Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have great pleasure in speaking in support of the reforms being put forward in the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2010. There

In Australia, in contrast, despite the fact that I, for instance, might question the redistribution in New South Wales in the last term which saw rather bizarre strange boundaries between the seats of Blaxland and Parramatta, in general we have a very legitimate recognised honest system, controlled by an independent Australian Electoral Commission. That is a very important part of the broader debate on electoral matters in this country. The opposition has been systematically denigrating our system, alleging corruption, finding any contrived arguments that there should be greater restrictions on people’s voting rights, that there should be more checking of people, that it should be difficult for people to vote and that there should be restrictions in the way in which people exercise their franchise. The most controversial of those areas has been those restrictions which in the past would have made it very difficult for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory to vote because of identity requirements.

After every election attempts are made to find a list of people who voted twice and to find some corruption in the system  and after every election the AEC concludes that most of the people who voted twice are people who are intellectually challenged or were errors. We in Australia can be proud of a system that is, by any international standards, renowned and respected. It is no wonder that the AEC is often asked to assist other political systems.

The main measures in this bill are about having public exposure of donations. I strongly support these measures. In the Joint Committee on Electoral Matters report on the 1996 election, the Liberal Party and National Party members stated:

The disclosure thresholds should more accurately reflect current financial values. The scenario painted by the AEC—donors going to extraordinary lengths to avoid disclosure of gifts totalling $90,000—is in most cases unlikely. Even accepting such a possibility, a sum of just $90,000 spread over the State and national branches of a party is hardly likely to engender corruption.

I am afraid I agree with the AEC and not with the opposition. I think $90,000 is a substantial amount of money. I think that there would be more than one person in this country who would be persuaded in a variety of political matters by donations of $90,000. The AEC predicted at that time that there would be an increase in the amount of donations that would go unreported. I would far more respect their integrity and their disinterest from a political partisan point of view than those who ensured that more and more donations in this country would go unreported.

The measures in this bill are that the threshold for reporting donations would go from $1,150 down to $1,000 and that all donations over $1,000 would have to be disclosed. I think the Australian people would regard that as more than reasonable. There are arguments that there are small businesspeople out there who are intimidated, who are too scared to give donations if they are known. I do not think anyone with any credibility would listen to that kind of stuff. This is quite clearly an attempt to maximise donations for the Liberal Party through backdoor operations.

Amongst the other changes is one to extend the probation of anonymous donations to all donations over $50. Once again, why should there be anonymity with regard to these matters? Why should the Australian public not know that particular developers, particular people with very clear interests, are giving money? Why should we not be able to determine whether we think there are questionable decisions being made because of donations in this country?

The bill also bans foreign donations, and that is the matter I mainly want to talk about. I do not want to cover areas that have been covered by other members. It also talks about donation splitting, in other words, making donations to a political party in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions so that they are not put together in one item, thus avoiding public scrutiny. Once again, this is overdue, it is correct and it should be supported.

There is also the closer tying of the amount of money that people get with regard to taxpayer funded electoral assistance to the actual campaign expenses. We have seen a few cases in the past where people are basically running in elections to make a few bucks out of it.

I want to turn to foreign donations. This is a very overdue reform. There are clearly areas where foreign powers and other countries try to affect the political system in another country through donations. In recent decades we have seen some very disturbing instances where this was a possibility. In the 1996 United States elections, after sources close to the Chinese government donated to the Clinton legal defence fund, there was a significant investigation in the United States into the activities of John Huang, Johnny Chung et cetera, which led in the end to 21 convictions. A number of these people had connections to a particular corporation, Lippo, and ties with the Chinese administration. It was alleged that in total $7.4 million was devoted to this. Bob Woodward and Brian Duffy in the Washington Postspoke of the Chinese Embassy in Connecticut Avenue being tied to these efforts. They had favoured George Bush in 1992 but in the 1996 elections there was a degree of uncertainty as to Clinton’s reliability because of his attacks with regard to human rights in Tibet. That is a good instance of the way in which, allegedly, money from other sources was being used to affect the politics of another nation.

We know the Liberal Party has a close friend, Michael—Baron—Ashcroft, a person who managed to make $1 million for the Liberal Party in this country between 2004 and 2005. He is another example of questionable practices. Recently he resigned as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in the UK, having on the way out criticised the electoral performance of David Cameron. He has been essentially a citizen of Belize for decades and failed to reveal, over quite a period of time whilst an officer of the Conservative Party, the fact that he had not managed to pay taxation in the United Kingdom on his earnings. He was also alleged to have paid $3.6 million in a loan to the Conservative Party in the UK in the ‘cash for peerages’ scandal. He admitted in March 2010 that, after arguing for some time his taxation privacy, he had not paid on his overseas earnings. Lord Oakeshott of the Liberal Democrats said, ‘Democracy is in danger if Lord Ashcroft has been pouring millions into Conservative campaigns through an offshore pipeline from a Caribbean tax haven.’ As I say, this is a matter of concern.

You can get a variety of issues. We know in recent years that the United States blocked the entry of funds from Dubai and China in regard to port control in the United States because of security concerns. We know that it is a reality around the world that diasporas tend to be far more hard line and more intransigent with regard to issues in their homeland than perhaps the citizens of those homelands. You can look at a variety of foreign policy issues in our own country. Take the breakup of the Soviet Union and the concern of the Baltic, Ukraine and other communities here. Their intensity around those issues is perhaps stronger than the citizens in the homeland. Obviously it is a lot safer to be very radical around these issues in Australia, where you will not get a bullet in your head. You can also have the situation where a diaspora in another country is not really representative of the population back in the homeland. Those people who have left that country in many cases are perhaps an elite of better off professional people, or maybe they are political refugees with objections. In a political system it is natural that these people can influence the politicians of an area in regard to the foreign policy attitudes of their new homeland. To allow donations from overseas sources to be players in the field is, as I say, quite inappropriate. It is long overdue that we are taking measures here to defeat the possibility of influence on the political system from overseas sources.

Once again, another controversial instance was in Canada where former Prime Minister Mulroney was involved in a major scandal involving West German finance, some of it possibly coming from the Bavarian CSU, in a number of commercial transactions in Canada—national decision making that is still being questioned. In 2008 he refused to go before the ethics committee of the Canadian parliament after the main person who was alleged to have paid him this money was extradited. That is another example of why there must be concerns and serious oversight of foreign donations.

Returning to the question of the way in which there should be some limits, and to give an example of some of the money that kicks around in these systems, it has been estimated that the US Chamber of Commerce donated $75 million to ‘pro-business candidates’ in the last midterm US congressional elections. One of our favoured sons, Mr Rupert Murdoch, is estimated, from sources, to have given $4.4 million. He said in an interview with Politico’s Keach Hagey, about $1 million of them, that he ‘didn’t expect’ that his donations would become public. This is typical of the amount of money that kicks around these systems.

It is more than overdue that there be restrictions on the amount of money that can be kept secret from the Australian public. These measures are about transparency. They are about making sure there is oversight so people can gauge for themselves whether money is having a significant influence on politics. We know that overnight in New South Wales there have been moves to actually do something about the huge influence of alcohol, gambling and tobacco in the politics of that state. Another area is the very disturbing influence of developers. The opposition harks back with constant references to the union movement and how much money the unions give. I have no quibble with massive oversight of them. But that is not the issue here. The issue is that people should be able to see what is really happening. It should not be by backdoor processes. It should not be by hiding donations, by making them through a variety of state branches so they cannot be collected on the one site and so people do not have knowledge. I commend the minister and I commend the committee for working on these matters. When we accomplish these kinds of changes we will be strengthening a political system whose legitimacy and whose integrity is renowned around this world. To do otherwise, whatever the contrived arguments, is simply to have a mechanism to try to ensure that the public does not get proper oversight.

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