Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak against the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Political Campaigners) Bill 2021 and in support of what the member for Scullin moved earlier. Let's just be frank about what we've got before us here. In a time when people are calling out for truth in a democracy, and in a time when people are really questioning and challenging how healthy our democracy is, what do we have as an answer from this government? We have a bill that attacks the very people who are challenging them, their ideas and values and what they are doing as a government.

Who does this bill target? It targets the smaller charities. It targets the people who have been active in our democracy previously and who now would be limited in the way in which they can participate. Here are just a few of the organisations—and it's no coincidence when you hear the organisations that this government is targeting in this bill and their motivations behind it. It is organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Bob Brown Foundation, World Wide Fund for Nature and the RSPCA. We know that a senator in the other place is particularly opposed to this organisation, even petitioning for them to drop the 'Royal' in RSPCA because they believed that it did no longer represent the views of the royal family. That is how absurd some of the arguments have been on their side towards organisations on this list. Organisations that would also be disenfranchised by this bill are organisations like St Vincent de Paul and organisations that are involved in a lot of advocacy around food support, welfare and community support. Several unions would also be disadvantaged by this bill, like the United Workers Union, the NUW, the STA and the CEPU. These are the organisations: unions, environmental organisations and not-for-profit welfare charities—the very organisations that are third parties campaigning in our democracy about core values and issues.

This government doesn't like democracy. They're a bit of: 'We're in the club. We're here now. You can't be.' This government is becoming more authoritarian by the day, and that is what is in this bill. They will pretend it is about disclosure. They'll pretend that it's about encouraging more honesty and transparency. But it is not. It is about raising the bar so high for some of our organisations who are so actively involved in our democracy in a good way. I don't always agree with what some of these organisations say. I have the Australian Conservation Foundation protesting at the front of my office on a regular basis, but I don't shoo them away. They have a right to be there. It is a democracy. As long as they are not being violent, as long as they are letting people come in and out of my office and as long as they are doing it in a peaceful way, it is something that we encourage in our Australian democracy.

We are home to some of the most ugly protests right now. Those protests, when they become violent and make threats against people, are not democracy. That is not something that we should be embracing. That is something which this government has, ironically, not been able to condemn. It is a government that just likes to pretend one thing but do another. I find it extraordinary that we're here saying that we want to exclude groups from participating in our democracy. They are registered groups that have a legitimate say, have raised an issue that they campaign on and have a membership that is behind them. We have no doubt about what the Australian Conservation Foundation campaign on. They are there to campaign around the environment. That is what they are passionate about, that is what their membership is passionate about, that is what they bring to us as parliamentarians, and that is their right to do so. In a healthy democracy, we create the space for them to do that, but this bill seeks to set the bar even higher.

This is coming from a government that says it's okay to be a bigot. This is from a government who will say that people have a right to protest and make threats against a premier and have gallows at the front of parliament house. But, if you want to be an organised environmental group or if you want to be a trade union that is raising the matter, they are going to set the bar really high so you can't actually participate in an election process. It is a government that does not live by its rhetoric. It is a government that also, too, will say it's okay for politicians to have blind trusts. And that's the thing that I find quite extraordinary.

Here we are lowering the threshold for organisations who might want to participate in an election process, making it harder for organisations to participate in our democratic process, yet at the same time saying that their own can have blind trusts set up where people can just throw money in; we don't know where it came from and we just have to trust the person that received it. Well, where is the trust for these organisations? Where's the trust for these membership based organisations who are out there campaigning on an issue? In a free democracy, you should not be afraid of them. In a free democracy, where we embrace and encourage people to engage in a safe, peaceful way, we should not be afraid of them.

This is also, too, the government of sports rorts. This is the government who will use whatever language they can to try and disguise, to try and hide, what they are doing. This is a government where we have a prime minister who will say one thing and then try and rewrite history, even though it's quite clear, in the age of technology, that that's not what he said. This is a government who believes that, once you're in the club, if you're here, 'This is our club and no-one else is welcome.' This bill, the political campaigners bill, has been designed to target a certain kind of organisation, to set the bar so incredibly high for them that they choose not to participate in our democracy, because that's essentially what will happen. Organisations like St Vincent de Paul, organisations that do so much community based work—they do the drug and alcohol work in our communities; they do the food hampers in our communities; they help people who have fallen down—will say, 'Okay, I guess that means we just can't raise our concerns about these issues.' That's what has happened year after year, reform after reform with this government.

Another area where this legislation is linked so clearly to the government's entire agenda is the gag clauses they put in funding agreements. Organisations who are very concerned with how people in their care are being treated feel really nervous about speaking out. Employees of these organisations privately disclose how they're very worried about how legislation may affect them, but they are too scared to speak out on the record because they're worried that they might lose their funding agreement. This bill is in that same vein. It's about silencing dissent. It's about silencing people who speak up about issues.

You wouldn't be so upset with the government if they were true to their rhetoric and said to be protesters in Melbourne and said to the antivaxxers and said to the far Right, 'No, you don't actually get to have a say'—if they were consistent, but they're not. The Prime Minister comes in here and stands up and says, 'Everyone has the right to a have say; we live in a free democracy,' but then puts bills like this before us and says, 'This is about ensuring transparency and accountability,' when it's not. It's a government of hypocrisy. It's a government about protecting themselves and protecting their position here in power. They do not want an active democracy. They do not want people speaking up about these issues. When you look at the organisations that this bill will target, the government definitely don't want the Australian Conservation Foundation campaigning in the seat of Higgins, campaigning in the seat of Goldstein. Let's be real about what we're seeing in this bill. This is about stopping organisations that may hand out how-to-votes against them.

In my electorate of Bendigo we have always had a very active democracy. We have people from the far Left and the far Right involved as well as major parties. It's unusual for us, come federal elections, to have fewer than nine candidates. In my first election, it was 13; years after, it was 11 and 12. And there are lots of different groups. Now, granted, when it comes to polling day, I am quite relieved that most of the people in the electorate get behind one of the two major political parties. But you don't go and say to them, 'You can't participate.' It's our democracy; it's what makes us stronger. And of course we have disagreements of views, but, with a lot of the groups that are involved and that participate in these elections, there's material I don't like; there's material which gets reported to the AEC. We don't see a bill before us about truth in advertising. That's what Australians really care about. They really want to see some truth in advertising. We don't see that. We can make complaints about material, we can make complaints about the texts we get, but we don't see any bill that's dealing with that side of the issues we're having with our democracy. What we have instead is a bill that is about protecting themselves. We have a bill that's about silencing legitimate campaigning—people who do it properly, people who are willing and wanting to follow the rules.

The government is trying to be sneaky in the way it has introduced this bill—at the end of the year, right before an election, without having full and proper consultation. It's another demonstration of how this government is really keen to change the rules to suit itself. Whether it be this bill or the bill about voter ID and disenfranchising people in remote communities in Australia, in vulnerable communities, what we see is a government all about protecting their own jobs and protecting themselves. They're not really interested in a healthy democracy, which is why they side with antivaxxers, which is why they side with far Right extremists. They actually don't really want to engage in a proper dialogue and contest of ideas. What they really want to do is just protect themselves. And it's disappointing. When our democracy is under such a microscope and we've had three years to look at it—in fact, quite a while to look at it—what we see from the government, at the very end, in the legislation they've put forward about how they're going to improve the health of our democracy, is not about truth in advertising. It's not a bill that looks at that. It's not about genuine donation reform and disclosure. It's not about an integrity bill that will look at people and blind trusts in this place. What we have is this bill and another bill, a bill which is about disenfranchising people from participating in our democracy. That's a really sad state of affairs. It really demonstrates the selfishness and the individuality of those in this government. It demonstrates that it's really all about the Prime Minister and about the Prime Minister keeping his own job.

How a Prime Minister could stand alongside the protesters in Melbourne after what they did at the front of parliament house is beyond me. And I hope that, when it comes to election day, people in Melbourne remember that we have a Prime Minister who said that it's okay to stand out the front of the Victorian parliament with a gallows, that it's okay to walk down the streets with—

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