Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to take note of the minister's very feeble and brief response. Earlier today the Senate asked the representative of the Prime Minister to come and give an account of the extremely dodgy allegations, which have been aired throughout the media and in this chamber all week, of special treatment being given to international highrolling gamblers—who in some cases have criminal backgrounds and might not otherwise be let into Australia on the basis of our visa requirements—and of how ministers and senior officials in the Home Affairs department had been pressured, and had then pressured the relevant officials, to bend the rules to let these high-flyers in.

Now, these are allegations about ministers. I would have thought that the Prime Minister would want to find out who on earth those people are and tell them to stop making his entire government look so dodgy. That's why all week we've been asking: what are you doing to investigate this? Name these ministers. Are they still in cabinet or have they moved on? Who are these people and what are you doing about this scandal? It's the latest in a long line of scandals. We just heard from Minister Cormann, who didn't voluntarily come to tell us absolutely nothing but was compelled to come here—and, sadly, he did tell us absolutely nothing. But what he did say was that the Prime Minister was not aware of any breaches of the ministerial standards. How convenient! When you don't even ask and you don't even investigate, of course you're not aware of any.

The Prime Minister is putting his head in the sand because he doesn't want to know. Well, I'm afraid we have ministerial standards, a code of conduct, for a reason. If the Prime Minister is going to continually ignore the breaches—at the very least, alleged breaches—of these ministerial standards, why does he bother to even have them on the books at all? Give up the charade. It is perfectly clear the Prime Minister doesn't give a damn about enforcing his ministerial standards—he clearly has no standards—so why bother with the charade?

That's why we need a federal anticorruption body, as my colleague has just attested to so well. That's why for 10 years the Greens have been pushing for a federal anticorruption body. We are now the only jurisdiction that doesn't have an anticorruption body. Every state and territory has an anticorruption body. They call them different names, but basically they do the same thing. The federal government doesn't have one, but, boy oh boy, we have seen example after example of why one is needed.

In recent weeks, it started with former ministers Pyne and Bishop being in flagrant breach of the ministerial standard for a cooling-off period before going off to earn money in the area that you previously regulated. They don't care about those rules. The Prime Minister is not doing anything about that. Then it came to ministers Taylor and Frydenberg, who look like they've had a very cosy relationship, trying to dodge environmental laws. Now there are allegations about ministers—potentially, sitting ministers, in cabinet—getting pressured, and bought off by the $700,000 in donations from Crown, to fast-track visas, when they won't even let asylum seekers come here lawfully. It's the height of hypocrisy. The donations flow to both sides of politics; we know this. There was $550,000 to Labor from Crown, almost as much as the $700,000 to the coalition from Crown. It's time we got rid of dodgy donations buying access and policy outcomes.

That is exactly why we need an independent, well-resourced, strong federal anticorruption body. I reintroduced a bill to do just that today. It's a model that the experts have proposed. We back it. It needs resourcing, but it's got independence; it's got broad scope; it's got the ability to have public hearings; and it's got the ability to take anonymous tip-offs from the public, which is how most of the scandals at the state level have been discovered and investigated. We can fix this. Instead, today we have the Prime Minister's representative saying, 'There's nothing to see here,' and they've sent this dodgy matter off to a body that can't even look at the source of the problem. How very convenient, when that agency is hobbled and can't actually investigate the corruption at the heart of this scandal.

We will continue to push for an anticorruption watchdog, because the public deserve better and deserve that we here in this place treat our duties with more respect. There's clearly a lot of conduct that I would consider to be unacceptable—I would go so far as saying corrupt. There is a clear need for an anticorruption body. The Prime Minister's representative did absolutely nothing today to reassure this chamber that the Prime Minister is taking any of these allegations seriously. That's why we'll keep pushing for a federal anticorruption body and it's why we'll keep pushing to clean up dodgy donations that buy off the big parties in this place.

Question agreed to.