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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-27 Daily Xml
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INDEPENDENT COMMISSION AGAINST CORRUPTION BILL

Introduction and First Reading

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (11:19): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to establish an independent commission against corruption; to define its functions and powers; and for other purposes. Read a first time.

Second Reading

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (11:20): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I move the second reading of this bill with great pleasure, having previously introduced a bill in very similar form in 2009. Indeed, recently the Hon. Stephen Wade in the other place indicated that there have been numerous attempts to introduce into this state an independent commission against corruption, beginning with the Hon. Ian Gilfillan in 1988 and since then in 1990, 1998, 2005 and 2007. I moved a bill in here in 2008, Robert Brokenshire moved a bill in 2009, and here I am back moving a bill in 2010.

Members may have noticed also that, in terms of my own portfolio assignments as the leader, I have kept the position of shadow minister for the arts and shadow minister for multicultural affairs, but I have also specifically kept myself as the shadow minister for an independent commission against corruption, so important do I see this issue in this state.

We are one of the few states now that does not have or is not close to having an independent commission against corruption. New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia have had them for some years. In fact, I think in New South Wales it is now over 20 years since the introduction of that legislation. Most recently, in the run-up to the Tasmanian election—and Will Hodgman was ahead in the polls as the leader of the opposition down there—it was one of the clear differences between the two sides. At that point, in order to negative the differences, one of the things the government then did was to say that it would introduce an independent commission against corruption there, which leaves only South Australia and Victoria without an independent commission.

We believe that indeed it is necessary. In fact, I attended the first conference on anticorruption which was held in Australia some years ago—the year before I introduced the bill—and I was looking at the various ways they operated in the various states. When I attended, the conference was opened by the then Labor premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma. In his opening to that conference he said, 'Any state that thinks they don't need one is crazy.'

This bill, like the previous bill I introduced, is based on the New South Wales model. That model basically looks at doing three things. First and most obviously, of course, the intention is that the independent commission against corruption (ICAC) is aimed at giving the opportunity for the investigation of complaints about corruption, not the prosecution of those; that is done by the DPP, but it gives people somewhere to go. If they believe that something corrupt is happening in local government or in a state government department or agency, they have somewhere to go, somewhere to take that complaint that is independent of government, and there are various safeguards to make sure that it can maintain its independence. They can take their complaint there and it can be investigated.

That is the first and foremost thing that it does but, as I said, it does not include prosecution, as that goes off to the relevant prosecution authority. I am sure everyone have come across stories in this state and elsewhere of corruption, be it at local government or departmental level. We know that it occurs and, when you look at the history of the other states, it is clear that it does occur everywhere.

The second important thing for this ICAC to do is to actually look at the systems that apply. Nearly everyone in here will have at some stage served on some sort of sporting club committee or something like that, and in previous years, of course, the safeguard for the management of the financial side, particularly, of any of those clubs was simply that we had countersigning of cheques. So normally, if you were on the committee of a sports club, two people would have to sign the cheque. You might appoint three people and say that any two of the three could sign, but there was the safeguard that two people were keeping an eye on it, and it made it harder for one person to nick off with the funds.

That was all very well then, but of course the systems are so much more sophisticated now. Particularly when you are dealing with large government departments—large agencies that have multi-million-dollar budgets—we need people who are specialists in going into those agencies and looking at the systems to discover where corrupt conduct can occur.

Going back 35 years ago, I remember in New South Wales a situation where someone who was in charge of the payroll for the whole state Public Service simply rounded everyone's pay up or down to the nearest five cents. They kept the money that they rounded off and took that off to another account—that was corrupt. Further, in a particular department which I will not name, they had a system of clocking in and clocking out. The rule in that particular department was first in clocks everyone in; last to leave clocks everyone out—that was corrupt.

There are numerous examples. Part of the function is to have trained people who can go in and look at the financial systems in particular. I may have told this house before, but until recently I had spent 28 years on the Stirling Hospital Board. That hospital board employed as its financial officer a well credentialled and highly reputable—according to the references given—financial person. Within a week of starting, he began diddling us through the computer system and through the way the accounting was done, because it was all done electronically. We did not catch him until he had done this community hospital out of $470,000 of the money that our community had generated through its hospital to plough back into health services. That guy spent two well-deserved years in gaol for taking that sort of money. The problem is that we do not have in place sufficient capacity at the moment to go and look at the systems.

The third thing that an independent commission against corruption will do is educate. It will educate the public at large about what corruption is and educate particularly the people in the Public Service, local government, state government and government agencies about what constitutes corruption, because many people do not recognise it even when it slaps them in the face. To give you a famous and most recent example, Gordon Nuttall, the minister up in Queensland, took $10,000 a month and did not think it was corrupt because, after all, he was only using it to buy houses for his kids. What could possibly be wrong with that?

An honourable member: They were good kids!

Mrs REDMOND: They were very reasonable children, no doubt. I wish to make the point, therefore, that this is not just about investigation of corruption: it is about those aspects of educating the public and the people dealing with these issues. The major issues are education, investigation and looking at systems, because we know that, just like anything else, opportunity and desire reach a certain tipping point and, if you lessen the opportunity, then the desire has to be that much greater before someone will actually engage in a corrupt practice. Those three issues are the essential components of this bill which, as I said, we have based on the New South Wales model.

We based it on that model knowing that, when we actually introduced the original legislation, the cost in New South Wales was $15 million per annum. Now we, I thought quite generously at the time, said that is the budget figure we will apply to it, even though we have less than a quarter of the population of New South Wales. To prevent the government criticising our costing on it, we adopted the costing they had for New South Wales: it could not possibly be too little.

We said $15 million, and for some reason this government decided they would double that, so every time they referred to it as wasting $30 million: (a) it is not a waste; (b) it was not $30 million. We have now increased our costing to $17 million, or $17.1 million I think it is, which is the amount that the New South Wales government now applies towards its Independent Commission Against Corruption.

One of the most regular criticisms of this proposal is that it can be used as an unfair weapon. In times gone by, and people particularly might remember that the then premier of New South Wales who introduced the commission, eventually fell victim to it and—

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: He was exonerated.

Mrs REDMOND: Exactly, and that is one of the things that we have covered, because I was aware that it was to some extent a valid criticism of having an ICAC. If you allow people to say, 'I reported this person to ICAC', then mud sticks to some extent. An allegation like that can have an extremely deleterious effect, whether it be on a politician or on someone else. Being able to say you have made that allegation is not fair.

What we have done is try to put some things into this bill to stop that from happening. In particular, I spoke to one of the former commissioners in New South Wales at another conference I attended, at which a particular commissioner spoke about their commission in New South Wales, and I also met another commissioner. What they used to do was, first of all they said they would tell the people who came in to make a complaint and make it very clear to them in person: 'If you go out and publicise the fact that you have made this complaint, expect us to make you just as much a target of our investigation as the person you are complaining about, or the organisation you are complaining about.'

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: It didn't help Nick Greiner, though.

Mrs REDMOND: The minister across the way says it did not help Nick Greiner. It did not, and that is why we have built in protections, and indeed we are prepared to even accept amendments from the other side, who to this day have been the only ones opposing all of these various things. Let me remind the house, it is the eighth attempt to introduce an independent commission against corruption, and it is really, I think, fundamental.

Now the government's excuse has been—apart from saying 'Oh well, we don't have corruption in this state,' which quite frankly is a nonsense, and apart from saying 'Well, it's too expensive,' which again is a nonsense when you have got a government that has wasted the amount of money that this government wastes on an almost daily basis—that they are going to have a federal one. Senator Bob Brown has actually proposed a federal one.

I will just quote from what the Hon. Stephen Wade said in the other place, because, of course, we now have a new Attorney-General in this state. The previous attorney-general was favouring a federal independent commission against corruption, but he did not even put it on the Notice Paper. However, when the new Attorney-General was going to do something about it—he was supporting the government's position of only having a federal one—he said in a ministerial statement:

Prior to the recent state election, the government promised to push ahead with the Premier's plan to pursue the establishment of a national anti-corruption body. I am today travelling to Melbourne to a meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General to argue the case for a national approach.

Well, obviously he argued his approach so strongly that, to quote the Hon. Stephen Wade in the other place:

The Attorney-General has argued the case so strongly that the communiqué issued after the meeting did not even mention the issue.

In any event, Senator Bob Brown has now introduced a national anti-corruption proposal in the federal parliament, but the fact is that that will take care of federal departments. What we are proposing is a bill for this state to take care of the potential corruption in our state government departments, our state government agencies and local councils. With no offence to any of the members who have served on local councils, or served for local councils, the fact is that the vast majority of the complaints that come in actually relate to that. There is a huge potential there, because it can fly under the radar very easily, and when you read the reports of the other states you can see that that is where the problem comes from.

The intention of the federal ICAC is simply to run alongside, and that is what Bob Brown said in his speech about having a national anti-corruption body, that it is for the federal parliament to run in concert with the various state bodies all around the place, so that, indeed, we do not have the problem that we have federal agencies that are subject to anti-corruption; we need to have it at every level of government to ensure that the people of this state, like all the other states that already have this, have confidence that the decisions made in this place are the right decisions, that the decisions made by the departments and agencies of this place are made in a proper, transparent, accountable and non-corrupt manner. People need to understand what that means. They need to have an independent place to go to make those decisions and they need to be confident in the correctness and the transparency of government in this state. With those few words I will conclude my remarks.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Sibbons.

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