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

Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to make some remarks without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

Firstly, I want to express my thanks to the opposition for making it possible for me to speak in this debate, otherwise I would have had to run out and not be able to make some remarks which I think people across the spectrum might find interesting.

Mr Tehan interjecting—

You are very nice people. I want to congratulate the chairman, Daryl Melham, and his committee for moving what I regard is an essential change to the electoral law that will prevent candidates trousering, as they did at the 2004 and 2007 elections, $200,000 without record of expenditure. We will remember that at one election a certain candidate in Queensland from the seat of Oxley, which the chair at the moment ably represents, was able to score over four per cent of the vote, get $1.90 per vote and then only spend $35,000, harvesting a profit of $200,000. This is something I have often observed that reminded me very much of Zero Mostel's famous film The Producers,where the Broadway producer had to get several thousand per cent of investment by investors and then hoped to make a profit if the play closed on the first night. This was the electoral equivalent of that, and recommendations 15 and 16 of the committee's report do an excellent job of addressing this by saying:

… members elected with less than four per cent of the first preference vote be eligible for election funding. These members should be entitled to the lesser of:

So we will never have this precedence of making election day Pauline Hanson's payday in the future. This issue has finally been addressed by this parliament, and I hope the government takes it on.

The second thing I want to turn to is the recommendations about timing of single donations above $100,000 to a political party or a third entity being a special reporting event. I was very surprised that this resolution was passed by the committee. We know it has been a matter of great controversy in the Australian Greens political party in relation to the extraordinary $1.6 million donation received by that party from the company associated with Wotif. I make no remarks about the issue that is going before the Privileges Committee; I do, however, record my amazement that this appears to further the differences between Senator Rhiannon and Senator Brown. Senator Brown maintains that this was reported as under the current regulations, which I am sure is true knowing him. He is a very upright and ethical person. One can politically disagree with him, but the Greens political party is deeply split as we know on this and other issues. The New South Wales branch is often referred to by its own members in the New South Wales upper house as being run by the 'Eastern Bloc'. They all live in the eastern suburbs and are all communists, according to other members of the New South Wales Greens.

So the 'Eastern Bloc's' longstanding plan has been to torpedo the current model of electoral funding so that we would not have the mixture of private, public, government and organisational funding with this increasing pattern of public disclosure and transparency, which is a very good thing that this committee has recommended. Transparency, openness and timeliness are very good things. They wanted an alternative model which would have seen political funding exclusively from the federal government.

I costed this model according to the pattern of the Australian political parties in the last electoral cycle, and it would have cost the Australian taxpayer $450 million to entirely fund the political parties at their existing level of activity. The unstated benefit for the Greens political party was that it would have increased their funding fivefold—from $10 million to $50 million. The Australian taxpayer, instead of paying some $20 or $30 million matching funding at election time, again with the pattern set out by this excellent report of increasing transparency, timeliness and openness, would have been contributing entirely to the funding of political parties with the benefit going especially to the Greens.

It surprises me that Senator Rhiannon's views on the funding from Wotif to her own political party seem to have been carried through with this report by saying that donations above $100,000 have to be disclosed within a recommended period of weeks. It is called a 'special reporting event' and must be disclosed within 14 days of the donation. I am not against that, but this is a continuing reflection of the internal divisions in the Greens political party.

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