Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Finance and Deregulation representing the Special Minister of State. What steps are being taken by the government to improve the accountability, integrity and transparency of the electoral laws? Are there any threats to these reforms?

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Banks for his question. The government is committed to a transparent and accountable electoral system and to strengthening our democracy and the electoral practices that underpin that. In order to pursue that, the government will be issuing a green paper on electoral reform in two parts in the second half of the year to examine other ways of improving our democratic practice in Australia, because democracy means more than just the superficial structures; it is also the mechanics, the process ensuring that we can all participate equally in our overall democratic system.

At the moment there are some urgent repairs required. We have, therefore, introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008 to fix some of the more serious loopholes in the existing system. The opposition, because it unfortunately has the numbers in the Senate, is sending this bill to a committee with a reporting date of 30 June 2009.

This bill contains five urgent measures to clean up problems which have been identified with the current funding and disclosure regime. These measures include ensuring that all donations to political parties and candidates over $1,000 are subject to proper public scrutiny, reducing the $10,500 disclosure threshold that now exists. It also includes a twice yearly reporting regime through the Australian Electoral Commission. It also bans overseas and anonymous donations and prevents political parties and candidates making a profit from public funding.

The government wants to implement all of these measures by 1 July this year and therefore make the management of the new regime as straightforward as possible for the Australian Electoral Commission over the financial year 2008-09. The measures are straightforward and uncontroversial, or so they should be and so we believe they ought to be. For 2004-05, when the donation disclosure threshold was $1,500, there were 1,286 donor returns lodged with the AEC. For the following financial year, 2005-06, when the previous government raised the disclosure threshold to $10,000, only 317 donor returns were lodged. In the space of a year the number of donor returns subject to public scrutiny dropped by three-quarters. In the following year, 2006-07, the number of donor returns dropped again to 194—less than one-sixth of the number of donations disclosed when the threshold was $1,500 in 2004-05.

No-one, we believed, could reasonably argue that transparency, disclosure and tightening the rules of public accountability are bad things, and nobody could disagree with the need for proper disclosure of sources of funding for election campaigns—or so we thought. But it appears that the opposition and Dr Nelson, the member for Bradfield and Leader of the Opposition, have a problem with this bill. It reflects a longstanding dynamic in Australian politics on these issues: the Liberal Party will always seek to restrict access to the right to vote and always seek to restrict disclosure of political donations. These are the two fundamental positions that always prevail in debates about electoral reform in this country.

The opposition is clearly against transparency, accountability and strengthening democracy, and this bill is being sent to the never-never of a prolonged Senate committee process which is not due to report for over a year. Therefore, the reforms cannot be passed by the Senate until roughly September 2009 at the earliest, when the government believes the bill should be put in place by 1 July this year. The opposition wants to delay those reforms until at least September of next year. That is a whole year’s worth of a big pile of extra secret donations. That is a whole year’s worth of potential for further corruption. The opposition should think very seriously about its position on this issue. I urge the Leader of the Opposition to rethink the opposition’s position. The figures speak for themselves: as these rules have been changed by the Liberal Party in government, so the level of transparency and disclosure has disappeared. We are about to reverse that and the opposition should support the changes to the legislation.