Wednesday, 3 May 2023

Statements on parliamentary committee reports

Integrity and Oversight Committee

The Independent Performance Audits of the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission and the Victorian Inspectorate

Brad ROWSWELL (Sandringham) (10:05): I rise to make a contribution on The Independent Performance Audits of the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission and the Victorian Inspectorate minority report of October 2022. In doing so – and I have done this once before – I do so as a former deputy chair of the Parliament’s Integrity and Oversight Committee. In my first term in this place it was a great learning opportunity for me, actually, to work with some really dedicated and hardworking members of the secretariat to delve into areas of policy consideration that I had not had the opportunity to do before. Those new members in this place who are joining committees during the course of this Parliament, I would encourage to fully immerse themselves within the committee process.

Acting Speaker, as you may know, given the history of the Parliament’s Integrity and Oversight Committee and the predecessor committee, being the IBAC Committee, for this committee to produce as part of a report that it delivers to the Parliament a minority report is absolutely extraordinary. From time immemorial, so the member for Rowville, my colleague Mr Wells, tells me, matters of integrity, certainly within the parliamentary committee system, have been largely bipartisan. It was unheard of that there would be a minority report. But the member for Rowville and I felt so strongly about the circumstance that we were presented with that we felt like we had no other option but to expose a little bit of truth about what happened during the course of this particular performance audit. Acting Speaker, I am sure you will join with me in being absolutely flabbergasted by the circumstances that ensued.

We have expressed these views in the minority report, the first and the key one being our concerns with the appointment of the auditor and the conduct of the auditor. Okay, the people who put together this minority report are, yes, both members of the opposition; we are both members of the Liberal Party. If there are some people out there who say, ‘Well, of course they’re going to have issues with a Labor-dominated committee and the processes that ensued at that committee inquiry’, for goodness sake, do not believe us, believe –

A member: We don’t.

Brad ROWSWELL: I will come to you in a minute – what is his name?

So do not believe us, believe the former IBAC Commissioner in Robert Redlich KC, who wrote to the Presiding Officers about his own deep concerns about the processes that ensued during this committee inquiry. So, yes, we had concerns with the auditor. We also had concerns with the way in which the auditor was being directed by Labor members of the committee – absolutely unprecedented. Call me conservative, call me a traditionalist, call me a lover of processes, call me whatever you like – and I am sure you will – but I believe in due parliamentary process. I believe that the committees of this Parliament have not only a right, but an obligation to do their work independent of interference from political overlords and certainly the Premier’s private office, which is exactly what happened during the course of this inquiry.

As an addendum to this minority report, Mr Wells and I attached an email that Mr Halse actually – one of your former colleagues, member for Mordialloc – sent to the auditor, directing the auditor as to what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. Blow me over, but I would have thought that the obligation of an auditor was to undertake their work free of party-political, partisan interference. The fact that they were actually subjected to that flies in the face of an audit process in the first place, but this is what we were subjected to during the last Parliament in the Integrity and Oversight Committee. Mr Redlich has written to the Presiding Officers. I would hope that the Integrity and Oversight Committee of this Parliament will consider that letter and those matters seriously.