Labor uses Bruce Billson censure to goad Coalition over federal Icac

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/29/labor-uses-bruce-billson-censure-to-goad-coalition-over-federal-icac

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Labor has seized on the censure of the former Liberal minister Bruce Billson to put pressure on the Turnbull government to join a bipartisan effort to establish a national integrity commission.

The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, wrote to the attorney general, Christian Porter, on Wednesday expressing concern that two months after Labor proposed an anti-corruption commission the Coalition had not agreed to set one up.

Porter told Guardian Australia the Coalition was considering “detailed models” for the reform, including possibly strengthening and combining some existing bodies.

He warned Labor against proceeding by “announcement first and detail second”, saying the Coalition would continue consulting before engaging in public debate.

Porter has met a panel of judges and legal experts who are in favour of an anti-corruption body and asked for a briefing on how it could operate fairly without impugning people’s reputations, one of the key concerns inside the Coalition.

One of the panel members, the former chairman of Transparency International, Anthony Whealy, told Guardian Australia they responded with a briefing last week that put a “strong case there is no need for it to operate unfairly”.

Whealy said the concern could be addressed by only having public hearings where it is in the public interest, including not unfairly damaging witnesses’ reputation.

He said it was “almost impossible” to combine existing bodies which had different functions and instead recommended an anti-corruption body cooperate with existing agencies.

After Labor’s announcement in late January, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said he was “looking at this issue” and that he “certainly” had not ruled it out.

But Dreyfus complained that a national integrity commission “cannot wait much longer” and the task of working together to set it up is “ever more urgent”.

Dreyfus cited the case of the former small business minister, Bruce Billson, who the privileges committee found on Monday had been employed and paid by a business lobby group before he quit parliament in May 2016.

On Tuesday the House of Representatives officially censured Billson for taking a $75,000 a year job with the Franchise Council of Australia in March 2016, which the privileges committee found he had failed to declare in breach of his obligations as an MP.

“The cause for Mr Billson’s censure – failing to declare private sector payments made to him while he was still an MP, paid to him for work he was doing on behalf of a key stakeholder group he had engaged with when he was the minister for small business – is the kind of behaviour which does serious damage to the Australian public’s faith in our democracy and our politics,” he wrote.

Porter told Guardian Australia a parliamentary committee had recommended that “careful consideration” be given “to establishing a commonwealth agency with broad scope and jurisdiction to address integrity and corruption matters, and that is what we are doing”.

“It may be that the best way to further strengthen and improve the national integrity framework is to consolidate a range of existing bodies into a single commonwealth agency,” he said.

Change should “improve rather than detract from present arrangements” and required detailed consultation on “a variety of options for a new body which can be the subject of public debate”.

Porter questioned whether an anti-corruption body would have jurisdiction to consider the case of Sam Dastyari, who resigned after revelations of his links to Chinese donor Huang Xiangmo.

The experience of anti-corruption bodies at the state level indicated this was “the worst possible area in which to engage in policy on the run”, he said.

Before his censure, Billson submitted to the privileges committee that his failure to declare the job was an “administrative error and oversight” and wrote to the Speaker apologising for the “discourtesy to the house this represents”.