Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens political party come into this place and talk the big game, but they've got a few housekeeping issues that they need to address. One of those is why exactly their co-founder, Drew Hutton, leave—or was he expelled? We don't know; it's all a little bit murky. There was also—and I still remember the case—Alex Bhathal, a candidate in Melbourne in Victoria, who basically accused her own party, the Greens, of bullying. What came of it? Crickets, absolutely nothing. The pure-as-snow Greens political party like to come in here, wave their finger at the Labor government and lecture the rest of us, but they don't want to really open that black box and do their own housekeeping. Never forget that.

Going back to this Labor government's record on integrity, we also cleaned up the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. That old chestnut was a millstone around this country's neck when we came to government in 2022. It had been absolutely stacked with a bunch of Liberal mates, cronies and hacks. We basically completely abolished it and created what is called the Administrative Review Tribunal, the ART, a new federal body that is user focused, efficient, accessible, independent and fair, and has merit based appointments. It's not just putting your buddies on there to do your work—those people who were failed politicians or would-be politicians.

That's not all. We also strengthened provisions of the Public Service Act 1999 to make it clear that ministers cannot direct agency heads on employment matters. I remember that in the other house, in the first term of government, I spoke about this. I remember speaking distinctly about the importance of ensuring separation of powers with respect to our Public Service. As we know, in the aftermath of robodebt, the Australian Public Service, a venerated institution in this country, had been absolutely gutted. It was cowering in the corner after 10 years of coalition rule, leading to the catastrophe that was robodebt. We brought in legislation to ensure that we strengthen the independence and integrity of the APS so that it can provide free and fearless advice to government. We established an APS Integrity Taskforce to identify gaps and opportunities to deliver system-wide integrity improvements in the Australian Public Service. That's not all. I'm reading out a few of them, but that's not all. These are some of my favourites. I want to pay tribute also to the previous attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, for his work in this space. He quietly went about doing it, but he brought in significant reforms as part of a broader integrity agenda—things that are foreign to the Liberal and National parties—completely alien.

We also strengthened the whistleblower protections, knowing that there is more work to do. The first tranche was reforms to the Public Interest Disclosure Act. These reforms implemented 21 of 33 recommendations of the Moss review. When was that Moss review handed down? Was it in 2022 or 2021 or 2020? Actually, it was in 2016, and, FYI, it wasn't us in power then. It was the opposition. Why didn't they act on it? I'm not sure, but perhaps we wouldn't have had some of the issues around whistleblowers doing the right thing but getting persecuted for it had the recommendations been enacted. I cite specifically the case of Mr Richard Boyle, who was recently exonerated. He should never have gone through that kind of suffering. My heart goes out to him and his family. Had these whistleblower protections actually been enacted by the previous government, maybe all of that would have been prevented and maybe taxpayers would have saved a few bucks.

We have now commenced work on the second stage of reforms to ensure that the Commonwealth public sector—