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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 3743 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The committee has clearly established that there is a gap in our administrative system. When people become aggrieved at the response they receive from a number of the elements of government infrastructure, there is nowhere for them to go. That theme came up time and time again. As I said, a number of the people who appeared before us were aggrieved that the system had failed them. They went to any number of different places in the system to try to have their grievances heard, and at the end of the day they had no satisfactory official response.

The committee concluded that it is not true to say that there is no corruption in the ACT. There is evidence of some corruption of the system at least. That may be because certain people in the system are corrupt and are not doing their jobs properly, or it may simply be that the administrative arrangements are such that people are able to decline to take on the responsibility of some problems that come before them, because of sensitivity or the nature of the problems. The committee concluded that something needs to be done. There needs to be an organisation within government as a last recourse for people who feel that the system has let them down.

I believe that that still ought to be a commissioner for corruption or, if you want to put the other light on it, a commissioner for integrity in government. They both mean the same thing to me. Where we found that the model I had put forward was rather excessive for the ACT, we looked at other possibilities, and we concluded that a proposal that came initially from the Auditor-General is the one that would be best and the one that we should act upon. That is that the Auditor-General should have additional tasks that would allow him to pursue matters of corrupt practice or, if you like, cases where somebody identifies a lack of integrity in the system.

We have recommended to the government that they pursue that model. We have left it open to the government to discuss with the Auditor-General how he might best perform that function. We have not set down a structure as to how that might be done, but my own personal opinion would be that the Auditor-General ought to be given the additional title of commissioner for integrity in government or commissioner for corruption, whichever the government decides.

While much of the corrupt activity, fraud and the like that might be detected by the Auditor-General through his audit program can already be dealt with by the Auditor-General to some degree under the existing Audit Act, there are clearly other cases where citizens feel that there is corruption or lack of integrity in the system. They would bring those matters to the attention of the new commissioner.

The new commissioner would not be empowered under his present act to take those matters on. So I believe that we need to appoint the Auditor-General, in addition, to be the commissioner for corruption, and that there needs to be a new act that defines his functions and responsibilities when he is wearing that cap. That does entail the necessity to provide some limited additional resources to the Auditor-General.

In discussions with the Auditor-General and his staff, it seemed pretty obvious that the sorts of investigations the Auditor-General does as Auditor-General and the sorts of investigations he would have to undertake as the commissioner for corruption are two different types of investigations and they perhaps require people with different skills. So we need to identify the two functions that the Auditor-General would have in the future

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