We're only one week into the election campaign, and broken promises are already looming large. Specifically, Scott Morrison's failure to pass legislation to form a federal anti-corruption commission since the last election.
Given Operation Spicer and its consequences for so many, the Hunter is no stranger to how much impact an anti-corruption commission can have.
It was an election promise that most definitely has not been met and, as broken promises go, failing to directly address transparency and honesty in government ranks pretty low on the pub-test scale.
The Prime Minister has long maintained - in the past few months, especially - that his government would only bring the bill for a federal ICAC to parliament if Labor backed it. Scott Morrison and other Liberal MPs have repeatedly pointed to a lack of Labor support for its failure to legislate the watchdog, even as the government faces increasing pressure to live up to its now long-out-of-date promise. And now, Labor leader Anthony Albanese has neatly called the Prime Minister's bluff. He has, in turn, promised to pass such a bill by the end of the year if elected to power.
"If elected, a National Anti-Corruption Commission will be the first priority of the Attorney-General in an Albanese Labor government," he said in a statement on Friday.
Of course, at this stage, it's all just words, just as Morrison's last election promise has turned out to rest on little more than semantics and a half-hearted exposure draft bill in 2020. But these are words that, in an election campaign especially, rest on notions of integrity and trustworthiness. And, at the end of what was a horror start to Labor's campaign last week, this latest move is a canny one.
No one is walking into this latest development blind. Labor has already tried in the past to pass a more detailed alternative bill that has been languishing since 2019. It's a bill that has garnered support from across the political spectrum of the parliament.
If voters care about these kinds of things - and, judging by voter comments in the wake of Albanese's failure to recall key figures around unemployment in one of his first campaign doorstops last week, they most certainly do - the willingness of Labor to step into the integrity void created by the Coalition may well be a deciding factor. Will it be enough to blot out Albanese's early blunder? If his gaffe felt like a gift to the incumbent, questions this week over the $500,000 taxpayer-funded payout to former Coalition staffer Rachelle Miller, the former lover of Liberal minister Alan Tudge, come practically gift-wrapped in return.
These questions have certainly raised issues of integrity and government accountability - almost a textbook example of why an integrity commission should be an ongoing priority of both parties, let alone an election promise in any era.
