Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance and the Public Service (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by Senator Di Natale today relating to a national anti-corruption commission.

Trust in politics is at an all-time low. People believe that our democracy is broken, that our democracy is working for big corporate interests, for vested interests, and not working for people. Our key priority in this place, across all sides, needs to be to restore faith in our public institutions to ensure that people have trust in the institutions that deliver politics in this country. That needs to start by getting money out of politics. That needs to start with strict caps on donations to political parties. Unless we get the money out and bring the people in, people have every right to not trust the decisions being made in our national parliament. We need strict donation caps, and we need prohibitions on donations from industries that benefit from the decisions being made by elected politicians. We need to close the revolving door between parliament and industry. We need laws that stop lobbying in a way that corrupts good government. We have to close that revolving door and we need to ensure that ministers who are responsible for making decisions over a particular policy area can't simply leave parliament and begin working in those industries over which they had parliamentary oversight. There have to be cooling-off periods. But front and centre needs to be the establishment of a national anticorruption watchdog. We have anti-corruption mechanisms right through our state parliaments and we have seen time and time again that those anti-corruption bodies have uncovered deeply disturbing behaviour across all sides, within the bureaucracy and among elected officials. There is nothing to say that Australian federal parliaments are immune from such temptations. When the potential rewards are high and the risk of getting caught is low, they are the preconditions for people to behave in a way that would be determined as corrupt. When you have nearly half a trillion dollars of public spending with very little oversight, where those anti-corruption mechanisms are vague or in some areas non-existent, they are the conditions under which corruption can thrive. That's why we saw only last week an open letter from 32 former judges rejecting the Attorney-General's contention that there's no persuasive evidence of corruption at a federal level. Indeed, they argued the precise opposite: that existing federal integrity agencies lack the necessary jurisdiction, the powers and the know-how to properly investigate the impartiality and bona fides of decisions made by and conduct of the federal government and public sector.

That's why there is now a consensus within the parliament that there has to be a national anticorruption watchdog. It is a policy the Greens have led with, beginning in 2010 with the introduction of legislation by Senator Bob Brown, then Christine Milne and me, and now Senator Waters leading the charge. We have all sides of politics acknowledging there is a problem. We have the Labor Party, earlier this year, reversing their opposition to a national anti-corruption watchdog. We have crossbench members in the House supporting the establishment of a national anti-corruption watchdog. It's only the Liberal Party who stand in its way. We have an opportunity to restore faith in our democracy, to ensure that our democracy works for people, not for vested interests, and to ensure that our democracy delivers for the community, not for big corporations. To do that we have to clamp down on those political donations. We have to stamp them out. We've got to close the revolving door between parliament and industry, with reforms to the way lobbyists operate. Most importantly, we need to introduce a national anti-corruption watchdog. We can't wait another moment.

Question agreed to.