National Anti-Corruption Commission

This government is committed to integrity, honesty and accountability. In 2007 it was a Labor government that introduced the standards of ministerial ethics, introduced reforms to ensure that cabinet documents were made available to the public in a more timely fashion and introduced long overdue reforms to freedom of information, led by then senator Faulkner.

In 2022, it is again a Labor government which has the responsibility to introduce a higher standard of the code of conduct for ministers and their staff. Now we take the next step in introducing a National Anti-Corruption Commission. This is meaningful action to drive out corruption. It's something that was promised by the coalition but delivered today by Labor. We know that corruption can be devastating for our society. It enables serious and organised crime, it harms individuals, it harms our society, it harms our economy, it damages our national security, it destroys the vital trust that we need in institutions and it eats away at that fundamental Australian value of democracy.

During my time in this place I have always found it very strange that when I go and sit alongside local councillors at a citizenship ceremony in the City of Bayswater, those councillors are under a more stringent anticorruption regime than I am as a federal member of parliament. When it comes to finally getting to that point where we harmonise across the states and territories so that all levels of government are under an anticorruption regime—that is a good thing and it is well and truly overdue.

We aren't just putting the legislation into this parliament. We have already committed the funds necessary to make sure that this is a powerful watchdog with teeth. If you look at the funding allocated—$262.6 million to fund the National Anti-Corruption Commission—that is actually an investment in making sure that taxpayers get value for money out of all of the decisions that are made by government. To make sure that this is a strong, effective and independent body there is annual funding of $67.4 million from 2026-27. This will secure the National Anti-Corruption Commission as an independent statutory agency; one with a broad jurisdiction to investigate allegations of serious or systematic corruption across the Commonwealth public sector.

I'll remark again that I am so disappointed that some people have chosen to use this debate, of all debates, to attack the public servants who serve us so well. They weren't just junior members of the opposition backbench; they were people who'd previously served as Acting Prime Minister. They chose to use this debate to attack the public servants, the vast majority of whom work incredibly hard doing so much for our country, trying to do the right thing in developing and delivering policy that improves the lives of all Australians. This should be a debate where we actually praise our public sector, where we say thank you for giving us the strong institutions which we rely upon, and I, again, say thank you to our public servants for all of the work that they do.

When we talk about scope, again, this will cover the entire public sector of the Commonwealth. It will include federal ministers, federal parliamentarians, staff, statutory officeholders, government entities staff, companies and contractors. It will cover any person who adversely affects or could adversely affect the honest or impartial exercise of a public official's functions. In that sense it enables government. It enables the public to have confidence in the decisions that are made. It enables those many tens of thousands of public servants—who do the right thing by the taxpayers of Australia every day—to have confidence in doing their job professionally and well and in accordance with the law.

Importantly for the construction of this bill—and it is a hefty piece that's on the table just there—it was constructed in consultation with a range of experts. It was also done in consultation with the parliament itself. Again, I want to thank the committee members who were involved in reviewing this legislation and who have recommended improvements to this bill, drawing upon their experiences and, indeed, the long march that many people have been on in looking for this to finally get to the floor of the parliament in 2022. As the Prime Minister has highlighted today, it is so important that it is the decision of the commission as to where they choose to investigate. The commission and commissioners will have the discretion to commence investigations on their own initiative, as well as on the basis of referrals from anyone. Any Australian citizen will be able to make a referral to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, making sure that this truly empowers the citizens of Australia. It will have the power to investigate conduct that occurred before its establishment. It will hold public hearings where there is a public interest and in exceptional circumstances—again, not a decision for anyone here; a decision for the independent commissioners—and will have the funding, as I mentioned before, to ensure it has the staff capabilities and technical capabilities to do its job properly.

What we all want is for this commission to be able to consider those referrals, initiate timely investigations and undertake corruption prevention and education activities. I think it's really important, and the legislation and the explanatory memorandum outline this, that the National Anti-Corruption Commission will not simply be an investigator; it will also be an educator, committed to that big project of raising the standard of our public administration, because promoting anticorruption best practice is as important as stamping out corruption where it is happening—we know that prevention is better than cure—and providing valuable information and insight into corruption so that decision-makers and policymakers can make better informed decisions about how we design policy to prevent or in some cases identify corrupt practices.

What's also important is that we note, as I outlined earlier, corruption doesn't just have a cost in dollars; it has a cost in what it does to our society, and in some places corruption enables serious organised crime. That's why the preventative functions of the National Anti-Corruption Commission will allow it to investigate the existing vulnerabilities in the public sector, the sorts that criminals may seek to exploit or may indeed be exploiting today. The National Anti-Corruption Commission will be able to consider measures that can be implemented further to stop such corruption from occurring, and in doing so it will draw upon a growing set of expertise that exists across Australian academia, the public sector and the private sector, where we are becoming regarded as a leader in anticorruption work, but starting to do that coordination piece across the agencies of states and territories. The existing agencies cover some parts of our public sector, and now this great coordinating agency will be able to lead at a national level.

Thinking about how this fits into broader efforts from the government to restore integrity to our national government, I've already mentioned the strongest code of conduct for ministers that has ever been in place for any Australian government in history, but we're also working across the parliament to implement the Set the Standard report to ensure Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces are safe and respectful. We're looking at ways to increase the transparency and integrity of political donations in Australian federal election processes, and we've already taken steps to ensure that processes for appointments to key independent institutions are transparent and merit based. For too long, Australians were without a government they could be proud of. They had a government they felt they could not trust. This is about restoring that trust not in a particular government but in the institution of government.

I do note an integrity commission will not stop every bad decision, and it will not guarantee that every government decision will be a good one. No Western Australian will ever forget the decision Prime Minister Morrison made in the middle of the COVID crisis to support Clive Palmer against the people of Western Australia in the High Court—not corrupt, but a terrible decision, which was made through the coalition cabinet. A number of people who helped make that decision and backed that decision now sit on the frontbench of the opposition. The entire weight of the Commonwealth's legal resources was thrown behind Clive Palmer in that case. Over three days they called multiple witnesses and vigorously cross-examined Western Australia's public health experts, and when they finally agreed to give up, what did they do? They signed a cheque for a million dollars to cover Clive Palmer's legal fees—like I said, not something that would necessarily instantly draw itself to being examined by this body but the sort of thing that shows you that no anticorruption body can save a bad government from bad decisions.

If I think about some of those bad decisions, I go into a range of areas. I think about the broken promises to not cut the ABC, the broken promises when it came to putting in penalties for wage theft and the broken promises to act on climate change. That ties it back to what we are doing today because, in fact, this legislation delivers on something that the Australian people were promised in 2018. It was a promise of the then Attorney-General, the member for Pearce, that this legislation would be put in, should they be re-elected in 2019, and then nothing happened for three years. Again, in restoring the faith that people should have in government, it is important that we get this legislation done. It is important that we get this legislation done now so that we can allow that commission to start doing the work that is so long overdue in restoring integrity and restoring trust in government.