Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Bill 2024. It won't be my best speech, because it's so rushed. We received a copy of the bill just a few days ago. It's a very large bill, which we're still trying to read, interpret and get a response to. I do apologise for my incredibly rushed speech, but we're trying to draw it together as quickly as possible.

Like so many of my colleagues on the crossbench, since I arrived in this place I've been calling for improvements to our electoral laws, specifically to shine a light on the problem of the private and corporate money in politics. The problem with private money in politics in this country is that so much of it is hidden. So-called dark money has been obtained in ways that have skirted around the rules, avoiding any obligation to be disclosed to the Australian public. This might include things like a $10,000 ticket to a party business forum. According to the Centre for Public Integrity, over $1 billion in dark money has flowed to the political parties over the last two decades, undisclosed and undeclared. The public has no knowledge of where it came from, who it went to or what it was used for. This, quite frankly, undermines our democracy.

I've also long called for greater clarity on the definition of a 'donation' in our electoral laws so that more of the money flowing to MPs and candidates in creative ways is captured and disclosed. I've also called for the disclosure to occur far more frequently. Currently, disclosures of donations to political campaigns are only required to occur every several months, even maybe a year after an election. These two problems have been improved in this bill. Parties will no longer be able to charge $20,000 a ticket to a fundraising dinner or a business forum without disclosing that income as a donation. This is a good change. Similarly, people who purchase the tickets will be obliged to report their donation. The disclosure threshold has been significantly reduced to $1,000, so we will have much greater transparency over who is donating what and to whom and where the influence is flowing.

There will be real-time disclosure requirements.

Outside of an election period, recipients of donations will be required to disclose them on a monthly basis. In the month after the donations are made, once writs for an election are issued, that steps up to weekly, and, in the seven days either side of an election, disclosures must be made within 24 hours. These changes—a broader definition of what constitutes a donation, a reduction in the disclosure threshold and more frequent disclosures—are welcome, but they could have been done much earlier. Many of these things are uncontroversial, and they should have been done much earlier so that they could have been applied to the next election in 2025.

The other problem with money in Australian politics, of course, is the outsize influence of big money. Let's just name the problem. At the 2022 election, Clive Palmer spent $123 million and obtained one seat in the entire parliament. He outspent Labor. Wealthy individuals should not be able to buy a seat in parliament. Donation caps should absolutely be implemented so that wealthy individuals and corporations are not able to sway or undermine our democracy, but it is imperative that the donation cap is not set so low that new entrants who are not part of a major party are not able to raise enough money to be competitive with a major party candidate, particularly because major party candidates will be able to benefit from an additional nationwide expenditure cap of up to $90 million, which parties will be free to spend in marginal seats.

This is the biggest problem with this bill by far—the fact that party candidates, in addition to the $800,000 spending cap per electorate, will have the additional benefit of nationwide spending caps. A new community independent challenger has no such nationwide allocation, so this $800,000 expenditure limit must be considered in the context of other changes that enable the parties—but not independent or minor party candidates, perhaps—to move money around the country to spend in electorates of their choosing, such as marginal electorates.

I will go into a bit of detail now, because these two different types of spending caps are quite complicated, but the Australian public deserves to hear about it. Here's how it's unfair. The parties have a national spending cap of $90 million. That is the maximum amount they can spend on an election in one year. Remember that per election spending cap of $800,000? That $800,000 is for targeted electoral expenditure where the name of the candidate is specifically used. In a nutshell, electoral expenditure is targeted if it goes out to voters in a particular electorate and expressly mentions a candidate or includes their likeness. Here you can think of posters, ads, billboards, T-shirts and the like that say, 'Vote 1 Sophie Scamps,' or have a picture of me on them. I can spend $800,000 on such material, and so can my party opponents. They too are limited to expenditure of $800,000 per electorate per candidate on this type of thing.

But here's the rub. They can spend much, much more than that in each electorate on material that promotes their own brand. They can have ad after ad after ad that says, 'Vote Labor,' 'Vote Liberal,' 'Vote Labor to cap international student numbers,' or 'Vote Liberal to cap all immigration.' If it doesn't specifically name the candidate, they have an expenditure cap of up to $90 million. All those brands, Liberal and Labor, are extremely well known and incredibly powerful. It's brand advertising, brand based marketing, pure and simple. How can you compete with the brands of these two major parties?

As I mentioned, the parties will be subject to a national expenditure cap of $90 million. Unlike Independents, they generally don't raise money for particular electorates. Rather, someone usually donates to the Liberal Party or the Labor Party and it goes into a big pot. The parties are then allowed to move that money around the country at will, so it's available to be spent in any electorate.

It's well known, and make sense, that parties are strategic about where they spend their money at each election. They might, for the sake of the argument, be really worried about 30 marginal electorates—30 electorates where they will need to spend more than in other, safe seats. Let's assume they spend on average $100,000 in electorates that are either safe or that they know they have no chance of winning. That's $100,000 in the remaining 121 electorates. When you put that altogether that equates to $12.1 million. That $12.1 million comes off their national cap, leaving them with $77.9 million to spend on the 30 marginal seats that they are targeting, that they are really worried about. That's around $6 million in each of those target seats—$6 million versus $800,000, which the Independents will be limited to. Please explain to me how this is a level playing field? Yes, the parties will be limited to $800,000 on targeted electoral spending, but in the strategic spending scenario they'll be free to spend an additional $5 million on 'Vote 1 Liberal' ads or 'Vote 1 Labor' ads. That's an extra $5 million to promote an already very powerful brand. This is, of course, astoundingly unfair. It is an insurmountable hurdle for new challengers. Spending caps are simplistically appealing; I understand that, but, until we can design a system where spending caps interact with other rules in a way which maintains the ability of Independent challengers to compete, we are only doing harm to our democracy.

There is a raft of other problems with this bill that my crossbench colleagues have addressed at length. They include the unfair administrative costs payment for incumbents, the nominated entity advantage of major parties, the lack of clarity around how things like membership fees and levies on MPs and party members will be dealt with—the list goes on. Unfortunately, the way in which the government has gone about this bill means that, as of right now, my team and I have not had nearly enough time to properly analyse either the intended or the unintended consequences of this bill. I do understand that the intention of the bill is to take away the influence of money, but it is particularly the unintended consequences which are of grave concern to me. My team was able to obtain a copy of this bill only last Friday, when we heard about it on the news—how is that fair?—and only after seeking it out. I was not briefed on the bill until Sunday, the day before parliament, and I have still not been briefed by the minister, as has been the convention. The government is bragging about this bill being the biggest reform to our electoral system in 40 years, yet it has not released an exposure draft. They do not intend to expose it to the scrutiny of a parliamentary committee, and they plan to pass it through parliament in a fortnight. This is our democracy we're talking about—our most valuable asset.

The way the government has dealt with this bill is nothing short of scandalous. They clearly think the public won't notice or won't care, but I think they underestimate the Australian public.

The Australian people are losing trust in the major parties. We saw at the last election that trust in our political system was at an all-time low. We also see that a full third of voters are directing their votes elsewhere than the big major parties. This is because of conduct like this: hoodwinking the Australian people by rushing legislation through parliament in the last sitting period of the year, refusing—

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