Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure for me to support the Advisory report on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008 by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. This bill was referred to the committee by the good senators. I would like to say how much I appreciate the work that has been done by the committee secretariat in relation to this bill. You will find it is a bill about which there have been some differences of opinion based across the political divide. However, as it turns out, the chairman, Daryl Melham, has been able to negotiate a fairly decent outcome in terms of the recommendations and the modest dissension that has come with this report.

In the first instance, I will mention a little bit of historical information. Political donations are not a matter that we have argued about just in recent times; it has been around for as long as I can remember. In particular, I note that colleagues who were on the joint standing committee in the previous parliament put in a dissenting report quoting Senator Ray back in 1983. One sentence encapsulates it all. Senator Ray said:

I believe that the public has a right to know who is donating to political parties.

I think that all of us would expect that to be the case. We should be open with our communities as to who is giving us the money that we use in order to attract their vote. A good friend of mine, Michael Lavarch, was on a committee of the parliament in 1989, which is when I think the report called Who pays the piper calls the tune was presented. I think that is what the community believes: who pays the piper calls the tune—who is sticking the money in the hands of the political parties is who, if not to get their way, gets to have influence over government.

As a Queensland MP I am very familiar with the process that led up to the 1988 Fitzgerald inquiry regarding the legendary brown paper bags of money that passed hands in Queensland at that time. The whole country has come a long way since then and political processes have matured somewhat, but it is still the case that, in almost any survey of the public that is taken, MPs rate at the lower end of occupations of Australian workers—because, of course, we are Australian workers—that are trusted by the community. We share that status with a couple of other professions, like used-car salesmen and journalists.

We are open to that kind of lack of regard by our community. If we are seeking to hide from them the sources of the money that we use to campaign then we are playing into the hands of that kind of opinion. They should see, as I do, members of both sides as honourable people who are striving to see to it that the values system that they support is the one that is driving the country for the moment. The report that the committee has brought down is simply about that. It is about openness and accountability. It is about the restoration of public confidence in the political process. And while the dissenting report suggests that these matters should be delayed until the green paper of the full review of electoral legislation comes through, I believe that openness, accountability and the restoration of confidence are not matters that we as members of parliament should be seeking to delay. I believe that this is what we should have been offering up to our community not now but years ago. I think the increase that occurred in non-disclosable donations in the course of the last parliament was a blight on our political process.

There are some fairly interesting matters that are also covered in here aside from the disclosure threshold, which we are looking to bring down from $10,900 and indexed, as it is now, down to $1,000 and non-indexed. I know that in Queensland we have an issue that my colleague, the member for Melbourne Ports, has been very vocal about over a number of years—that is, the use by certain individuals of public electoral funding to gain an income over some years and, by dint of, shall we say, celebrity, being able to acquire many more votes and much more money than they need to expend in order to acquire those.

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