Maverick Senator Nick Xenophon wants the federal government to follow the way of New South Wales, Queensland and West Australia and establish a body similar to that of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).

"It is a glaring anomaly that the Federal Government - in control of a $350billion-a-year budget - doesn't have a peak anti-corruption body that will cover public servants, government departments and politicians," The Daily Telegraph reported Senator Xenophon as saying on Tuesday.

His calls were made following the strings of scandals that had wracked the Parliament and involved two prominent members - House Speaker Peter Slipper and former Labor MP Craig Thomson.

Mr Slipper has since stood down from his high-paying post while Mr Thomson has consistently professed on his innocence, claiming in a speech delivered yesterday that he was a victim of a set-up arranged by his former colleagues at the Health Services Union (HSU).

But the independent senator from South Australia said that the twin Thomson-Slipper controversies and the ensuing calls for a definitive call of conduct for Australian lawmakers were mere sideshows the moist pressing issue of the time.

"It's an anomaly ... that there is no national ICAC ... that at a federal level there is no ICAC to cover government departments, public servants and particularly MPs," Senator Xenophon said.

On that note, he declared that he will back the initiative of Greens MP Adam Bandt that will urge the Parliament to mull the creation of an anti-corruption agency on a national scope, which Mr Bandt said will hopefully get the Senate's attention when it resumes session next week.

The proposal pitched by Senator Xenophon and Mr Bandt is in support of an earlier call by Greens leader Senator Christine Milne, who last week declared that the country badly needs an established body that could police the ranks of those serving in the government.

Senator Milne told ABC in an interview that codes of conducts would not suffice in checking the erring members of the Parliament in particular as they "tend to be implemented at the discretion of the leadership at any one time and they are not as effective as a national integrity commission and commissioner."

"What you have with a national ICAC is the ability to (legally) deal with," offences committed by those in the government, especially the elected officials, Senator Milne added.

But the idea was immediately shot down by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, who dismissed the plan as "a desperate distraction from a government and a government partner to the whole Thomson-Slipper scandal."

"The important thing is how is this government, including the Greens, are going to respond to the Slipper matter and the Thomson matter," Mr Abbott was quoted by The Australian as saying in a statement he made last week.

Anti-corruption commissions are presently in-placed in Queensland, Western Australia and the NSW, which originally adopted the creation of such body in the late 1980s purportedly to combat the growing incidence of irregularities among civil servants in the state at that time.