Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They do—British American Tobacco—and the public have a right to know that. I have said before that previous laws that existed allowed political donations to be concealed from the public, and this gave the bad odour of potential corruption. I commend my friend the Special Minister of State for reintroducing this legislation to ensure that our system is more transparent and accountable.

However, the aspect of this bill that I really think is worth noting is the reporting of election funds and verification of election expenditure directly incurred by a candidate or party for an election, with penalties for fraudulent claims. This House may remember that I spoke in 2007 of the need to reform the electoral expenditure and reporting funds in order to avoid another Pauline Hanson situation. In 2004, the former member for Oxley ran for the Senate in Queensland, spending only $35,000 and trousering $200,000 that she got from the public purse because, as we know, a fixed amount is given by the Electoral Commission according to the number of votes. What Pauline Hanson used to do was run a campaign in the Women’s Weekly and on A Current Affair, get all the free publicity and spend none of the money that was given to her by the public for a legitimate election campaign, score over four per cent, which was the minimum you needed, and trouser the difference—spend $35,000 and take $200,000 from the taxpayers. What a scheme that was! It reminds me of Zero Mostel’s famous film The Producers, where they deliberately tried to have a play that closed on the first night in order for all the contributions that they got oversubscribed from elderly widows to make the play worth while financially. This was an extraordinary scheme by the former member for Oxley, Senate candidate Pauline Hanson, and this legislation will close that sort of thing down. Again, I would think that the Liberal Party would be in favour of this. They are not in favour of Pauline Hanson. They opposed Pauline Hanson. Therefore why would they not support this legislation?

The context of this legislation is also very important. The period from 2004 to 2007 when the Liberals had control of the Senate is widely regarded by many people as a period of hubris for the now opposition, the Liberal Party, when they introduced legislation on workplace reform that ultimately brought them down. But, when they controlled the Senate, apart from introducing their bodgie donations scheme, they introduced legislation such that, when people cast a provisional vote, they had to produce unreasonable amounts of photo ID in order to exercise their provisional vote.

What that meant at the last election I want to make clear to this House. Two hundred thousand Australians sought a provisional vote at the last election; 130,000 of them received letters in the last few weeks saying that they were not granted. They did not get their vote, because of this Liberal Party scam that required them to produce photo ID, not just proof of signature or proof of change of address, which they could easily produce, as they did in the past

At every previous election since 1996 the Liberal Party were elected on the basis of people with provisional votes having matching signatures. On all those occasions, it was perfectly legitimate for them to be elected on the basis of those people’s votes, even in close elections. Now they try to rule out all of those Australians’ rights to vote. In a compulsory voting system, our ethic should be to try and include every person who is a legitimate voter in the voting system, not exclude them. In those elections in which the Liberal Party were elected between 1996 and 2004, 50 per cent of people who applied for a provisional vote got it. Because of the scam that they introduced in 2007, only 20 per cent of people got a provisional vote. One hundred and thirty thousand Australians lost their right to vote because of the photo ID scam that the Liberals introduced at the 2007 elections. Of course, this is their idea, their motivation for the 2006-07 legislation: salami tactics to shave off different groups of people that might vote for the Labor Party.

Another group of people that they have excluded very cleverly over the last 15 years via masterly inaction is people who shift addresses. As you change address—and every member of parliament knows this—the Electoral Commission know where you have shifted to because of their access to databases like the White Pages. The AEC are bound by legislation to write to the ordinary voter and say, ‘Can you please confirm in writing that you have shifted address?’ Unfortunately, only 20 per cent of Australians respond in hard mail. What that has meant over time, over the period of the Liberal Party’s government—and we did not manage to change it in the last three years of the previous Labor government—is that 1.8 million Australians have been taken off the electoral roll by this process.

What we ought to do—and I am confident that my friend the Special Minister of State will eventually do this after June when there is a sensible majority in the Senate—is that, when we know people have changed addresses, when the Liberal Party does not dispute that they have changed addresses, when it is confirmed by different databases such as that of the Transport Accident Commission or the various electricity boards, people should write back to the Electoral Commission only if they are not at that address. Hopefully therefore in excess of 1½ million Australians would be able to be put back on the electoral roll.

This is our responsibility. In a democratic system, in a compulsory voting system, it is absolutely terrible that 130,000 Australians cast a provisional vote and were not actually allowed to vote at the last election. It is terrible that 1½ million Australian citizens were not given their right to vote because they were not enrolled, and I think it will be the responsibility of this government and of the Electoral Commission to clean up this area just as we are cleaning up political donations.

I might say that one very bad idea on political donations that came during the last three years was initiated by Senator Ronaldson, the previous spokesman on these matters, together with his friends in the Greens. That was for pure public funding of political parties. What a crazy idea that is. I have the figures for the 2007 period of the real cost of political parties. Can you imagine the Australian taxpayer taking up the entire cost of funding the Liberal Party or the Labor Party? In the 2004-07 period the real cost of the Labor Party operations was $217 million. The real cost of the Liberal and National parties was $180 million. In order to have pure public funding of the Australian electoral system it would cost the Australian taxpayer $450 million. Do we really want to do that, to pay for political parties, or do we want to build hospitals, pay for our defence forces and pay for the public education system? The current system of some matching funding at election time together with private donations, open and transparent, is an ideal way for an open democratic society like Australia to pursue. But having pure public funding would cost the Australian taxpayer $450 million. When we make decisions on these kinds of issues, we have to have the real costs of what these idealistic Green ideas would cost rather than just proceed with them. (Time expired)

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