Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

Earlier this year Mr Kenneth Hayne AC, QC attended Parliament House to present the Accountability Round Table Integrity Awards. The awards focus on individual commitment to integrity, and both the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the former member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, were rightly acknowledged for conducting themselves in a manner that deserved recognition. In congratulating the award recipients, Mr Hayne addressed the room on the importance of integrity. While I encourage all members to read his speech, here is an excerpt that I think is particularly important today:

Personal integrity is guided by standards of eloquent simplicity: honesty and courage. The words are simple, yet point to basic truths.

That personal integrity demands honesty is self-evident. And honesty demands courage. It demands courage because compromise, in pursuit of some apparent immediate advantage, always beckons. It demands courage because ends may be thought to justify the means used to achieve those ends.

In public life, as in private life, an individual’s reputation for acting with integrity, once lost, will seldom be recovered. … And so it is, I think, in almost all forms of human interaction, private and public, honesty is rightly expected. Fail to meet it and trust is lost.

And trust is lost in this place. Today we lost just a little bit more. We had Senator Lambie saying that she's done a deal with government, but she can't tell us what it is. We had the government saying: 'Nothing to see here. There's been no deal.' There's only one version of the truth.

Research conducted by the Museum of Australian Democracy has said that by 2025 they only expect 10 per cent of Australians to trust politicians—one in 10 trust us and what we do in this place. That's disgraceful. We are now at a stage where public trust is so low that parliament is now effectively forced to outsource policy deliberations to royal commissions.

How do we regain public trust? How do we act with honesty and courage? The first and obvious step is to create a national integrity commission—one that's well funded, can refer matters itself and doesn't decide that members of this place should be excluded from that process. It must be more than a tokenistic gesture designed to placate a baying public.

The design and implementation of a robust integrity commission should, at the very least, include the ability to self-initiate. As I said, anything less will merely invite cynicism and further mistrust from the community. However, the integrity commission is not a panacea for the challenges facing this parliament. To that end, I've introduced a couple of private members' bills into this place around political donations to lower the disclosure threshold to $1,000 and to promote transparency and accountability by having real-time disclosure. It can't be that on 1 January this year we have people making donations and no-one in this place knows—and not in February the following year but February the year after that. What a mockery that is. What an absolute mockery. No wonder people think that we're in this for ourselves in this place. This place is absolutely awash with money. It comes in from the gambling lobby. Both sides do this.

The National Party still accept donations from big tobacco. It doesn't matter how many Australians are dying from lung disease; they'll still take those cheques. Big tobacco donated $96,000 to political parties in the last annual return, and it's a secret state in this place. Paladin—no-one got to see that tender, did they? And there was the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. Closed tenders in this place mean that we have no idea. We have water deals done in this place where we don't get to find out from government exactly what is spent, because it's all commercial-in-confidence long after the deal is done. What a mockery it makes of this place. We stand in here, hand on heart, saying that we need to be so careful with taxpayers' money and yet it is a secret state. We have no idea.

We have bills in this place that weren't even disclosed. How much of taxpayers' money is going to be spent on the implementation of those bills? I go to the plan for government to drug test welfare recipients. We have profits shifting to the Cayman Islands. (Time expired)

See this speech in context