The Coalition’s commonwealth integrity commission will not conduct public hearings or release reports into alleged corruption by public servants and politicians, the attorney general has confirmed.
Releasing two bills to establish the anti-corruption body on Monday, Christian Porter revealed the government would create new corruption offences and argued guilty public officials should be tried in court rather than have their careers “destroyed” by integrity commissions.
Despite announcing a six-month period of consultation, Porter warned opposition and crossbench parties there were “certain matters of principle” the government would not compromise on.
The proposed commission would consist of a law enforcement integrity division to oversee the department of home affairs, federal police, and other law enforcement and regulatory bodies; and a public sector division to oversee federal departments and agencies, higher education bodies, MPs and their staff. The oversight of judges could be added to the public sector division.
The law enforcement integrity division could investigate corruption of any kind, would have the discretion to hold public hearings and could initiate investigations after referrals from the public.
By contrast, the public sector division would only consider referrals from other agencies and regulators, could not hold public hearings and would be limited to investigating corruption that breached criminal offences.
The integrity commission would have the power to investigate fresh matters on its own motion only where something was revealed in the course of an existing investigation.
Labor’s shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, declared on Monday that the proposed commission was “weak, secretive and compromised”, signalling Labor was prepared to block it.
Porter told reporters in Canberra the rationale for allowing public hearings on law enforcement was “there is a higher risk and a much greater threat from corruption inside law enforcement agencies in so far as they are the agencies that are meant to enforce the law”.
The attorney general said he would hate to see “deadlock” develop if crossbench parties insisted on full public hearings and warned that the government would listen to feedback but “stick strongly” to its position against public hearings.
Porter defended the higher bar to investigate public servants and politicians, noting the list of possible crimes that could spark an investigation was “very long” – at 143 offences.
“In my observation, they cover every conceivable type of serious criminal conduct that one might label corruption,” he said.
New offences will include repeated public sector corruption and concealing public sector corruption. But many seek to punish those that raise unmeritorious complaints, including disclosure of false or misleading allegations to a commonwealth investigative body and raising public sector corruption issues with no basis and with an intention to cause detriment.
Porter accepted that the jurisdiction to investigate law enforcement might be slightly broader, but countered that for a public service of hundreds of thousands of people it was beneficial to create “clarity as to what conduct is criminally corrupt, and what conduct might be misconduct of a lower standard”.
From 1 January, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity will expand its jurisdiction to cover four tax, investment, prudential regulation and competition regulators, before morphing to become the law enforcement division of the new commission.
The government has committed $106.7m in new funding to establish the commission on top of $40.7m of existing ACLEI funding.
Porter would not be drawn on timing for the public sector integrity division, arguing it depended on when legislation passed parliament. He noted he needed to convince the crossbench the proposal was “the best-balanced approach” to create the anti-corruption agency.
Crossbench MPs and senators such as independent MP Helen Haines prefer a stronger model with public referrals and public hearings – which transparency advocates say deter corrupt conduct.
Porter said blocking public hearings was necessary to avoid the “pitfalls” of state anti-corruption bodies that deny procedural fairness to witnesses and cause “innocent people [to] suffer unfairly”.
Despite limitations on public hearings and jurisdiction, Porter boasted the commission would have “greater investigatory powers” than a royal commission including the ability to compel evidence, search and seize evidence under warrant, arrest people and tap phones.
Cases from the public sector division would be referred to commonwealth prosecutors “for public trial and conviction or acquittal depending on how that trial transpired”, he said.
The Coalition first promised a national integrity commission in December 2018, at which time Scott Morrison revealed it had been in the works since January 2018.
Continuing the government’s practice of blaming the Covid-19 pandemic for delay, Porter said although he had draft legislation in December 2019 it would have been “a terrible idea” to conduct consultation on 400 pages of legislation “during the height of a pandemic”.
Porter rejected the view that there was some “urgency” to improving scrutiny of politicians, arguing there were already 11 agencies with jurisdiction over criminal conduct and corruption in the public sector.
Porter said the commonwealth integrity commission could investigate conduct before it came into existence provided the conduct was an offence at the time.
He said full retrospectivity – proposed by the Greens and backed by Labor – was “wrong ethically, morally and in principle”.
Dreyfus told reporters in Melbourne that if Australians have to “wait for the election of a Labor government” to get a proper integrity commission then “so be it”.
“If this government manages to persuade crossbench members of the Senate that they should favour its inadequate model, then a future Labor government will certainly commit to giving Australia the proper integrity commission,” he said.
