Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

People in Australia like democracy, but they're worried that our parliament has been captured by big corporate interests and that too many decisions are made by this government for the benefit of private interests, not the public interest. There are four important things that the government could do within a matter of days to turn around the decline in trust that people have in this place and restore people's confidence in democracy. We need to restore confidence in democracy because we have seen what happens around the world when people disengage from the democratic system. It opens the door to demagogues, and we want to make sure that never happens in Australia.

The first thing that we could do is put in place a national anticorruption watchdog before Christmas, and we could have one before Christmas if the government wanted to. Why could we have one? Because the Senate has actually passed a bill to establish a national ICAC. I was proud to be the first member to introduce a national anticorruption watchdog bill into the House. That was then improved on by the previous member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, and worked on by a number of others. Suggestions were taken on board and a bill that probably had the support of the whole crossbench passed the Senate, because it had the support of the Labor Party as well. It found its way to the House, where the government kicked it off into the long grass. The government are prepared to come in here time after time and say, 'We need an integrity bill for unions,' but they're not prepared to bring in an integrity bill that covers politicians. If you want to restore trust in this place, put in place a national ICAC, a federal integrity commission, because we are seeing at the state level, day after day, what happens when developers and big corporates get politicians from both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party in their pockets. And if you believe that, somehow, corruption only happens within state borders and stops at state borders and doesn't come to Canberra then I've got a bridge to sell you. I think the Australian public know that there is a case for a federal ICAC. The government should listen to the public and pass it—pick it up off the Notice Paper, pass it tomorrow and we'd have a federal ICAC before Christmas.

The second thing that the government could do to restore trust and confidence is get the big money out of politics. Let's limit donations to $1,000 a year, across the board, from everyone. And let's say there are some people and some kinds of corporate interests that we don't want making donations to politics at all—like developers and the tobacco industry and so on—because they corrupt the process. While we're there, let's also limit the amount that can be spent at election time. People get sick of the amount that is spent across the board by political parties at election time and we saw, just last election, Clive Palmer buy an election by spending $60 million on an election campaign. If you limited the amount of spending then that would reduce the incentive to start getting these donations in the first place, and it would mean this place could start acting in the public interest—not for private interests.

The third thing that we could do is run a public-interest test over every decision that gets made here. And, when it comes to handing out money and giving subsidies, we could ask: is this actually in the public interest? We have big corporations—Gina Rinehart's mining companies, for example—who go and put diesel in their trucks and they pay a bit of tax then, and, at the end of the year, they get a cheque back, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer, as a refund for all of that tax that they pay on their diesel fuel! When every other Australian goes and puts petrol in their car, they pay 40-odd cents a litre in tax—when Gina Rinehart does the same, she gets the tax back, courtesy of the Australian people. We don't need to be giving subsidies to the very rich and powerful at the same time as we've got people who are homeless, people who can't even afford to get into their first home and people who are finding it hard to get a decent job, and power bills are going through the roof. Let's run a public-interest test over the decisions that are made here, not a vested-interest test.

The fourth thing that this government could do, if it wants to restore some trust, is start protecting people from the impacts of climate change. People want action on climate change. This government gets up and beats its chest about national security: the government is fond of saying that the first duty of any government is to protect its people. If that's right then protect people from the impact of climate change. People want action on climate change. Three-quarters of people under 34 now know that there is a link between the recent and current fires and climate, and they want action. What is standing in the way? The government is on the coal-company teat and won't take the action that's required. Take action on climate change and you'll start restoring a bit of trust in this place.

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