Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I second the amendment. The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Bill 2024 is a disgrace. The transparency is good but too late for the next election. There's an argument for some sort of donation cap so no individual has too much influence on an election, but those bits are being used as an excuse to push through a huge increase in taxpayer dollars to current politicians and complicated spending caps that will lock in the major parties and lock out future Independents. This is the two parties colluding to stop future political competition. It's outrageous that the government and the opposition are rushing this through the parliament with no scrutiny, despite saying it's the biggest change to our electoral system in 40 years.

The experts agree. This afternoon, the Centre for Public Integrity, the Australia Institute, Transparency International Australia and Australian Democracy Network have put out a joint statement saying that they're united in the view that the government's proposed bill should not proceed in its current form other than the donation transparency part. These are organisations that are interested in safeguarding our democracy, not furthering a particular political interest. They have no vested interest, and they are saying this should not go ahead.

I want to talk about how we got here and pick out a few of the high-level problems with it. If I had triple the time, I still could be listing problems, and that's after only a few days of seeing it. Firstly, on the history, we've seen 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 voting for minor parties or Independents. The will of the people is changing. They want something different now. This is a threat to the major parties. Parties are machines designed to win, not to lead, and challenging the concept of a safe seat means that they would actually have to represent their communities. But, like any institutions, the parties have a strong immune system and are fighting to retain power and fight change. This bill is a desperate attempt to arrest that trend.

I sat on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, which conducted the inquiry into the 2022 election, and I was the first Independent to sit on that committee. They took months to approve my appointment, and, by the time I was allowed to join, they'd heard almost all the evidence about donation reform, so I didn't have the opportunity to ask many questions. But I went through the evidence and gathered all the evidence from the experts who didn't have a vested interest—the academics, the think tanks and the democracy organisations. Much of their evidence did not make it into either the majority report or the opposition's dissenting report, so I put them together in my additional comments. I then put that together into a piece of legislation and provided a path that the government could have taken to show that it was respecting the will of the people and the integrity of our political system.

I put together the restoring trust bill last August, which had the support of the crossbench in both houses and the fair and transparent elections bill in February this year, which was introduced by me in the lower house and by David Pocock in the Senate, and which would have had enough support to pass in both houses.

The government has stated for a long time that its policy is real-time disclosures above $1,000. That was in my bill. It was also in many other private members' bills from other crossbenchers who want to see greater transparency. The government had a path to address transparency throughout this parliament. On any sitting day of this parliament, we could have had greater transparency about political donations, but the government said it couldn't deal with this without also addressing other issues, such as banning lies in political campaigns. I engaged in good faith with the minister, providing a pathway to good reform without it being a major party stitch-up. There was very little actual engagement with the minister, other than some lip-service meetings and certainly no sharing of draft legislation.

The minister and his office said that drafting was very complicated, and that was why it was taking so long. He did also say that he wanted to get bipartisan support, and he was condescending about the concept of multipartisan support, and showed no understanding that the will of the people and the make-up of the parliament have changed. I suspected that we would get a stitch-up by the major parties presented at the last minute to lock in advantage, and that's exactly what we've got here. If the major parties want to rebuild trust and regain their vote share, this is not the way to do it. Voters can see through this cynical, self-interested approach.

There are a few good things about this bill. We've finally got some progress on donation transparency, but it's too late for the next election, so you still won't know who has funded your candidates when you're voting at the next election. I am actually okay with the idea of a donation cap. I don't think anyone should have a disproportionate influence over an election. I proposed a cap model linked to one or two per cent of total public funding as a way of linking the cap to prevent outsized influence. This legislation includes a cap of $20,000 a year. Is that too low or too high? I wish that that was the sensible debate that we were having now—talking about what the donation cap level is. We can talk about it. No doubt there is an appropriate amount. But that is not the debate we're having because there are so many terrible things about this bill.

I want to go through nine of the worst things about this bill, and I'm sure I could find more if I had more time. The first two relate to process. This is being rushed through parliament. We are changing who can get into our parliament without any public scrutiny. It's a fundamental change. The government said it is the biggest change in 40 years, and it's really complicated. It's 224 pages of an interconnected web of donation caps, spending caps, increased public funding and transparency frameworks. It needs two types of scrutiny: what it is meant to do, so we can look at the intended consequences of the legislation, and what it actually does, so we can look at unintended consequences. It's not getting either of those things. The CPI, the Australia Institute, Transparency International Australia and the Australian Democracy Network said this afternoon:

Legislation that will have such significant consequences for our democracy must only be passed after a parliamentary inquiry has had an opportunity to thoroughly scrutinise its provisions. To do otherwise is not in the interests of the Australian public.

My second problem is that the issue of transparency has been separated from banning lies in political advertising. This undermines the government's excuse for delay, in terms of saying that we can't do transparency unless we do truth at the same time. Banning lies in political campaigns is being introduced as a separate bill as a fairly performative measure, knowing that it will be kicked into the long grass. If the government actually wanted to reflect the will of the public and not the parties, it would add the transparency provisions to the second piece of legislation banning lies, and debate that.

My third and fourth objections relate to public funding. The third one is that taxpayers are paying more and getting less choice. There's a huge increase in funding here. The experts today that I mentioned earlier say these laws include more than $40 million in additional taxpayer funding of political parties and candidates, most of which would go to the major parties. It goes up from about $3.50 a share to $5 a share. In terms of the numbers, it may be $40 million or it may be more; we haven't had enough time to go through and look in detail. But no matter how you look at it, it's a massive slap in the face to Australians during a cost-of-living crisis.

This has the effect of locking in major parties and incumbents. Funding is based on how many votes you got at the last election, so there is no funding for new challengers. It just increases the barriers to entry.

The government thought that, because I and other crossbenchers now have incumbent advantages, we would be fine with it. But I'm not here to protect my political career. I'm here to improve our democracy, and this does not do that. Creating extra hurdles to stop new challengers is absolutely unacceptable. It does not reflect the will of the people. 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 is a reliable revenue stream to protect the status quo and creates another hurdle for challengers.

This legislation includes a huge increase in what we call admin funding. That's $30,000 per MP and $15,000 per senator, every year, for administrative purposes. There is no relationship between this extra funding and the actual increase in administrative tasks. It's clearly designed to get the coalition on board. It translates to $17 million in extra taxpayer funding in each term, three-quarters of which goes to the major parties. There is not, as anyone in business knows, a linear relationship between the number of people and an overhead like administration. The ALP currently has four people to meet the admin needs of 104 parliamentarians. It does not need another $6 million a year to do that. I haven't seen any proof or even attempt to show that this is the right amount of money, and it's shameful that voters should be expected to fork out millions for parties' headquarters. In South Australia, they've increased admin, but they capped it at 10 MPs because it's indefensible to say that the admin costs go up significantly with every additional MP. New challengers get nothing for their administrative costs, despite needing to set up a compliance framework from scratch.

My objections 5, 6 and 7 relate to spending caps. This sounds good, but it's not a level playing field, so it locks in the status quo. Our democracy experts, in their statement today, have said

The bill would also entrench major party and incumbency advantage, and further disadvantage independent and challenger candidates in elections.

When I was drafting my own legislation on this, I tried to find a spending cap that worked, but it was impossible. If we address transparency and donation caps, spending caps become obsolete. If 5,000 people donate $200 each to a campaign, why shouldn't the candidate be allowed to spend that, if that's come from people below a donation cap?

The fifth objection is related to that, as a sitting MP, I have incumbency advantages, so I now benefit from part of this legislation. There's a spending cap of $800,000 in a division, but that doesn't count incumbency advantages like an office, a car, a team and a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. None of these count towards the $800,000 cap, but a new challenger has to fund all of those things.

My sixth objection is that the spending caps don't account for party advantage. There's an outrageous exemption to the divisional cap for party advertising. Ads that say, 'Vote Liberal,' or 'Vote Labor,' don't count towards that cap. Governments will say that they're caught by a $90 million cap. Yes, but we know that parties use their money strategically. They can allocate the money so that they can double the spending of a challenger easily and still remain inside this cap. This is not a level playing field. The best way to deal with this issue is through transparency and donation caps. If they're structured properly, spending caps are not necessary.

Nominated entities are my issue No. 7. There's a weird, little exclusion for parties to have a nominated entity. This is where you can keep your wealth, if you've got some, without having to account for where it's come from historically. But any new party that were to start wouldn't have access to this hidden wealth source. The ALP and Libs have huge assets, possibly $100 million for the Cormack Foundation, which would be the Liberal Party's nominated entity—we don't know, because there's no transparency. But that's not available for new challengers.

The last two problems relate to transparency.

On balance, more transparency is a great thing. Bring it on! I've been asking for it since the beginning of this parliament, but it won't start in time for the next election. So, given the government has claimed that it's had a policy of a $1000 threshold for many years, it has left it until the very last minute, and now there's no time to implement it. It's hard not to be cynical about that.

Now that none of this reform can be implemented before the next election, where is the urgency? The only thing that's urgent here is the two parties colluding to change the rules to protect themselves before the inevitable happens—voters get wise to it, and their decline continues. I will declare all donations on my website in real time like I did last time. Every politician should do this as a bare minimum to be taken seriously by their community. No voter should cast their precious vote without knowing who is funding the candidate they're voting for. I challenge every MP to do the same thing, whether you're in a party or not. Tell your community where you're getting the money from. There are also so many exceptions to the definition of 'gift'. I won't go into it now, but this clearly needs scrutiny because it is full of loopholes.

In summary, this bill is a travesty. It addresses a cynical anticompetitive oligopoly play as reform, which is being fed to an unsuspecting public. There are huge problems with the process it's gone through. There are problems with the massive increase in public funding, which locks in the status quo. There are problems with limiting spending in a way that creates a very uneven playing field for new challenges. The transparency reform is too little too late, and it's a huge disappointment. Australian voters will not be taken for granted. They will not be taken for voters. And if the major parties ignore their desire for greater choice and push this through with no inquiry, Australians will remember and punish them with their most effective tool—their votes. I do not commend this bill to the House.

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