The Liberal Government's submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Integrity is about ensuring all misconduct complaints are managed appropriately, removing expensive duplication, and eliminating stakeholder and legal concerns about lack of fair process.
We do not want to abolish or 'gut' the Integrity Commission as has been falsely asserted recently. We want to ensure it operates efficiently and fairly.
The Integrity Commission will continue to play a central role in ensuring all complaints are triaged and dealt with in an appropriate way by the appropriate authority.
The vast majority of the complaints received by the Integrity Commission are referred back to the relevant agency after triage.
The Government believes that this triage function should remain and that the Integrity Commission should continue to quality assure investigations by other agencies and ensure that they address misconduct concerns.
We also believe that there is a greater role to be played by the Integrity Commission in educating public servants about misconduct.
The issues and areas of concern identified in our submission are echoed by the submissions of other stakeholders. The primary concerns are:
None of these concerns are new and all have been raised now and previously by various stakeholders, particularly in relation to the recent lengthy health investigation.
Criticism that our submission was in some form an attack on the Integrity Commission has been disappointing. With the Government wanting the Integrity Commission to continue and strengthen their role in quality-assuring misconduct investigations, there should be no suggestion that misconduct complaints will go unaddressed should these recommendations be adopted.