Page 5132 - Week 13 - Thursday, 29 November 2018
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The role of the parliamentary oversight committee will be particularly useful in looking at how this very small integrity agency performs effectively. During the course of the Assembly inquiry into an integrity commission in the ACT, the committee met with a number of parliamentary oversight committees in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania to discuss their roles. My impression was that all parliamentarians were working together to ensure that their respective commissions were performing their role effectively.
We should not expect that the new integrity commission and the legislation will operate perfectly from day one. While we have drawn largely from legislation that has been in operation, in the case of ICAC, from the 1980s, there will be improvements that can be made to ensure that the commission is performing its role. For example, in recent times amendments have been made to the New South Wales ICAC Act to ensure that there is a level of procedural fairness, particularly in public hearings. I am pleased that rules of natural justice and procedural fairness are reflected in the government’s bill from day one.
There will also be policy improvements across government that can be learned from the findings made by the commission, especially from any strategic reviews that are undertaken by the new commission. The oversight committee will play an important accountability role in relation to the implementation of findings that are made at a policy level. On the other hand the role of the committee is not to have a direct role in the operational matters of the commission. That is the reason why the inspector role is so important, to be able to directly look into the operations of the commission.
We are debating the government’s Integrity Commission Bill because it provides a comprehensive establishment of a new integrity commission within our existing integrity framework and existing integrity agencies here in the ACT. We have also had a private member’s bill which was introduced by Mr Coe. It is a fact that private members’ bills do not benefit from the rigour of government decision-making processes, and it was obvious to me from the very beginning, even before Mr Coe introduced his bill, that the preferred bill to establish an integrity commission, which is a very complex piece of legislation, had to come from the government because of the deeper level of engagement and scrutiny through government processes required to make the bill operational.
Mr Coe decided to draft and introduce a private member’s bill which was much shorter, did not reflect engagement with the required agencies, including existing integrity agencies, and did not adequately deal with important consequential amendments that needed to be made to other pieces of legislation, such as the Public Interest Disclosure Act, to ensure that the entire integrity framework was operating together from day one of the new commission. The government’s exposure draft established a much more comprehensive framework, and that was the reason, ultimately, why the government’s bill being debated today is the preferred model.
As we have heard through the public consultation during the inquiries, we have a good bill with the government’s bill. It is a bill that all members can support, notwithstanding debate on minor amendments today. The new integrity commission
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