Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fowler for her question. The government is seeking to amend the Electoral Act in a number of ways to strengthen scrutiny and probity in Australia’s electoral system. Those reforms include requiring disclosure of any donations above a $1,000 limit and banning donations to political parties by foreigners. Sadly, the Liberal and National parties have been obstructing these very important reforms to political transparency and probity in this country in the Senate, which is very unfortunate. It is very unfortunate for the integrity of our democratic process.

It is worth noting that there are recent examples of particular kinds of donations that would be affected by these changes. I draw members’ attention to an article in the Sunday Age, dated 8 February this year, headed ‘Turnbull takes cash from market ‘vulture’’ and written by Josh Gordon. I would like to quote a couple of sentences from this article:

MALCOLM Turnbull has taken a large campaign donation from an American billionaire closely linked to the predatory lending practices that triggered the subprime lending crisis—

in the United States and the global recession. It goes on:

An investigation … revealed that Peter Briger, chairman and director of controversial “vulture company” Fortress Investment Group, contributed $US50,000—

or A$76,000—

to the Liberal campaign fund for the Opposition leader’s seat of Wentworth last year.

The article then goes on to say that a ‘vulture’ company is a company which preys on the carcass of dead or distressed companies. In fact, this particular vulture company was deemed to be so aggressive that even the Wall Street Journal attacked the company for foreclosing on families who were affected in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. An interesting addendum to this article is that a search of the register of members’ interests revealed that on 14 March 2007 the Leader of the Opposition disclosed that he owned shares in the Fortress Investment Group and that this shareholding remained until 27 July 2007. According to the article he received a donation of $76,000 from this company during 2007 at some point—which does raise the interesting possibility that he was on both sides of the transaction, although it is not clear from the indications as to whether or not that is the case.

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