Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Hansard source

Previously in this place I've given a few speeches about the undemocratic nature of the Nick Xenophon Team, about how four people control this party, about how there are many members of this party who are deemed associate members and who don't have any voting rights and about how there are weird clauses—unknown in any other political party that I know of—in the Nick Xenophon Team constitution which talk about the demise of the party's namesake and what might happen to the party's nomenclature in such an event. What we've found with this party is that it is a personality cult: those who worship at the altar of St Nick are gifted great office, in some instances, and those who don't are excommunicated from the party. And there are many people like that in the South Australian state parliament—Ann Bressington and, after her, Mr John Darley. We have seen recently that Mr Tim Storer, who was a Senate candidate at the previous election, has now been found out of favour and is arguing in the High Court regarding the Senate position.

On the weekend, on Sunday, 4 February, Mr Matthew Abraham, a very well known journalist both here and in Adelaide, wrote about the Nick Xenophon Team—sorry, the SA-BEST team's latest iteration—and the headline is 'If you want, Nick can change the situation'. In it, he compares Mr Xenophon to Arthur Daley from the TV show MinderI'm sure you would remember that show, Mr Speaker. Mr Abraham says that, unlike the fictional Arthur, Mr Nick Xenophon is neither unscrupulous nor a crook, but he does have a natural—how shall we put this—flair when it comes to stumping up campaign cash: 'Want to run? Mr Xenophon "could be so good for you".' As I understand it, there might be some exceptions, but the rule seems to be that each and every SA-BEST candidate has to stump up $20,000 in order to fund their campaign. It talks about how this is being operated. In the event that it's not actually $20,000 cash up front, you can take out a loan from Mr Xenophon, who has taken out a $600,000 mortgage, according to this article—a direct funding arrangement between the leader and his candidate. Mr Abraham notes that one business source said that both major parties have a more hands-off approach when funding individual campaigns, and that what this arrangement does is to tie those candidates—if they're successful and elected—completely to their leader's bandwagon because, through some arrangement—we don't know what that arrangement will be—they have to pay Mr Xenophon back.

This sets up a very difficult situation. We are all aware that people get candidate-itis when they run for public office, and sometimes that particular disease is warranted, and people make great sacrifices, and they are elected to this place and to other parliaments, and it all goes swimmingly well. But, more often than not, people run for office, get very excited, sure they're going to win—and they're unsuccessful. What political parties frequently do is talk such people out of spending large amounts of their own money to try and get elected to public office and urge them to be more prudent in their views. Mr Xenophon, I think, is taking advantage of people who are not schooled in politics and who are liable to get candidate's disease in such a circumstance.

Mr Speaker, you can see how this arrangement—with candidates entering into loans of up to $20,000, which is a small fortune for working people—might mean that they find themselves in a sort of political Ponzi scheme, in a situation where they're funding this loan, in effect, that Mr Xenophon has taken out, which may later be paid for by public financing; we don't know. It sets up a very, very strange set of arrangements indeed. I think that Mr Xenophon, now running in the South Australian state election, should front up to the public about what these arrangements are so that people might vote with some confidence for candidates and know candidates are not going to be beholden to their leader in a financial way—either to him personally or to the party which shares his name.

See this speech in context