Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In 20 May 2022, the Australian polity voted for change. They voted for transparency and integrity in government. In my seat of Kooyong, people voted because they wanted politics done differently. One of the things that people have spoken to me about during the election campaign last year and since that time has been their desire for integrity and transparency in government. What we have seen in the last government and, unfortunately, in the first 12 months of the Albanese government is that politics is still being done very much the same way it was before. Yesterday, in the House of Representatives, we saw the Albanese government block an integrity bill, an integrity measure to increase transparency around massive infrastructure projects in Australia. A succession of Independents and crossbenchers spoke in support of amendments which would have strengthened that bill and would have increased the transparency of this government. The Albanese government voted against an amendment it had previously put up itself in the last government, an amendment which had been proposed by the incoming Prime Minister. It opposed its own previous measure for transparency. It is a perverse measure and an incredibly disappointing one at a time that we know Australian people want integrity in their politicians.

More recently, we have also seen increasing evidence of the malign effect of lobbyists in this country. There are more than 1,300 people who have access to the corridors of power in Parliament House. Many of them do not carry lobbying passes, and this is one of the measures I and other Independents will be working on in the next six months, to increase the transparency of who has access to Australian politicians right now. We have discussed this in this House and we discussed it in Senate estimates yesterday but there has been no change over many years. We know that hundreds and hundreds of people can enter Australia Parliament House and walk straight to the doors of politicians. We have no register of who half those people are, we do not know who they are talking about and we do not know what they're talking about.

In recent years we have seen increasing evidence of the breakdown of the transparency of government. During the Morrison years we saw sports rorts, we saw water rorts and we saw the Leppington Triangle. We saw in my electorate alone car parks to the value of $65 million which had no approvals, and there were no infrastructural requirements. It was basically pork-barrelling. People do not want this and they do not want us as politicians to be immediately accessible by lobbyists.

If a person is on JobSeeker or on the age pension or on a single parent pension cannot walk into Parliament House and talk to me, why should someone from the BCA or the ACTU be able to waltz into my office and do that? There is no parity or equity there. What we do need is to change the rules around lobbying in this country. We need a lobbying register which is legislated. We need a lobbying register which is enforced by the Attorney-General. We need to have real penalties for those people who break the rules, rather than a slap on the wrist and a temporary faux exclusion from this place for three months. We need to hold those people to standards of account.

We also need to set access for ministerial diaries and we need to end the embarrassing, ridiculous way in which people from this House, ministers in particular, transition straight into very well-paid consultancy jobs immediately on exiting parliament. We need to end the constant shuffle between the halls of power in industry and the halls of power in this place. We need to give Australian people some assurance and some sense of surety that their politicians are accountable to them and are not just feathering their own nests and improving their own interests in retirement. In recent years we have seen a number of senior government ministers walk straight out of this place and into very well-paid lobbying jobs. We all know that there's a level of interest there, and we know that industry is not stupid. There's something to be got for those expensive sinecures that these former ministers are receiving in industry. The Australian people deserve better than that; we all deserve better than that. So, in the next year, I will be moving lobbying laws, and I will be improving the rules on this.