Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I follow the member for Braddon, who spoke before me on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2009. The member for Braddon made some points with which I agree, but the fact is that this country is in dire need of electoral funding reform. I think that one of the great shames of the previous government is that it did not undertake this reform. It did not undertake a holistic reform agenda on political donations and, to quote the member for Cook, we are now in a situation where we are headed down a funding arms race—which is not good for democracy and is not good for either side of this House.

It is in the best interests of both sides of this House and the people that we seek to represent that we reform the system of donations that operates now. The sums of money are becoming so large that the integrity of what we do in this place and what happens in the Senate can be called into question. That is why I think that this bill is a very big disappointment. It is the same as we saw last week with Senator Wong on the flawed ETS. It is saying: ‘You can’t have a Ferrari, but you can have a Datsun. If you want the best model, we are not going to be able to give you the best model. We can give you a very poor second choice instead.’ That is the same excuse that the government is using on this bill. It disappoints me that the member for Braddon has said: ‘We’ve got to do a little bit. We can’t do it all.’ I am not sure why we cannot do it all. There is a process going on at the moment through parliamentary committees to look at holistic reform, and I support it, many on this side of the House support it, and many on the other side support it as well. We can do this with a holistic approach, and we should.

I think this bill is a cop-out, because it favours those on the other side of the House. That is the disappointment about this bill. Rather than taking a holistic approach and looking at the benefit for both sides of the House, for the benefit of our democracy, we have a bill which seeks to benefit one side of the House over the other. That is why we are opposed to it. We do have a political arms race going on, and it poses a grave danger to our democracy.

The reason that this bill seeks to assist those on the other side of the House rather than to fix the system is that it gives the Labor Party a great opportunity to continue the great fiscal advantage they have in political campaigns. In the last election campaign they had a $37.6 million head start over any other party—$37.6 million given to them by the trade union movement, and these are direct donations. There was $9 million in cash and in kind from the union movement to the Labor Party. The only reason we know this is because of the Howard government reforms. There was $26 million in a completely dishonest political campaign. The parliamentary secretary at the table, Mr Shorten, knows it, because he was part of it. Of course, he was a beneficiary as well. That is why the Labor Party do not want to reform this system in a real hurry. They get a $37 million head start in every election campaign, and that adds up to the difference in what the party raised in the last election. If you look at the total campaign funding for both sides of parliament, you had $110 million for the Labor Party and $89 million for the coalition. These are enormous sums, and I am sure that most people out there in the electorates do not actually understand how much money it takes now to run an election campaign. To run TV ads alone—as the parliamentary secretary at the table knows—you are talking many tens of millions of dollars. This is a danger for our democracy.

The problem with this bill is that it favours those who benefit from a $37 million head start. In the last campaign we saw completely fictional examples on a piece of public policy to make a political point. That is what the Labor Party and the union movement did in the last campaign: they ran ads which were not true. They ran ads which sought to mislead the Australian people, and they spent $37 million doing it—for the benefit of those who sit on the other side.

We know that most of those who sit on the other side come from the union movement. The parliamentary secretary at the table does, and he did a fine job as the National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union. I was always a fan of the job that the parliamentary secretary was doing—certainly in comparison with some of his contemporaries in other unions. The AWU is a much better union than the CFMEU, and the parliamentary secretary would agree with me on that matter.

If we look at the unions that gave the most money, consistently at the top of the list is the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, which gave $1.5 million. Of course, they run the Labor Party in South Australia; they run the government. In recent times we have seen their factional war lord in the state parliament, Tom Koutsantonis, promoted to the state cabinet far and above his ability and against the wishes of the Premier. The Premier has seen the writing on the wall or the money in the bank, and Tom has been promoted. This is a man who welshes on bets, as my state colleagues will tell you. The SDA is an organisation run by the Labor Party in South Australia, controlled by Senator Farrell, whom the Advertiser calls—and these are not my words—the ‘godfather of the Right’ in South Australia. He runs the efficient operation of the machine. They pay a lot of money to operate this machine, and they run the government in South Australia.

We have a big problem with donations in Australia. We have an enormous problem with the system and it needs to be fixed, and the parliamentary secretary at the table knows it. But, of course, those on the other side do not want the system fixed because they benefit under the current system. The old saying ‘those who pay the piper pick the tune’ operates in the Australian Labor Party every day, and the money they receive—their $37 million advance on every other party in elections—is the reason you do not see a genuine attempt at reform with this bill; you see a half-baked attempt which seeks to give the Labor Party more advantage. Why does it give it more advantage? It seeks to reduce the disclosure limit from $10,000 to around $1,500. The reason they seek that is not for transparency. Rather, when they find the list of those small businesses who dare to donate to the Liberal Party, they visit those small businesses, through their affiliates, and make sure that those small businesses or individuals know—particularly at the state level where they control government—that, if they think the state government will ever deal with them again, they are kidding themselves.

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