Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service and Integrity) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Banks for his question. He has had a longstanding interest in electoral reform and in particular in recent years in looking at the matter of political donations and the like. For the last 25 years this parliament has been the beneficiary of insightful legislation introduced in 1984 that brought the first disclosure of political donations. Over the course of the last 2½ decades, we have seen substantial tightening and increased regulation of political party activity, which has thankfully and thoughtfully kept our parliament at the very leading edge of these measures globally. It has meant that our parliament has never faced the criticism or the accusation that donations to political parties seriously pervert the course of deliberations in this place.

But we must be continually vigilant to ensure that our laws and the regulatory environment in which we play are as good as they can be. On two occasions over the past two years the government has introduced a bill designed to increase the transparency of political donations and to reduce the limit from the current over $10,000 for disclosure to $1,000. On both occasions, that legislation passed this place only to be stopped in the Senate. It is because of its knowledge of this parliament that the government, through its commitment to the crossbenchers, will reintroduce the legislation to ensure the $1,000 limit is once again able to be debated in this place. The bill to do that will be introduced in the next few days. That bill will reduce the limit from $10,500 to $1,000.

The bill will also prevent donation splitting between different branches of political parties, will ban foreign donations, will ban anonymous donations of over $50 and will increase the timeliness and frequency of donation disclosure.

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