Page 1298 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 April 2019
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robust and trustworthy. Together with these other accountability mechanisms, we believe there is a reasonably robust framework to ensure public accountability.
The Integrity Commission legislation allows us to also have a place for more systemic corruption to be examined. Hopefully, it will come into operation in July this year, pending agreement on a commissioner. I note the comments in the Canberra Times today. The Greens agree that it is important for us to review the existing PID legislation. The review needs to, firstly, assess whether the system is working and, secondly, how it will interact with the Integrity Commission. This is one of the recommendations of the select committee examining the details of the Integrity Commission, and we are pleased to reiterate the Greens’ support for this review today.
The legislation commenced in the ACT in early 2013, so we have had six years of it being in place. While I understand that there have been quite a few PID referrals over the years, from the outside it is hard to know whether matters are being resolved and resolved satisfactorily. When the PID legislation was debated in 2012 the Greens raised a few issues that were outstanding from the legislation then, and we hope these issues might be re-examined through this review process.
One issue was the lack of compensation for public servants who may have suffered detriment as a result of their speaking out. I understand the UK has best practice compensation mechanisms, but in Australia we are reliant on federal changes to workplace relations legislation before we are able to allow this in the ACT. I repeat our 2012 call for the ACT government to raise this issue with federal colleagues to instigate commonwealth reforms. A key part of this is recognising public interest disclosure as a workplace right under the Fair Work Act. Given that we have agreement in the ACT Assembly from both the Liberal and Labor parties, I hope this matter can progress regardless of which party becomes the federal government after the soon-to-be held election.
In terms of Mr Coe’s motion before us and the process set out in the government amendment, the Greens strongly support putting a clear timetable to the review process, given that all parties agreed to the recommendation of the integrity commission select committee last year that a statutory review of the PID legislation be undertaken. The timetable set out in the amendment allows for the review and the legislation to be passed in this term of the Assembly. We started discussing this time line in more detail in February, and members will note that this motion was on the notice paper to be debated in the February sitting period but this debate did not happen.
We are really pleased the government has gotten on with the job of getting this review underway in the meantime, thus making this motion possibly a little superfluous. But it allows the Assembly to restate its commitment to this legislation and to better understand the time line and what is involved in the updating. We understand the time line allowed a longer period for the reviewer to be engaged. This was discussed in February, and we understand that the process to appoint a reviewer is underway and the reviewer will be announced very soon.
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