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

I rise to support the amendments moved by the member for Curtin. She's been able to identify two discrete parts of this legislation that could be removed and still enable the government to proceed with significant electoral reform. I think it's a smart way forward. When you look at a lot of the commentary that is coming out of the public sector across our country, many—as am I—are prepared to accept a lower donation threshold and many are prepared to accept as close as possible to real-time donations. But there are significant concerns in what appears to be a baked-in disproportional benefit for party participants when it comes to expenditure caps and this weird new category of public funding called administrative funding.

To be clear, the bill ostensibly imposes spending caps at a divisional level, a state level and a federal level as well as for Senate campaigns. Yet the caps as they're currently structured are riddled with loopholes that ultimately benefit the legacy parties. Why? Because a divisional cap, which is where somebody like an Independent exists, is set at $800,000 per seat—meaning a candidate is allowed to only spend up to that amount, be they an incumbent or a challenger. A party candidate, however, while in theory being subjected to the same divisional spending cap, is free to have their campaign topped up with executions that are funded under a federal cap for a party which goes up to $90 million.

I acknowledge that political parties do not contest every lower house seat or every Senate seat, and they do not spend the same amount of money in every seat; in fact, they shift the money between seats so they are focused on those seats that they see as the most vulnerable. Under this legislation, parties will essentially be able to put themselves into a situation where they are able to back up individual candidates in divisions by providing additional advertising and electoral marketing materials that go over and above what is everybody else's budget. I think that is fundamentally unfair, and my community of North Sydney would not support that; they would like to see that removed. If it's going to be an 800-kay cap, make it 800 kay for all—including the party expenditure that takes place over and above an individual's direct expenditure.

I will go to this innocuous funding stream called the administrative funding assistance. To be clear, for anyone listening at home, the administrative funding would see every MP in the House of Representatives receive $30,000 a year, whilst every senator would receive $15,000 a year. In the case of an Independent, that money comes directly to them, but in the case of a party the funds are consolidated and the party machine would receive that funding on a quarterly basis. That means the vast majority of this funding will go to the major parties based on a false premise that administrative costs increase proportionately with the number of members. But they don't. It doesn't work like that.

Most of the costs of running a political party are fixed, and it makes no sense to presume that they would increase in direct line with an increase in the number of members. Interestingly, the government has intimated that these provisions have been included predominantly at the behest of people like me—Independents—to cover what are very real compliance costs, including legal fees and accounting fees. When you are just one person wholly and solely bearing those costs they are difficult to get up and over. But, in looking at the detail in this legislation, when I run the numbers on the current members sitting in the House, this legislation means that the major parties would get $4.8 million a year of public funding to use not just on legal fees and accounting fees, but for all sorts of things, including conference attendance, seminar attendance, meetings or similar functions at which policies of a registered political party are discussed, expenditure on equipment or vehicles used by staff and, perhaps most offensively, to pay interest payments on loans!

I'm okay if you want to discuss an administrative payment, because accounting fees and legal fees are high, but I think when we start talking about covering loan repayments for the major parties we have a problem. Therefore, as proposed by the member for Curtin, should be removed from the bill.

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