Wednesday, 8 February 2023

Integrity and Oversight Committee

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

Brad ROWSWELL (Sandringham) (10:12): I also rise to speak – perhaps in a little bit more detail than the member for Frankston – on the minority report actually submitted by the member for Rowville titled The Independent Performance Audits of the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission and the Victorian Inspectorate. The member for Rowville, you will be surprised to hear me say, is absolutely correct: there was very little consistency with the Integrity and Oversight Committee of the last Parliament, and that was not the fault of the opposition. The opposition were, frankly, the only constant in that committee. I was really actually grateful for the member for Rowville, who helped me as a new member of Parliament and a new member of the Integrity and Oversight Committee undertake my work as deputy chair of that committee in the last Parliament. Just to have the member for Rowville’s expertise, knowledge and guidance I was very grateful for, as he had served on previous iterations of the committee in previous parliaments.

Now, to the minority report itself, we felt as an opposition it was important to table a minority report to get on the record some of the issues that were experienced by the committee during the course of the inquiry. The reason we felt that was important to do was so lessons could be learned for future committees, because this audit that was undertaken by the committee on behalf of the Parliament, on behalf of the people of Victoria, of two integrity agencies – being the Victorian Inspectorate and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission – was the first of its kind, so you would expect there to be issues. A first-of-its-kind audit, new legislation being enacted through the authority of the Integrity and Oversight Committee – of course there are going to be issues. But frankly, and I think I speak for the member for Rowville when saying this, we did not expect how many issues there would be. There were significant issues; firstly, with the appointment of the auditor, who we believe – and it is articulated in the minority report – misrepresented their ability to undertake the performance audit competently. That was a real shame because we had faith in the auditors, Callida, to undertake an effective audit against the requirements of the act to determine whether these agencies ‘are achieving their objectives effectively, economically and efficiently’. We believe that Callida, on a number of occasions, sadly, fell well short of that.

We made one recommendation only in this minority report, and we trust that the government will consider this recommendation seriously because the recommendation was made in absolute good faith and, as I say, with the view for lessons to be learned from the last Parliament. That recommendation is the following: that the incoming Integrity and Oversight Committee of the 60th Parliament should review, with the intention of rewriting, the legislation concerning auditing in the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Act 2011 and the Victorian Inspectorate Act 2011.

We came across so many issues during the course of this audit that we believe that the Integrity and Oversight Committee should undertake a review of those acts in order to tidy these things up to get greater clarity for the auditor, greater clarity for the community and greater clarity for the agencies. There were issues during the course of this audit. The agencies gave a bit of pushback to the auditor, but the auditor did not assert themselves in the way that we thought they should have asserted themselves in order to undertake an audit to the degree that the committee expected them to take. So this does need a full-scale review by the incoming Integrity and Oversight Committee.

Just finally, I do want to reference some comments made by the outgoing Commissioner of IBAC, the Honourable Robert Redlich, who at the end of last year in one of his final public interviews suggested that the chairmanship of the Parliament’s Integrity and Oversight Committee should be held by a non-government member. I think that is entirely appropriate. That does not necessarily need to be a member of the opposition, but it is entirely appropriate because, as we demonstrated as opposition in the last Parliament, the only consistent thing in the Integrity and Oversight Committee during the last Parliament was our presence there. I commend this minority report to the Parliament.