAC—as an independent statutory agency consisting of a National Integrity Commissioner, a Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner and an Independent Parliamentary Advisor. It is an appealing concept to have a National Integrity Commissioner in one place. It would have appealed to me earlier in the course of my parliamentary career. But I came to the view long before now that putting all of your eggs into one basket is not necessarily the best outcome.

From what I have read and seen over time of writings from persons in the field of integrity, such as Charles Stanford and AJ Brown, if you are going to address systemic corruption within a federal body such as the Commonwealth, then a latticework of integrity agencies which are interconnected, working diligently and cooperatively is a far better model. The model that the Commonwealth has currently is not perfect. It always needs vigilance. It always needs to be at its best. But what the Greens are proposing is, I think, an outdated model, one that would weaken the latticework of protections that we currently have, and it would ensure that ultimately you would not have integrity. You would find that you would have a weakened model. What we currently do—and what they say would be the role of the commission—is oversee the functions for the investigation and prevention of misconduct and corruption within all Commonwealth departments and agencies, including the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Commission. What is proposed would also—