Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The guiding principle for the opposition on disclosure and funding is that the trail of disclosure, back to the true source of the funds, be understood by the public. ALP committee members believe that these amendments do not uphold this guiding principle.

Our dissent focuses on six aspects of the current funding and disclosure scheme: thresholds at which donations must be disclosed, tax deductibility of donations, the disclosure of donations given at fundraising events, anonymous donations, enhanced obligations and audit compliance of donation receivers, and the powers of the AEC in managing the scheme.

First of all, the underlying object of the government’s proposed changes is to make it easier, in our view, for corporate donors to give the government money without having to disclose it. The raising of the threshold to $10,000 means, for instance, that you could make eight separate donations of $10,000 without having to provide a return to the AEC. I think it is transparently against the wishes of this parliament and the Australian people that $80,000 is able to be given to a political party without it being disclosed. We reject as misleading the view, as asserted by Liberal national director Brian Loughnane at the JSCEM hearings into the 2004 federal election, that nearly 90 per cent of donations received in 2003-04 would be disclosed if the threshold were raised to $10,000. In our view, had the government’s planned changes been in place in 2004-05, roughly 80 per cent of receipts for the approximately $143 million received by the major parties would have escaped public scrutiny and, plainly, that is against the public interest.

On the issue of tax deductibility, we see no evidence for making the political system more democratic, as the member for Herbert has just claimed, by raising the threshold. The member for Casey previously criticised me, in particular, in this chamber, for saying that the ALP had previously supported this. He was obviously wrong. When individual members of committees make certain judgments on particular issues at times, they do not necessarily commit their political parties to doing that, just as the support of the member for Moncrieff and the member for Casey for four-year terms does not necessarily bind this government to it, although I wish it would.

On the issue of tax deductibility, two academic observers, Tham and Orr, submitted:

The problem with tax deduction regimes are that they are disproportionately attractive to high-income earners who benefit most from deductibility and least of an incentive to pensioners et cetera.

One of the other issues that concerns us is that the AEC has consistently recommended that all payments made at fundraising events be deemed donations and therefore required to be disclosed. From time to time, this has been a problem for both political parties. We understand that, for instance, the Millennium Forum has had major donations to the Liberal Party, yet it has never once been mentioned in a return by the Liberal Party to the AEC.

We also have issues with anonymous donations. This is clearly not within the legislation. There have been major anonymous donations where one cannot get to the source of the donors—for instance, from the Greenfields Foundation. In the National Party, we have recently discovered, the absurdly named Pilliwinks company in 2002-03 gave $95,000 and Doogary gave $661,000, without providing a return to the AEC. In 2004-05, Pilliwinks gave $30,000 to the Victorian Nationals and Doogary gave $374,000, again without disclosing who their donors were. The far right Citizens Electoral Council has also benefited from the legislation’s failure to deal with anonymous donations. That is why we believe that, if the true source of these donations cannot be understood, anonymous donations might as well be banned.

I turn now to donations from overseas. Australia saw the enormous donation to the Liberals from Lord Michael Ashcroft of $1 million. In 2004-05 we had Kingston Investments, which is based in China, donating almost $50,000 to the New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party. This group has not filed a return with the AEC and the AEC has no way of ensuring that the group complies with Australian law. (Time expired)

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