Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for your ruling, Mr Deputy Speaker. The sorts of campaign donations which AWB made will be easy to keep secret under this bill. You simply donate amounts of up to $10,000 to the various state branches of the political parties. An examination of the disclosures reported by the Australian Electoral Commission at the start of February this year shows that nearly $8 million in donations to the Liberal Party would have gone undisclosed under this bill. The member for Moncrieff might not want to hear it, but that is the fact. That is $8 million even before you factor in the probability of companies arranging their affairs so as to get under the new limit.

In order to comprehend the possibilities under these proposed reforms, if you have a look at the donations given to the Victorian division of the Liberal Party in 2004-05 you get the situation into perspective and you can see the democracy-eroding future awaiting Australia under these reforms. If the threshold for declaring donations had been $10,000 then 154 of the 205 donations given to the Victorian division of the Liberal Party in the last financial year would have been from unknown donors. It should probably be assumed that if the disclosure limits for political donations were to be amended to $10,000, as this bill proposes, then most of the 11 donations of exactly $10,000 would have been amended to $9,999 to hide their donor’s identity. Including these donations on the cusp of the proposed disclosure limit, 165 out of the 205 donations would be anonymous. This equates to over 80 per cent of all declared donations. So in the state of Victoria alone the Liberal Party would have been potentially able to give anonymity to over 80 per cent of previously declared donors had this law been in effect during the last financial year.

Furthermore, it is apparent that the Victorian Liberal Party, for example, would have enjoyed increased amounts of donations once donors realised that they did not have to disclose their generosity. Top companies in Australia have been reassessing their policies on donating to political parties, speculating on whether or not it is worth the grief that they receive from the media, the public and shareholders alike. You have had companies like AMP, Lend Lease and National Australia Bank deciding to stop donating to political parties at all. Clearly the government’s proposed reforms are aimed at tempting those major companies who have opted out of making political donations into donating again with the security of absolute secrecy. This seems almost certain, considering that when the member for Wentworth was Treasurer of the Liberal Party in 2003 he stated that the non-donation policies of many major companies had cost the Liberal Party $700,000 in potential donations during the previous year.

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