Interview with Tom Connell, Hume and McAllister, Sky News
30 September 2022
TOM CONNELL: Welcome back to Hume and McAllister. Each week the Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume and Assistant Climate Change and Energy Minister Jenny McAllister, face off and fire up in the big news and political developments. Jane and Jenny welcome we're gonna get straight into things because it's a very truncated version of the program today. We've are standing by for Anthony Albanese. We just hope he's late as he often is, so we'll get straight into what the big issue of the week was. Key crossbenchers and the Coalition are likely to back in Labor's legislation to establish a National Anti-Corruption Commission. The Attorney General Mark Dreyfus revealed detailed long plans. A Chief Commissioner will head the body with two deputies as well, public hearings they would only be held in exceptional circumstances.
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TOM CONNELL: So one of the things missing so far from what I've seen is a time limit on investigation. This has been really problematic in ICAC. You can have public hearings and then findings can take years. Jane Hume is that important to set a time limit on this.
JANE HUME: It's going to be something that the joint committee that is looking into the National Anti-Corruption Commission legislation will be looking at I'm sure. You know, there are some jurisdictions that have an anti corruption body where they don't even have to tell people that they have been exonerated or that they're not needed to help the inquiry anymore. That's an extraordinary imposition on people that may have changed their lives. Their lives entirely revolve around an accusation or an allegation that has been made against them by the commission. So getting this right is so important. We're actually investing an enormous amount of responsibility, even those commissioners in the Commission, we want to make sure that the safeguards are there, so that any man in the national anti corruption committee, actually, commission, engenders trust in our public sphere rather than diminishes it.
TOM CONNELL: What are your thoughts on a formal time limit Jenny, because we've seen sometimes public inquiries held questions asked of a ministers for example, and it's taken well longer than a year to have any sort of finding where we still don't know the finding and Gladys Berejiklian. Timeliness matters here, doesn't it?
JENNY MCALLISTER: This is a really important reform Tom. So just to take one step back for a moment, a robust democratic institutions are a core part of Australian national identity and of course also of national strength. It is concerning that public confidence in democracy is declining. And we wish to take every step that we can to restore that. Unfortunately, the establishment of a National Anti-Corruption Commision is one of the many things that was not done by the previous Liberal government and we wish to remedy that. It needs to be independent. It needs to have the necessary powers to do this work, and it needs to be sufficiently resourced to undertake its investigations in a timely way. As Jane has indicated, I'm sure there'll be a range of matters raised in the hearings into this legislation, but at its heart, what is needed is an independent body, where the commissioner has the resources and the powers to undertake the kinds of investigations that the commissioner thinks are necessary.
TOM CONNELL: All right, we've talked so much about the hypothetical, what about a real life example - so Barry O'Farrell, of course was found not to be corrupt, but he quit amid a lot of controversy for a bottle of Grange he failed to declare and said that he'd never been given. Jane was that ICAC working well, because we should have known about that anyway, or a failure of ICAC?
JANE HUME: Well, I know you'd like to use real life examples, but this is the thing when we established the National Anti-Corruption Commission that we take the best and the worst of each of the jurisdictions experiences and we hear from them and that's exactly what this joint committee will do. It will shave off the sharp edges, I would imagine, of some of the recommendations that have been made by the government on this. And make sure that the collective wisdom of the committee feeds into the final legislation, because to get this wrong, has dire consequences. What you will find is that good people…I’m not just talking about politicians or good people, good people will not…
TOM CONNELL: So is this a sharp edge though?
JANE HUME: Well, I can't tell you about the ins and outs of the New South Wales ICAC or even the Victorian IBAC but I know that each of those commissions, their experiences will feed into the committee.
TOM CONNELL: But was this an example, where Barry O’Farrell shouldn’t have had to give public testimony like that?
JANE HUME: That's how the ICAC is set up in New South Wales. It's different in Victoria. It's different again in South Australia, but we want the best of all of them. Because if we get this wrong, Tom, what will happen is that the best and the brightest will not join the public service. They will not stand for politics, they will not stand for public office, because the risk to their reputation to their bank balance and to their mental well being is just too great. We want to make sure, certainly, that we root out corruption wherever it is. That's really important to engender trust in the public sphere. But at the same time, we don't want him to get this wrong, because the consequences are great.
TOM CONNELL: Jenny, my reading of this proposal from Labor is in that situation, Barry O’Farrell would have been very unlikely to be giving public testimony so we wouldn't have had that moment that led to his downfall. Would that have been the better outcome?
JENNY MCALLISTER: Look, the legislation that the Attorney General has presented, sets out some principles that the commission would have regard to when it was making a decision about whether or not to hold hearings in public, and they include the significance of the matters under consideration the public interest in having those matters ventilated, but also the risk of reputational damage. There are some other factors the commission may consider in making this decision. Importantly, it is a decision for the commissioner. One of the most important features of a body of this kind is that it has the necessary independence to fulfill the role expected of it by the community. We are setting up a structure and we expect that the commissioner will be able to work within that structure to deliver on that public expectation that our democratic institutions work without corruption. Amongst other things that requires people like Jane and I not to provide a running commentary on what such a commissioner may or may not do, but instead to sit on the architecture and allow that commissioner to undertake their work in an independent way.
TOM CONNELL: All right, you're bipartisan on sticking to the hypotheticals. I'll try to get some examples going maybe in the future that you’ll bite on but I've failed there. Look, we're going to take a quick break when we come back. We'll talk about all the wrap up from the Optus data breach this week. Stay with us.