Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am responding to the statement Senator Ludwig made a little earlier this hour. The Greens have called for the establishment of a national anti-corruption and integrity commission because we believe that the nation ought to have a watchdog over and an advice bureau on the democratic process. The Auditor-General is currently doing an assessment of certain components of spending by members of parliament. We will watch that carefully and of course take note of the outcome. I hope that we get from the Auditor-General not just an assessment but recommendations.

It is my experience that it is very often difficult to get information on whether a matter of spending is acceptable or not. We need an advice bureau for members of parliament so that good people in the parliament are not left nervous wrecks because of anxiety due to them not being sure whether they should have hired the car on the weekend to go to an electoral function and whether they can claim it. There is an endless amount of interplay with the public, the media, business and community groups. It is very complex and you can have a huge amount of staff time taken up with this and the anxiety is theirs as well. We need an advice bureau, and we do not have it. There is a booklet. It is very blunt. It does not cover all cases. Politicians deserve to have that advice. If we indeed had an arbiter who we could call and ask, ‘Should I claim this or shouldn’t I?’ and they said, ‘No, you can’t,’ then we would not. Something like that would have cut off at the pass the terrible experiences of politicians in the United Kingdom recently, who were found to have been serially pushing the envelope. This would be a very worthwhile thing.

We would like to see a national anti-corruption commission set up along the lines of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in New South Wales but extended to include an integrity commission which can give advice to members of parliament, to people in the bureaucracy and to people in the police and other forces that give us security in this country. It is a two-way street.

I might add—and I will say this again; the Greens have been advocating this now for years—that we ought to be adopting the Canadian system adopted in the 1990s following a series of corruption scandals in Canada. It is a system that works well, and it is public funding of political parties and the political process and the removal of largesse from the political arena so that there is no funding from unions or corporations and a cap of $1,000 per annum in donations from individuals to political parties. That is much safer and saner and has far greater probity than the system which allows for political donations. This has been a matter of discussion in the public arena.

Finally, we also need to keep an eye on the fourth estate. I do not know how much members of the media establishment—senior scribes, management or owners—get. I do not know how they are lobbied. I do not know what decisions they make and on what basis. That is a matter that is going to come under increasing scrutiny in the times ahead. It is extremely important that the public be reassured that the information they are getting is not only fair and true but well informed and is not serving a sectional interest against the wider public interest. That is a very difficult and thorny area to be going into, but if we believe in a free, open and transparent democracy, that is an area that needs also to be part of any ongoing assessment so it can be improved if improvement is indeed required.