Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

What we have before us in the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2010 feels a bit like deja vu. We have been here before. The member for Banks and I have been here before, debating this same legislation, and what it betrays is the lack of an agenda from this government. What we have got is a recycling of the former Prime Minister’s agenda. We have got the leftovers of the former Prime Minister’s agenda and whatever the Greens serve up on their agenda, and that is the policy drift we find with this government. The member for Banks talked about an inquiry conducted by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, of which I was deputy chair and he was chair. He made reference to the report and the dissenting report provided by the minority members of that committee. What he did not point out was the fundamental point which I think the government misses—that is, this bill is not even a half measure, not even a quarter measure, not even a tenth measure.

If the government are serious about campaign finance reform, about reform in this area, then they should engage with the opposition and come up with a fair dinkum bill. This is not a fair dinkum bill. This is not a fair dinkum attempt. This is a bill designed to prosecute the advantage of the Labor Party. That is incredibly disappointing, because with all the shrill noises about bipartisanship it does require an element of good faith to come to the table to address the things that we all know in this place are producing the very dangerous cocktail of the politics of money. In the last parliament I said on numerous occasions that we had a fairly unique opportunity in this place to avoid the politics of money spilling over from the cesspit of the New South Wales Labor government and other state jurisdictions around the country and creeping into this place.

There is a real opportunity to do something significant in this parliament. I know the shadow minister at the table, the member for Mackellar, is very keen and very committed to reform in this area. There is an open invitation to the government to come and seriously discuss the issues that need to be discussed. But it is a demonstration of the serious lack of agenda that this government has. ‘Citizen Richardson’, as I suppose we could now call him—none other than the most prodigious power broker the New South Wales Labor Party has ever known—made the observation that this is a government without an agenda, and any assessment of what we see coming before this place on a daily basis I think is an absolute demonstration of that fact. But that is for the government to address. It is not for the opposition to write the government’s agenda. You would think that if they wanted to form government they would actually have an agenda for a government. In this area I think they are as bereft as in any other area that we have responsibilities for in this place.

We want a bill that will deal with the serious issues involved in working against the politics of money dominating our political environment in this country. I would suggest there are three areas we need to look carefully at, the first being political expenditure. While there will be many who will want to prosecute the case that the great ill in the system is who you take money from, if you deal with why the political parties need so much money then I think you are going a long way to addressing the ills that exist within the system. If the question is, ‘How much money do you need?’ and the answer is, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ then we all in this place leave ourselves incredibly exposed and I think this is a very dangerous situation we place ourselves in. The moves made particularly in the Canadian, New Zealand and UK jurisdictions to set limits on campaign expenditure are worthy of consideration and serious assessment. If you can control and regulate the amount of money that is needed then clearly you are not opening yourselves up to abuses in the way that money is then solicited. This is something that I would commend to the House for consideration.

Secondly, if you are going to deal in this area you must deal with third parties. That is the great abuse that we have seen in the New South Wales parliament recently with the haphazard reforms that have been trumped up more recently in that state. What we want is fair dinkum regulation and control of third-party participation in this area. If you want to be a third party like GetUp! or any other group of that nature out of the union movement, you want to participate in the electoral process and you want to run paid advertising in election campaigns then you should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny and conditions and controls as the political actors in those campaigns. By that I mean simply this: they should be completely subject to expenditure controls, and very strict and limited expenditure controls. They should also be subjected to political disclosure of the donations they receive. They should be able to say where they got their money from and not just take it out of the honey pot of union membership fees and make a donation. If you want to spend money as a union in a political campaign then get it off your members honestly by asking them for a donation and disclosing those donations. If that is what you want to do, do it. But that is what you need to do and that is what the process and the system should encompass.

Thirdly, we need to ensure that we recognise practically in this place that, on whichever side of politics you sit in this House, in relation to the compliance regulations that we put into these bills, the people who assist us in our work as members of our political parties are by and large volunteers. We need to ensure that we have compliance regulations and activity that enables them to comply and does not seek to hunt them out as being some sort of criminal participants, when all they are seeking to do is support the political view of their choice. That is a noble thing. People who want to make donations to political parties should be seen as people doing noble things, subject to reasonable regulation. To suggest their participation in the political process is somehow inappropriate when appropriate regulation is in place I think demeans our democracy. If people want to get involved and support candidates, good on them. We need more people who are keen to participate in the political process in this country.

So I plead, in the very short time remaining to me, that we deal with the issue of expenditure caps, that we deal with the issue of third parties most importantly, that we understand that there are people who support us in our political parties who are simply trying to express their support for views and that we do not seek to make the process too burdensome for them to comply. At the end of the day, we need to work together to end the politics of money. This is a half-measure bill and the government need to come up with something serious or they cannot expect the opposition’s support.

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