MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (16:55): He was 'operating in secret, keeping the operations of the government from the Australian people themselves'. That's not my quote. That's the current prime minister about former PM Scott Morrison.

But now it describes Prime Minister Albanese to an alarming extent. He said that what Morrison did was unprecedented, because it was, but we didn't know he intended to keep on digging himself. The Albanese Labor government has failed its own integrity test.

In doing so, it's failing the community. Right now they're trying to trash FOI, that fundamental tool of democratic accountability. They're running the system into the ground, having bureaucrats spend a million hours of their time per year blacking out information, refusing access, running printers out of ink in blacking out the pages and then introducing laws which will make things worse.

The mind boggles. The Centre for Public Integrity's scorecard contains a chilling assessment of Labor's performance. Their failure on FOI isn't an anomaly.

It's part of a government addicted to secrecy. On the CPI scorecard, Labor gets an 'F' for transparency—for jobs for mates, for letting lobbyists run riot, for not supporting parliament and its accountability function and for not supporting an independent Public Service. The only pass grade they get is because they've got a draft whistleblower bill they haven't yet brought to a vote.

Their landmark integrity reform was supposed to be a national anticorruption commission, but I don't know anyone who thinks that's working. In fact, the words most people use to describe the NACC would be declared unparliamentary. Of course, the NACC had its robodebt debacle—the lack of public hearings—and has a commissioner who's up to his eyeballs in conflicts of interest and fancy Army costumes.

That is not working. So, yes, this is a government that's failing transparency. It's about as transparent as a brick.