Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. These bills, the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Bill 2024 and the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Communications) Bill 2024, make significant changes to who can get into parliament, especially the first one, the electoral reform bill, and they should not be rushed through.

The government has said it has consulted thoroughly, but this is not the case. The remit for the JSCEM—Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters—inquiry was much broader, and the conclusions were very high level. The government said it has consulted, but we did not see any legislation until a few days ago. With such a fundamental change, we need to consider all the consequences, intended and unintended, and this has not been done.

The assistant minister spoke about trust and wanting to build trust, but the process here does anything but build trust in our parliamentary processes and the way laws are passed. There is a need for reform. We desperately need transparency, and I think there's a good case for donation caps at some level. But this bill goes so much further, with a massive increase in public funding and spending caps that tip the balance in favour of parties and incumbents. We really need to have serious public scrutiny before this is passed.

I'll give a bit of history and context on why this needs serious scrutiny now. There has been a consistent decline in support for the major parties over the last 40 years. At the last election we saw the lowest primary vote for majors, with one in three voters voting for a minor or an Independent with their primary vote. The will of the people is changing, and this is a threat to the major parties. Parties are now machines that are designed to win not lead, but like any institution the parties have a strong immune system and are fighting to retain power. This bill is a desperate attempt to arrest that trend.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters did an inquiry into the 2022 election, and I sat on that inquiry on that committee. Evidence was heard. A report was put forward. I put in my additional comments on the parts of the evidence that the major parties ignored. They were positions put forward by experts, academics, democracy think tanks—people with an interest in the health of our system rather than in preserving the existing power structures.

I provided a path that the government could have taken that showed that it was respecting the will of the people and the integrity of our political system through the restoring trust bill last August and through the fair and transparent elections bill that was introduced in both houses in February. The government could have worked with the crossbench to pass legislation, with appropriate review and inquiries.

The government stated that its policy was real-time disclosure above $1,000, and there have been many private members' bills that have been put forward about improving transparency like this. But the government said it couldn't do this transparency change without addressing other issues such as banning lies and political donations, which are now in a separate bill anyway.

I and other crossbenchers have engaged in good faith with the minister and provided a pathway to good reform without it being a major party stitch-up. The government kept saying that it was working on a bill dealing with all parts of electoral reform together. We now have two separate bills, one massively increasing public funding and imposing caps that will lock out competitors and one dealing with banning lies, which is probably destined to go nowhere in this parliament.

There have been so many delays and radio silence on the basis that this is very complicated and that the drafting was very difficult. We suspected that we might see a last-minute stitch-up by the major parties, presented now at the end of the term, to lock in party advantage while it's still possible. That's exactly what we've got. If the major parties want to rebuild trust and regain their vote share, this is not the way to do it.

If this bill is so complicated that it has taken an entire term of parliament to draft, surely it needs to be considered by a committee and the public needs to be given an opportunity to comment. The experts, the people who don't have a vested interest and are interested in protecting political competition and allowing our democracy to keep evolving, need to be able to look at this in detail before it gets passed as law. Voters can see through this cynical approach and this cynical attempt to lock in the declining support for the majors.

Last time electoral reform was attempted there was public outcry about the increased public funding, and it was dropped. Why would it be any different now? It's very hard to see that this is anything other than an attempt to push it through without appropriate review. It needs two types of scrutiny. Firstly, we need scrutiny on the intended outcome of the bill. We don't let Coles and Woolies make the laws about supermarket competition, but here we've got the two major parties banding together to make the laws about who can compete with them. It also needs scrutiny to look at the unintended consequences of the way it's been drafted. This is 224 pages long. We've had a few days to look at it. No-one outside a few crossbenchers and a few people have been given access to it. It needs external review so that the experts can really look at this, and, if it's such complicated drafting, let's make sure we know what it's actually going to do.

There are a number of issues within the bill that mean it should urgently move to a committee rather than be pushed through. On the public funding, this bill asks taxpayers to pay more to have less choice. There's a huge increase in funding here. Estimates seem to say that it would have been about $70 million more in taxpayers' funding if it had been applied in 2022. Those numbers may not be exactly right, and all those numbers are based on what we suspect at this point, so we need to understand that more deeply. We haven't had enough time to go through it in detail. But this is a massive slap in the face to Australians during a cost-of-living crisis, and it has the effect of locking in the major parties and the incumbents.

The funding is done based on the last election, so, if you didn't run in the last election, you don't have access to any funding. To add insult to injury, the major parties can tap into this funding in advance of an election, based on what they expect to win. The fact that this is possible shows that this a reliable revenue stream for the status quo and creates another hurdle for challengers. It also includes a huge increase in administrative funding, which, in my mind, is a ridiculous bribe. There is no relationship between the additional $30,000 per year per MP and the actual increase in administrative costs. This is clearly aimed at getting broad support from both the major parties. It translates to about $17 million in extra taxpayer funding every year—three-quarters of which goes to major parties. There is not a linear relationship between the number of MPs and the administrative task, and no boardroom in the country would accept that the administrative costs were going to increase with the number of people involved. There are economies of scale. We know the ALP currently has four people to meet the administrative needs of 104 parliamentarians. This would massively increase that, and there needs to be some evidence that it will actually cause an increase in workload that's commensurate with the increase in funding, but there is absolutely no clear argument being put forward for why that number was chosen.

Spending caps sound great. No-one likes to see too much money in politics, but, effectively, they lock in the status quo and create a non-level playing field. In drafting my legislation, I tried to find a model that worked on spending caps, but it is almost impossible. But, if your address transparency and donation caps, the spending caps become obsolete. If 5,000 people donate $200 each to a candidate, why shouldn't they be allowed to spend that on a campaign? The spending caps model locks in the incumbents in two ways. Firstly, it doesn't account for incumbent advantages. As a sitting MP, I have these advantages. I have an office. I have a car. I have a team. I have a budget for communications in the hundreds of thousands. None of these count towards my $800,000 cap, but a new challenger would have to fund all of these things. That is not a level playing field. Secondly, it doesn't account for party advantage. There's an outrageous exemption to the divisional cap for party advertising. As long as they stay within their $90 million cap, a party can advertise as much as it likes against a challenger, saying, 'Vote for the Liberal Party,' or 'Vote for the Labor Party,' and that doesn't count towards the $800,000 cap. That is not a level playing field. The government will say that they're caught by the $90 million cap. Sure, if a party intended to run a hard campaign in every seat in the country, then they would have to spend less than $800,000 in each seat because of this cap, but we all know how this actually works. If, for example, a party ran a full $800,000 personalised campaign in 100 seats, they then would have a $10 million spare party funding budget which they could use to target 12 contested seats to double the spending of their challengers. They could double that, and that's not even counting their incumbency benefits.

We desperately need transparency. People should know who's funding their candidates before they vote. But this could have been done on any day of this parliament with the support of both houses. This does not need to be bundled up with this package of reforms that locks in the status quo. The problem with it now is they've left it so late that it won't start in time for the next election. At the next election, you will have no idea how much the parties are spending in each electorate. Passing this bill now will not solve that problem. If this is not going to work in time for the next election, we might as well slow it down and actually look at the legislation and see if this is what the Australian public actually want, as now one in three are now casting their primary vote for someone other than the major parties.

Even within the transparency legislation that's being put forward there are so many exemptions to the definition of 'gift'. We need to go through those with a fine-tooth comb. The definition of 'gift' has been expanded in some small ways, but there is a three-page list of exemptions to what is a gift. This includes: subscriptions, memberships, related party payments, annual levies on members' staff and employees, disposition of property between members of a party's expenditure group or branches, any equipment sharing, office accommodation, a bequest, a loan, a gift to an MP for their personal use and a gift not paid into a federal account. Some of these might be very valid, but these need to be looked at if we're going to make this change. The public deserves better.

In summary, this bill is a travesty. It dresses up a cynical, anticompetitive oligopoly play as reform which is being fed to an unsuspecting public, with the major parties pretending that it will actually make our system better. There are huge problems with the process it's gone through. There are problems with the massive increase to public funding which locks in the status quo. There are problems with limiting spending in a way that creates an uneven playing field for new challenges. The transparency reform is too little, too late. And it's a huge disappointment and insult to the electorate, who demanded better. The major parties are relying on the increasing disengagement of the public, the complexity of this bill, the crowded media space and rushing it through to get away with the only path they've got left to arrest the trend of declining support for the sclerotic leadership the two parties offer to the public.

My community sent a message to the major parties at the last election that they will not be taken for granted, they will not be taken for fools and they expect something better than what the major parties are offering. If this goes through the parliament with no inquiry and no public scrutiny, the only choice the public will have is to speak to the major parties in the only currency they understand: votes. I urge the government to act in the public interest, not in its own interest, and refer this to a committee hearing so that the unintended and intended consequences can be fully understood and the experts and the public can have an opportunity to comment and decide whether this is the direction we want to take our democracy.

I second the member for Curtin's motion and strongly agree with the call that these two bills must go to inquiry and be properly examined. The hubris and hypocrisy from the government today in justifying their actions to bring forward this legislation are breathtaking. I call on every member of the government side and the opposition to think carefully about what you are doing if you put your name to this legislation. At a time of cost-of-living pressures, these two major parties have cooked up a new deal on new political donation laws designed to keep them in power, and they want the public to pay for it. The hubris is staggering. We need to reform our broken system of political donations; no-one disagrees with that. It is wrong that a billionaire can spend $132 million on trying to get his candidate selected, that there are no limits on corporate donations, especially when companies actually have government contracts, and that it takes months for donations to political parties to be disclosed. And, when they are, they're not broken down in a seat-by-seat way.

But what we do want to see is scrutiny on this major piece of reform. This piece of legislation is substantial. It has taken a huge amount of time to bring it here, and the government is proposing to table it today, force a debate this week and then have us vote on it by the end of the week. That is just the height of insult to the Australian people; that is the best way we can put it.

No-one wants Australia to drift towards a US system where political campaigns have become multibillion dollar exercises, forcing candidates into an unholy dance with big donors to raise the cash they need. We also don't want to end up like the US with a malaise of only two choices—and two poor choices at that—that don't end up delivering good policies for the future.

The bill introduced today—and I've got to say that the member for Perth was really given the dud job of the government to have to table this bill and put your name to it—is said to have the coalition's support, so it will be interesting to see every coalition member maybe exercise their free vote and think carefully of their integrity if they are genuinely going to support this bill. It is highly beneficial to major parties and it smacks of a dirty deal designed to cement their duopoly.

Independents and minor party representatives now make up 12 per cent of the House and 27 per cent of the Senate, yet we have not been consulted on this legislation for months. I first saw a copy of this and was briefed at 12.30 yesterday, less than 24 hours ago. This bill will have such a long consequence to Australian democracy, and yet there is no scrutiny being allowed on this bill. We're being presented with this 215-page bill making significant reform to our electoral process with less than 24 hours and now a proposal that Labor and the coalition intend to rush it through the House this week without proper inquiry, despite the fact it's not intended to come into effect until 2028. Send it off for inquiry and get a report in the new year—unless the intention is that we're not going to come back in the new year. Maybe the government can come clean to the Australian people on that.

There appears to be a flagrant double standard. I understand that, whilst the donation reform will be pushed through with no scrutiny this week, the truth-in-political-advertising bill is intended to languish. The government has no intention to push that one for debate and to a vote, because it wouldn't want to be stopped from lying when it comes to its advertising. Not only are the Australian people being asked to pay more to political parties; they're actually going to have to pay for the privilege of being lied to as well, because there's a constant delay in introducing voter protections. The last time the two major parties got together to agree on an 'integrity measure' was the National Anti-Corruption Commission. Look how well that turned out: a body that has not held a single public hearing has failed to deal with some of our biggest sector scandals, like robodebt, and has adverse findings about its handling of internal conflicts of interest.

Worse still, when it comes to donations, the government is proposing to reach into public coffers now to top up the shortfalls the major parties will experience as a result of their new fundraising constraints. At a time when cost-of-living pressures are a daily worry for households, they are proposing to give themselves an extra boost to funding. Under the government's proposal, public funding per vote will rise from $3.50 to $5 at a cost that is north of $100 million. They can't find the money to top up payments for people on JobSeeker or to deal with the rental crisis, but apparently we can afford additional largesse to the political class. The hypocrisy is staggering. Asking taxpayers to pay more to fund the major parties while making it harder for new entrants to participate has the unmistakable feel of rigging the market.

The bill proposes restrictions on the size of donations and the total amount that can be given by individuals, but it is the proposed spending caps which, in my view, are deliberately designed to put a foot on the scales in favour of our major parties. The government has made it sound like the problem is from the billionaires that fund candidates, but the real problem comes from within the parties, with 23 per cent of the major parties' donation receipts to the Australian Electoral Commission showing a non-declared source. That accounts for around $290 million over the past five years going to the major parties' coffers with no public record of where it came from.

Under this proposed bill, major parties will now be able to spend up to $90 million nationally while a person that chooses to stand as an independent in a seat will be restricted to spending $800,000 in a particular seat. Sure, the major party MP or candidate will also be subject to that candidate cap in a particular seat, but, at the same time, the major party can run a parallel Senate ticket campaign and its political party advertising. It's clear that that $90 million cap will not be spent evenly across candidates by the parties and can be put disproportionately in marginal seats to fend off a challenger.

The major parties will run national television brand campaigns to reach into everyone's living rooms. They can run a centralised campaign office, databases and infrastructure. An Independent taking on a major party candidate must set that up from scratch. To add insult to injury, the proposal in this bill is that an incumbent party or MP will have access to a $30,000-a-year admin cost. It's a linear increase for the parties but a challenger has nothing. The challenger has the 'thanks for coming; you can bear the cost', but a major party MP gets the public purse to pay for it. It's such a gross imbalance and it will be such a weakening of our democracy. It is not a strengthening, because the contest to enter into parliament will be less fair.

Duopolies stifle competition, just like with Coles and Woolies. If the major parties make it too difficult for new players to enter, Australians will end up with fewer choices and poor policy outcomes. Independents bring smart solutions and positive impacts. That is the difference, and that is why the Australian public are turning away from major parties. They can see through this. Whilst the government delivered this on a Friday afternoon, like putting out the trash—no different to the Morrison government when it comes to that tactic—the Australian people will absolutely see through this. The big call in the 2025 election will be that we need to get as many Independents into this parliament as possible, because this piece of legislation is stifling competition. It is there to make sure that political parties are just here for power, not for actual smart solutions and real legislation.

We need to deal with lies in political advertising. The government has put forward its misinformation and disinformation bill, and that has been contentious and has concerned many. It's a necessary guardrail, but there are concerns. It would be the height of hypocrisy if, then, the government does not proceed with pushing for the truth-in-political-advertising bill to be debated and voted on with urgency.

The public can have one standard, but the political class has a different one. It is outrageous. I very strongly support the member for Curtin's motion that this bill should be sent to inquiry. Both bills should be treated equally. The Australian public deserves a robust democracy and the opportunity to participate fairly. We need a fair and equal playing field, and this bill is just trying to lock in a monopoly by the major parties.

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