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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-29 Daily Xml
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INDEPENDENT COMMISSIONER AGAINST CORRUPTION BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 2 May 2012.)

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (12:44): I am a little surprised that we are approaching it in this order and not the one I was prepared for. Nevertheless, I will start on the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Bill, not the telecommunications bill.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Mr Deputy Speaker, there was some brief conversation when we were here before, and the understanding I had was that, given that the telecommunications bill is entirely consequential upon the other one, the main substance of the matter is, in fact, the ICAC legislation, so that is why we are dealing with it.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Okay. The Leader of the Opposition.

Mrs REDMOND: I rise to speak on behalf of the opposition and indicate that I will be the lead speaker on this bill. You would be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, that since becoming leader I have retained the portfolio in relation to having an independent commission against corruption in this state because I have fought long and hard for the introduction of such an organisation in this state.

Of course, it has been Liberal Party policy for a long time since I was the shadow attorney-general. Indeed, when I announced my intention to bring in a bill with the support of my party room to establish such an independent commission in this state, I remember doing a press conference at the time in which I indicated that I would be well satisfied with my parliamentary career if I could see into this state the introduction of an independent commission against corruption. So, I welcome the fact that we at last have such an introduction in this state.

It bewilders me somewhat that the government is bringing it in at this stage after years and years of fighting against such a commission with the stated intention that they are now in a rush to get it through. Indeed, they are in so much of a rush that I want to place on the record the contents of an urgent facsimile which I received from the Local Government Association in relation to the matter. In that, the CEO of the Local Government Association, Wendy Campana, said—and I will not read the whole thing:

...I wish to seek your support to delay discussion of the Bill in the House of Assembly until the LGA has had a chance to respond to the Minister regarding its contents. The Bill has been introduced without consultation with the LGA and our usual process of consultation with Councils is well underway and due to be completed shortly after 7 June. You would be aware the Bill has significant implications for the Local Government sector.

The Hon. J.R. Rau: Untrue.

Mrs REDMOND: The Attorney-General is calling 'untrue' from the other side of the chamber, and I put that on the record because I note the CEO of the Local Government Association in the gallery and I am sure that she wants to know that the Attorney-General is accusing her of saying what is untrue in her communication. She goes on to say:

The State/Local Government Relations Agreement, which was resigned by Premier Weatherill and the Minister for State/Local Government Relations, Minister Wortley—

We have another name for minister Wortley. Minister Wortley and the Premier re-signed that agreement on 17 May—so, not very long ago—and it specifically provides for consultation with local government prior to seeking legislative change that impacts on the sector. Clearly, given the contents of the Independent Commission Against Corruption Bill, this certainly does impact on the sector. The facsimile goes on to state:

The Attorney-General provided the LGA with provisions related to changes to Part 12 of the Local Government Act prior to its introduction and we provided some feedback. At no time prior to the introduction of the Bill did the Attorney-General flag the proposed amendments impacting on the LGA itself.

I wanted to place that on the record at the very outset because I believe it is very important for us to understand just where this bill has come from and what its true history is. If you read the second reading explanation of the Attorney when he introduced the bill, he goes to some lengths to talk about the supposed history of the bill, completely ignoring any part that the Liberal Party had to play. He basically ignores that in favour of a history that only talks about the fact that they went out to consult.

Of course, as is usual with this government, when they talk about consultation, that means that they have gone through a process so that they can say, 'Yes, we consulted.' It does not mean that they have taken any notice of anything that anyone said during that consultation process, merely that they can now tick the box to say 'we consulted'. I sometimes worry that you do more harm than good to any cause with this government by actually turning up at a consultation because it does enable them to tick the box to say 'we consulted' when you know that the government has already made up its mind precisely what it is going to do and it is going to proceed that way anyway.

As I said, my position on this bill and that of my party is that we welcome its introduction at long last. We fought against it with the former premier, that he would not accept that there could be corruption in this state, and eventually he was brought to the position of saying, 'Well, we will have a national ICAC,' which would have done nothing for this state. Eventually we did get to the position where the government, having changed premiers, did some polling and realised that the fact that we were in favour of an ICAC and they were against it was actually doing them harm in the electorate, so they decided that they had better proceed down this path.

Can I remind you that, whenever I used to talk about an ICAC, the government inflated the cost that it was going to be to the community. I remember when I made my first statement about the ICAC, we had investigated the various bodies—the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the CCC, the ICAC in New South Wales, all the different things that existed in the other states. Having looked at them all, we settled on basically the New South Wales model with some tweaking as the most appropriate.

We said, 'Well, we've never run an ICAC before. How do we cost what that is actually going to cost the people of this state? Surely it can't cost any more than what it cost in New South Wales.' At that time, the cost in New South Wales was just shy of $15 million. So we said, 'In spite of the fact that we have a much smaller population and in spite of the fact that it will take some time to actually put things in place, so we would not expect it to be operating at full strength right from the outset, let's cost it at $15 million.'

Straightaway, the government said, '$30 million,' and indeed Mike Rann even went as high as at least $40 million. It was going to be a lawyers' picnic, in spite of the fact that very few lawyers would be employed in the place, and it was going to cost at least $40 million. All the time that we were arguing about the introduction of an ICAC in this state, those sorts of figures—$30 million, $40 million—were the figures bandied about by the government saying, 'That's what it's going to cost.'

Now when it comes to them introducing it—after, as I say, having done some polling and discovering that it was hurting the government, so 'We'd better introduce one'—how much is it going to cost them? $6 million! After ours, which we costed at $15 million, was going to be at least twice what we said, somehow they are going to introduce an effective ICAC for only $6 million, just a fraction of what we were going to have.

Can I also say that I went to the very first conference dealing with corruption in New South Wales in 2007. It was the first time that all the different agencies—the CMC, the CCC, the ICAC in New South Wales—had got together. People involved in corruption and trying to deal with it throughout the country gathered for the first national conference in 2007. I well remember it because Morris Iemma, who was then the Labor premier of New South Wales, opened the conference. When he got up to open the conference, he said, 'Any jurisdiction that thinks they don't need one is delusional. Any jurisdiction that thinks they don't need one of these is crazy.'

They had been going for 20 years by then in New South Wales and it was a very strong statement from him, but he also made the point that just bribery alone, they thought at that stage, cost in the order of $1 trillion worldwide a year. A trillion dollars: that is a thousand thousand million dollars. They reckoned just the bribery part was 3 per cent of the world's GDP and that is of course not the only part of corruption that we have.

I want to take a few minutes at the beginning of my remarks to talk about just what constitutes corruption. It is a complex area and there are gradings of what people think would be corrupt conduct. Indeed, the first day of the conference was actually a workshop and at that workshop we were divided into groups and we had to deal with various scenarios and say, 'Do you think this is corrupt conduct?' I just want to review a few of those scenarios that were brought up at this conference in which you might find that you had corruption occurring.

Is this corruption? Given the cartridgegate scandal in this state and given that this government thought there was no corruption but was dragged kicking and screaming to having an ICAC, this is a very relevant example. A contractor gives an employee of a public agency a digital camera as a thank you gift. The gift is accepted and shared with other staff members in the office—question: is that corruption?

Another example is a school principal who deliberately overstates the number of students enrolled at his school in order to attract increased departmental funding. He uses the extra funding to upgrade the school library, so he is actually acting in the interests of the organisation he works for but he has falsely upgraded the figures. Or perhaps a public sector mining warden cancels a mining lease without issuing proper notifications and then reregisters the lease in favour of a family member—that particular one is a pretty clear case. Or perhaps a prison officer in charge of a workshop uses prisoners to undertake work for his private business—again, pretty clear.

Here is one that comes up I suspect more commonly than most people would realise but, looking at the cases that I have seen through the New South Wales ICAC, it is remarkable how often this type of thing comes up: a public officer is having an extension added to his house and he engages a company that he has had regular professional dealings with to undertake the work. The company offers him a 25 per cent discount on the private work which he accepts—corruption or not corruption?

Another one is where a routine audit of the department's network finds that a number of client files have been accessed by a casual staff member without proper authorisation and some files have also been emailed to unknown external parties—corruption? In her job at the Department of Land Management, an officer is asked to assess applications for funding to regenerate environmentally sensitive forest areas. The officer is also a member of a local environmental group which has been protesting about degradation in an area that is the subject of one of the applications. That will bring me on to another topic in a moment.

Finally, after being lobbied by a landowner, a cabinet minister intervenes to grant a favourable rezoning that allows the land to be developed as a resort. During the previous election campaign, the landowner attended a fundraising dinner organised by the minister—is it corruption? That obviously led to a lot of interesting debate at that seminar and, largely, people felt that all those scenarios were either corrupt or potentially corrupt. The other thing we discussed that morning was the problem of conflict of interest. Sometimes people have a conflict of interest, and there is a very fine line and not a big step between having a conflict of interest and not responding to it properly and tripping over the tripwire that can lead you into corrupt conduct.

I will mention a couple of those as well. The Department for Education has just opened a college campus in a developing rural community and an agricultural science graduate is employed part-time at that location to teach environmental science. He moved there from the city after inheriting the family crop dusting business which he currently manages part-time with his current college teaching commitments. The college has requested the officer to research and prepare a report on environmental risks to the new rural campus. College administration is aware that the local council has had a series of complaints from the local community about contaminated waterways. Pretty clearly, there is going to be a conflict of interest for that person undertaking that work.

There are questions arising from those sort of scenarios as to when that slips over the edge and becomes corrupt conduct. Usually corruption is going to be defined in terms of the point at which one gains a personal benefit. In the particular circumstance that I just outlined, for instance, the personal benefit could be that the crop dusting business is not adversely affected because the person who is doing the investigation is so closely tied to it in owning it.

There are many issues relating to corruption in terms of how you define it. I will come to that in more detail when I get further into my comments on this matter. I simply say that I raised those particular things just to highlight the fact that these sorts of issues and these scenarios that I have just outlined, although they were generic in the way they were worded, were all based on real-life examples. These are all things that happen every day and I have no doubt that, with the best will in the world, we are going to have some level of corruption in our various public authorities; be they local, state, federal or independent authorities, at work.

Indeed, one of the things we discussed at this conference was the fact that most people are very honest. We talked about the fact that you could leave money on a desk at the conference and you could walk out (not even knowing the other people) and reliably expect that when you came back into the room that money would still be on the table because people were not motivated to steal it.

However, you could get into certain situations—for instance, if there was someone with a gambling problem or a drug problem—where motivation to step over that line into corrupt conduct increases. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.


[Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00]


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