Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I just wanted to say three things which summarise the recommendations of this important report into, colloquially, the car parks rorts. The first, which is reflected in the first recommendation, is that the Prime Minister was up to his neck in it and that, as the report says, the commuter car park scheme and the Urban Congestion Fund were being used as a vehicle for a political purpose.

Basically we had a systematic, coordinated scheme—not just car parks but also going across sports rorts, community development grants, Building Better Regions Fund—to be spending taxpayers' money for political purposes, to buy votes. The Prime Minister was up to his neck in it and he needs to come clean. Hence, the first recommendation of the report, which says that we need to have a full explanation to the parliament of the role that the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's office, the Deputy Prime Minister's office and any other ministerial offices and staff played in the allocation of funding under the Commuter Car Park Fund.

The second really clear suite of recommendations here reflect the fact that, in terms of the overall purpose of the Urban Congestion Fund—tackling urban congestion—the whole process of determining where the money went did not come close to that. In fact there was double removal from urban congestion. First of all, the department has done zero work on determining what sorts of projects we should be funding if we're serious about tackling urban congestion. Certainly, there's very little evidence that commuter car parks are actually at all useful for tackling urban congestion. But, even if you accepted that, then the process of deciding where those car parks should go was not based on any assessment of their efficacy in tackling urban congestion. Essentially, we had coalition members of parliament being canvassed, 'Where would you like a car park?' Or basically, 'Where can you buy votes?' There is such clear evidence of that from the report and from the investigations we did, which, of course, were building upon the important work that the Auditor-General did into the car parks fund.

The third point is probably the most important point in terms of going forward: how are we going to make sure this doesn't occur again? Essentially, when we asked the integrity experts, 'What can we change to make sure this doesn't happen again?' they came back to us resoundingly with the same answer: we need a federal anticorruption commission, an integrity commission, that has teeth. That's what is needed to make sure that this sort of corruption, these rorts, do not continue into the future.

The Greens of course have a bill. We've had legislation that has gone through this place. It has been sitting down in the House of Representatives for two years now. We have a government that promised that in this term of their government they were going to introduce legislation for an anticorruption commission. But they've decided now in these last weeks of parliament that it just isn't a priority. We have had the priorities of moving on religious discrimination law that is going to increase discrimination against people, and an awful lot of other legislation, but the anticorruption legislation has not been a priority. Fundamentally that is what we need; we need an anticorruption body with teeth. Frankly, I do not trust that this government is going to deliver it. The only way that they're going to deliver it is to kick this government out.

This is my last speech in this place for this year, and I am looking forward to next year. I am looking forward to an election. I am looking forward to kicking this government out. Then what we would very much like to see, and what I think we have a good chance of achieving, is the Greens with a shared balance of power, pushing the next government to go further and faster on issues of corruption as well as tackling the other important fairness and sustainability issues that we as an Australian community face.

Debate adjourned.