Labor’s national anti-corruption commission bill is likely to pass into law with Coalition support, after Peter Dutton said it had “got the balance right”.
On Wednesday the Liberal leader urged the government to stare down discontent on the crossbench about the “exceptional circumstances” threshold test for public hearings, and he reinforced his desire to help set up a “strong” anti-corruption body.
The Greens and senators Jacqui Lambie and David Pocock have raised concerns about the public hearings test, which the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has said will mean most hearings of the Nacc are held in private.
The bill, introduced to parliament on Wednesday, says a public hearing would be held if the commissioner considered it to be in the public interest and it was justified by exceptional circumstances.
Relevant factors to be considered include the confidentiality of information, the person’s reputation, and the benefits of exposing corruption publicly.
Dreyfus told the House of Representatives the bill would “establish a powerful, transparent and independent National Anti-Corruption Commission”. He said the bill “honours our commitment to Australians” and “delivers … the single biggest integrity reform this parliament has seen in decades”.
After its introduction, Dutton said there was “no place for corrupt behaviour in public life”.
On public hearings, the Liberal leader said “the balance is there” because the Nacc can hold them “where it is appropriate to do so” and this was exactly what independents had argued for.
“I don’t want a show trial, I want people who have committed a crime to go to jail,” he said. “I don’t want a situation where somebody has their reputation trashed.”
Dutton claimed some parliamentarians “want to see a melee in this place, and want to see the system pulled down”.
He approved of the proposed powers to compel witnesses and evidence and the ability to inquire into past conduct, although he cautioned that public officials should be judged by the standards of the time.
Dutton said the bill was yet to go to the Coalition party room, but confirmed the opposition had been consulted about its content.
The bill will now be scrutinised by a parliamentary committee before a possible final vote in the Senate in November.
Earlier on Wednesday, the crossbench expressed their support for most elements of the bill but warned about the threshold for public hearings being set too high.
The Independent MP Helen Haines, the architect of an integrity commission bill in the last parliament, said the crossbench will consider these issues through the inquiry, but rejected the Coalition’s description of “show trials”.
Haines said it would be a “big mistake” if Labor only dealt with the Coalition.
The Greens senator David Shoebridge said the exceptional circumstances threshold was “exceptionally unhelpful”, while Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie said “there’s no public trust in politicians out there and if you want to play this out, it’s going to have to be in the public arena”.
“[The threshold is] just about going to kill off trust that we’re trying to establish with the Australian people,” she said. “You have to open this up.
“Besides that, the attorney general said all these decisions he was going to leave up to the commission itself, so why are we now starting to dictate who will be behind closed doors and who isn’t? It’s not on.”
The ACT senator David Pocock said the independent commission should be able to make hearings public if they believe it is in the public interest and not be constrained to do so only in exceptional circumstances.
