Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Under the Morrison government, Australia is becoming a nation in which corruption is tolerated at the highest levels of the federal government. The Prime Minister is fond of quoting the former Chief of Army's statement that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. From the Chief of Army, it was a statement of moral principle. From this Prime Minister, it's a hollow marketing slogan, because the Prime Minister has made it very clear that the standard he walks past includes conduct by a minister that Federal Court judges described as both disgraceful and criminal, it includes dodgy land deals by government departments to benefit Liberal Party donors and it includes the illegal use of taxpayers' money as if it were a slush fund for the Liberal Party's election campaign.

The Morrison government is so terrified of an anticorruption commission that it refuses to even allow the need for such a body to be debated in the parliament. The work of parliamentary committees—

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, I understand that I'm being interrupted rudely by someone from the government bench. I'm going to continue. In the absence of an anticorruption commission, we've only been able to scratch the surface of those scandals because, using all the resources of government, the Prime Minister has done everything he can to stymie any rigorous and independent investigation of those matters.

One of the Prime Minister's favourite talking points is 'if you can't manage money, you can't manage the country'. By that standard, the Prime Minister should have resigned long ago.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He has never taken decisive action to get to the bottom of what happened or to hold any wrongdoers to account.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can't hear you, Deputy Speaker.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If I need to withdraw, I withdraw. Responsibility is something this Prime Minister dodges at every chance. So, too, the once-pivotal doctrine of ministerial responsibility has withered to a farce under this government. When a corruption scandal breaks, the Prime Minister's immediate reaction is always to deny and shut down all discussion of it by launching sham inquiries conducted by former Liberal staffers or, at best, by individuals or bodies with no powers and no experience in investigations. Those investigations are, of course, always carried out in secret.

It has now been almost three years since the Morrison government claims to have started work on its weak, ineffective and secretive Commonwealth Integrity Commission, but all we've seen from the Morrison government is delay, broken promises and increasingly pathetic excuses. The so-called Commonwealth Integrity Commission proposed by the Prime Minister and his Attorney-General would be by far the weakest and most secretive in the country. It's the sort of integrity commission you establish if you don't really want an integrity commission. It wouldn't be able to investigate anything that occurred before its establishment, which means that every day of delay is another day of dodgy conduct which couldn't be looked at. It wouldn't be able to act on referrals from whistleblowers. It wouldn't be able to initiate its own investigations. It wouldn't be able to hold public hearings. It wouldn't even be able to make findings of corruption!

What the Prime Minister is proposing is not an anticorruption commission. It's a cover-up commission. It's a sham, a bureaucratic bunker into which the Prime Minister could sweep evidence of his government's corruption, scams, favours for mates and other unlawful conduct. What the Morrison government is proposing isn't an integrity commission. It's a cynical marketing ploy designed to deal with a political problem—not the problem of corruption itself, but the problem of corruption being revealed. That's why the Morrison government's proposed integrity commission has been universally ridiculed by legal authorities and integrity experts across the nation as a sham body designed not to reveal corruption but to conceal it. The ever growing list of scandals surrounding the Morrison government, including sports rorts, 'grassgate', the member for Hume's forged document and the $30 million airport land rort demonstrate why Australia urgently needs a powerful and independent national anti-corruption commission, and why the Prime Minister and— (Time expired)