Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

At the 2022 federal election, my community of North Sydney sent a clear message to the two major parties that they were done with a political environment that was set on ignoring them. They rose up, took their voices back and sent me, an Independent representative, to this place. At the same time, another 15 electorates decided they were done with the two-party duopoly and voted instead to send their own Independent or minor party representative to this place. As a result, the 47th parliament has benefited from a broader debate than it's possibly experienced since Federation as each crossbench member has determinedly shown up to fight for the reform we know our community wants.

Fast forward to today and I cannot express how incredibly disappointed I am to find myself in this place debating a piece of legislation that is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to erase people like me from this parliament. In his own introductory statement accompanying this legislation, the assistant minister acknowledged that this is the most significant reform of our democracy in over 40 years. But, rather than give this legislation the light and oxygen it deserves, the government, colluding with the opposition, has decided to ram it through in the dying weeks of this parliament. And while some may claim, 'There's nothing to see here,' you need look no further than today's speaking list. It does not include a single major party representative. Now that's convenient. To try and argue that this bill is anything more than a stitch-up designed to kill off Independent politics is disingenuous at least and, at worst, it could almost be considered legislative fraud.

Having seen this legislation for the first time on Sunday afternoon and then being briefed on it twice since and sleeping on it for two nights, I have no doubt that this is the two major parties rigging the rules of the game in their favour so that, in order to contest the opportunity to represent a community, you basically have to be part of a party. The bill before us does this in three broad ways. Firstly, it significantly increases the public funding provided to incumbents, creating a situation which provides an immediate additional benefit for the status quo and disincentivises challenges. Secondly, it caps the funding newcomers can have access to whilst ensuring the two-party system continues to be able to outspend an emerging Independent candidate by more than 1,000 times. Thirdly, it allows the major parties to get around caps by introducing special rules for nominated entities that safeguard the status quo of the major parties' largest donors while ensuring newcomers cannot establish an entity of an equivalent size.

Ultimately, I wish I could stand here and say that I understand this bill inside and out, that I'd examined every detail and each provision and understood how they would work in practice, that I'd been able to consult a broad spectrum of experts and that my community had been given a chance to look at it and provide their thoughts. But none of that has happened. Rather, this bill has been rushed through this parliament without proper scrutiny. As we saw yesterday, despite the best efforts of the crossbench, it will not even go to inquiry.

The legislation reeks of something born of arrogance and self-interest, and the way it is being railroaded through this place is out of touch with the kind of governance and policymaking the public want to see. To be clear, major party votes have been declining for 50 years, reaching their lowest level of 68 per cent in the last federal election. That year, nearly a third of voters went to minor parties or Independent candidates. But, ultimately, this bill sends a really clear message to communities like mine: 'We don't care what you want. We don't want to hear it. We don't want to acknowledge how you voted in 2022. We're just going to make it harder for you to vote that way in the future, because we can do it now. Let's face it: with so many of you turning away from us, if we leave this until the new parliament, where we may no longer have a majority control, your representatives may just take this democracy back and make it about you rather than us. And we can't have that.'

The two major parties have failed to act sufficiently in the interest of their communities and have instead prioritised their own interests and big corporate donors. Rather than shift the dial by actually listening to communities, engaging in more participatory democracy or, God forbid, improving their policies, they are instead using campaign finance laws to entrench a major party duopoly.

With all of that said, then, and the limited time I've had to get my head around this bill, it appears to me to be a really mixed bag of reform. There's what we'll call the potentially good; there's the obviously bad and the downright ugly. Let's start with the potentially good, because my community sent me here to fight for integrity in politics, and that has seen me consistently call for greater transparency, more accountability and truth in political advertising since day one. Ultimately, there's just enough potentially good sprinkled through this legislation for this government to market it as offering all of that.

But, just like a sweet treat which has an artificial sweetener rather than good old-fashioned sugar, don't be fooled. Specifically, expediting donation disclosures is absolutely something my community would support, with the bill improving public reporting timelines and requiring gifts that meet the disclosure threshold to be disclosed sooner. It also lowers the donation threshold from the current $16,900 to a $1,000, which again is reform my community would welcome.

The irony, however, is that the crossbench has been calling for this electoral reform on transparency and integrity measures for years, to no avail. For example, the member for Curtin, most recently in this term of parliament, tabled the fair and transparent elections bill, which, if adopted, would have lowered the disclosure threshold to $1,000, introduced real-time disclosures, prohibited misleading and deceptive electoral materials, broadened the definition of gift, included funding disclosure requirements and major donation caps, and prohibited certain political donations—yet the government wouldn't even debate it. From a practical perspective, I've also tried to walk the talk, publishing, with the permission of my donors, the details of donations I've received on my website in as close to real time as possible.

While these reforms should be welcomed, then, the truth is that voters will continue to have complete transparency over what an Independent raises and spends in their seat but that the same will not be true of a political party member. For, while they will be bound to report on their spending associated with the $800,000 for their division, the additional marketing that their party can run—for example, a national television advertising campaign or billboards in specific locations—that don't include their name will not count against the individual and will instead disappear into the great unwashed budget of a $90 million spend.

Ultimately, lower donation thresholds and real-time reporting could have been implemented at any point during this parliament with the support of the crossbench, yet the government has chosen to do a deal with the opposition, rather than work with us. That just about says everything you need to know.

Let's get to the obviously bad, and that starts with spending caps. While this bill imposes spending caps at a divisional level, state level and federal level, as well as for Senate campaigns, these caps are riddled with loopholes that will ultimately benefit the legacy parties. The divisional cap is set at $800,000 per seat, meaning an independent candidate will only be allowed to spend up to that amount, be they an incumbent or a challenger. A party candidate, however, while in theory being subject to the same divisional spending cap, is free to have their campaign topped up with executions that are funded under a federal cap of $90 million. I acknowledge a political party that is contesting every lower house seat and every Senate seat and is committed to spending the same amount in every seat would not be able to top up every seat without breaching their $90 million federal cap. But let's be clear—that's not how political parties work. They target specific seats, concentrating their funds on a handful of seats. Under this legislation, then, political parties will be able to outspend independent candidates in targeted seats many times over.

Next, the bill introduces a new funding stream innocuously called administrative funding assistance. Administrative funding would see every MP in the House of Reps receive $30,000 per year whilst every senator receives $15,000 a year. In the case of an Independent, that money would come directly to me, but for a party those funds will be consolidated, and the party machine would receive this funding as quarterly payments. This means that the vast majority of this funding will go to the major parties based on the false premise that administrative costs increase proportionately with the number of members. They do not. Most of the costs of running a political party are fixed, and it makes no sense to presume they would increase in a direct line in relation to the number of members.

Insultingly, the government has intimated these provisions have been included predominantly at the behest of Independents like me to cover what are some real compliance costs that come with contesting a seat—things like a lawyer and accounting fees. When it's just you as one person, you bear wholly and solely. But, looking at the detail, it seems that not only will the major parties receive disproportionately larger amounts of administrative funding, but they're also able to use it on a range of expenditures, including things like conferences, seminars, meetings or 'similar functions at which policies of a registered political party are discussed'. That means expenditure and equipment, including vehicles used by staff, or, fascinatingly, expenditure on interest payments on loans. Come on! Give me a break! There's no way my community would support the implementation of an administrative assistance fund, no matter how it's dressed up.

Moving on to nominated entities, these are the bodies the political parties can use to make unlimited contributions to their party coffers, and this is where it gets really confusing. While this legislation purports to be all about equalling the playing field and taking the big money out of the game, the truth is that these legacy entities attached to major parties have, over many years, accumulated massive assets without limitations on their donation caps. As such, they are yet another coup for the major parties, as extraordinarily—and wait for it—this legislation prohibits Independents from establishing a nominated entity and, due to the new donation caps, will make it almost impossible for a new party to build an entity of a similar size.

It gets even better. While each existing registered party can have only one nominated entity, given that the major parties have multiple registered branches and each branch can have a nominated entity, you end up in a really surreal situation. The Australian Labor Party gets a nominated entity, but wait! The Labor Party New South Wales branch gets a nominated entity, but there's more. The Labor Party ACT branch gets a nominated entity. And don't forget the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party of Australia gets a nominated entity. The Liberal National Party of Queensland gets a nominated entity. The National Party of Australia gets a nominated entity. The National Party of Australia New South Wales gets a nominated entity. It goes on and on and on. There is so much wrong in this set-up that I'm not even sure how you'd begin to fix it, but we could start by ensuring the entities are also restricted by capped donations, just like every other third party.

In closing, I'm sure there are many more questions arising from this legislation, including on topics like the pages of exclusions to gift caps. What do they really mean? And what about corporate donations caps? But I want to get to the downright ugly, and that is the process by which this bill is being rushed through this House with no committee hearing and no proper scrutiny. Frankly, it's disgraceful the government is using the excuse that the bill is based on high-level recommendations from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, otherwise known as JSCEM. To be clear, we all know the JSCEM inquiry was specifically tasked to look into the 2022 federal election. And, despite the fact that that election saw the largest number of Independents elected since Federation, there wasn't an Independent representative on that committee until the last day of hearing.

Furthermore, much of this legislation was not recommended by that committee, and the committee has not seen this legislation. So let's just call that for what it is: convenient window-dressing.

I'll double back to where I started. The assistant minister himself has said this is 'the largest reform to Australia's electoral laws in over 40 years'. Ordinarily, even minor changes to electoral laws would be subject to a parliamentary inquiry, yet the government and the opposition are happily working together to bring this baby home through the parliament in this term, and that says everything we need to know.

This legislation is not designed to take big money out of politics; it's designed to prop up a flailing two-party system. And, if the major parties think they can quash the community Independent movement with this bill, they have greatly underestimated the movement along with the communities and the individuals at its heart. Really frustratingly and incredibly depressingly, the major parties have failed to recognise that democracy is at its healthiest—it's absolute healthiest—when it is based on a true contest of ideas. And, for that, history will judge them.

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