Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

As the Leader of the House said, the government will not be supporting this motion for the reasons he outlined. There's no demonstrated breach of any of the obligations we have as members of parliament, as candidates for election to the parliament or as ministers—the AEC disclosures, the disclosures in the register of interest and ministerial disclosure.

There are a number of issues that I suspect lie behind this. The Leader of the House has reflected and recognised the commitment to action against problem gambling that a number of the members of the House have—perhaps most notably demonstrated by the career of the member for Clark, but so many members of the House have a background in action against problem gambling. We can have debates about that, as is happening right now in the New South Wales election.

What also lies behind this is that a number of members, particularly on the crossbench, were elected on a strong agenda of transparency. Again, though, this is something the Labor Party has been arguing for for many years, going back to the Howard government. We have been arguing for strong reforms to AEC disclosure—unsuccessfully, I have to say, unfortunately—for lower thresholds for disclosure of donations and for real-time disclosure of donations. These are agendas that we as the Labor Party have been arguing for for many years. No person in this House has the sole responsibility for arguing for transparency. We've been doing this, and the Special Minister of State continues to say we will remain true to the commitments we have been making for years to improve transparency and disclosure of donations through the Electoral Commission legislation and the operations of the Electoral Commission.

We've also been making that very clear in the statement of ministerial obligations. The Prime Minister has made clear from the day of our election as a new government that he intends to lead a government that has much stronger standards around ministerial disclosure than, frankly, has been demonstrated over the past nine years. Our ministers have been true to those standards and I don't think there's anything in the arguments that've been made in this short debate that indicate that the Minister for Communications has done otherwise.

It is very clear: as the Leader of the House has said, she has not taken a backward step. It might not be the full action that the member for Clark and others on the crossbench would like around issues to do with gambling, and online gambling in particular, but she has not taken a backward step in this area.

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