Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure for me to support the Advisory report on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008 by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. This bill was referred to the committee by the good senators. I would like to say how much I appreciate the work that has been done by the committee secretariat in relation to this bill. You will find it is a bill about which there have been some differences of opinion based across the political divide. However, as it turns out, the chairman, Daryl Melham, has been able to negotiate a fairly decent outcome in terms of the recommendations and the modest dissension that has come with this report.

In the first instance, I will mention a little bit of historical information. Political donations are not a matter that we have argued about just in recent times; it has been around for as long as I can remember. In particular, I note that colleagues who were on the joint standing committee in the previous parliament put in a dissenting report quoting Senator Ray back in 1983. One sentence encapsulates it all. Senator Ray said:

I believe that the public has a right to know who is donating to political parties.

I think that all of us would expect that to be the case. We should be open with our communities as to who is giving us the money that we use in order to attract their vote. A good friend of mine, Michael Lavarch, was on a committee of the parliament in 1989, which is when I think the report called Who pays the piper calls the tune was presented. I think that is what the community believes: who pays the piper calls the tune—who is sticking the money in the hands of the political parties is who, if not to get their way, gets to have influence over government.

As a Queensland MP I am very familiar with the process that led up to the 1988 Fitzgerald inquiry regarding the legendary brown paper bags of money that passed hands in Queensland at that time. The whole country has come a long way since then and political processes have matured somewhat, but it is still the case that, in almost any survey of the public that is taken, MPs rate at the lower end of occupations of Australian workers—because, of course, we are Australian workers—that are trusted by the community. We share that status with a couple of other professions, like used-car salesmen and journalists.

We are open to that kind of lack of regard by our community. If we are seeking to hide from them the sources of the money that we use to campaign then we are playing into the hands of that kind of opinion. They should see, as I do, members of both sides as honourable people who are striving to see to it that the values system that they support is the one that is driving the country for the moment. The report that the committee has brought down is simply about that. It is about openness and accountability. It is about the restoration of public confidence in the political process. And while the dissenting report suggests that these matters should be delayed until the green paper of the full review of electoral legislation comes through, I believe that openness, accountability and the restoration of confidence are not matters that we as members of parliament should be seeking to delay. I believe that this is what we should have been offering up to our community not now but years ago. I think the increase that occurred in non-disclosable donations in the course of the last parliament was a blight on our political process.

There are some fairly interesting matters that are also covered in here aside from the disclosure threshold, which we are looking to bring down from $10,900 and indexed, as it is now, down to $1,000 and non-indexed. I know that in Queensland we have an issue that my colleague, the member for Melbourne Ports, has been very vocal about over a number of years—that is, the use by certain individuals of public electoral funding to gain an income over some years and, by dint of, shall we say, celebrity, being able to acquire many more votes and much more money than they need to expend in order to acquire those.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mike was one of them.

Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He is a major celebrity in our quadrant in the parliament. The issue is: is it an appropriate use of public money to pay people in excess of what they spend to conduct an election? I believe that it is not, and I am yet to find any of my constituents who think that it is. They figure they work hard enough in paying their taxes and if they want to make a donation to an individual politician over and above what he spends, they would prefer that they be given the option to do that themselves rather than the government doing it on their behalf. I note there have been people who have been elected to this parliament in the past who fall into the category of people who receive more than they spend, and they have then in turn donated that to community groups. I commend them for doing that but, again, if my constituents are contributing to the money that those members get, I suspect that they would like to know that it is going to community groups in their electorate.

One of the other major issues here—I do not believe that it has been a significant problem in Australia; it certainly has not bothered me in the five or six elections that I have contested—is the issue of donations from overseas. In essence, the provisions that are included in the bill are simply to shut a door before a horse bolts. I think we all accept that that is, in itself, also a reasonable view. There have been some significant donations that have flowed into Australia from overseas from time to time. It is not a regular occurrence, but it is not something that we ought to encourage happening in the future. The support for that provision is appropriate.

We then have a look at anonymous donations. Again, the dissenting members of the committee have not taken issue with the matter itself, but they have suggested a slightly higher threshold for anonymous donations. The committee has recommended that anonymous donations of less than $50 be acceptable. That really means that somebody who attends a local party function and buys a few raffle tickets does not have to have their name recorded and reported ad infinitum. I can tell you that the greatest amount of my campaign money that does not come out of my own pocket comes out of the pockets of my branch members who pay $10 to come to a barbecue—and hopefully we will get $15 out of them for raffle tickets. I noted at a recent function of one of our state MPs that he sold at least 107 $5 tickets for a bottle of wine signed by the local councillor. I am not sure that the bottle of wine cost him more than $6.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It wasn’t vinegar?

Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was not vinegar but I do not think it was wonderful.

The northern outskirts of Brisbane and the adjacent area, where we come from, are really tough country to raise money. We do not have big businesses, so none of this is going to bother me terribly much at all. But I think that $50 is reasonable, although I could be convinced that it might be $100. But the majority of the committee said $50. Some members think a couple of dollars more than that is fair. That is okay that they should think that.

We have also talked about increasing the capacity of the AEC to follow up complaints and to ensure compliance, and we have talked about increasing the penalties for people who miss their time lines or seek to indicate something that might be misleading.

At the end of the day, what this bill is about—and what the committee’s report supports—is simply openness with the community: let the community know that it is not a great difficulty for us to think about the fact that they deserve to know. As Robert Ray said in 1983, they actually have a right to know who is supporting us. It is not something we should hide from them. Heaven forbid that we should end up with an electoral system the same as that of America—which we like to laud, and they themselves particularly like to laud, as the greatest democracy in the world—where Barack Obama was able to raise, I understand, US$600 million. That is a substantial amount of money. If those sorts of funds came flowing in our direction, graduated down to the relative size of our population it would be $60 million of public money that could be raised—and $60 million can buy a lot of access. That is the purpose of major companies donating, of course. They want access—not necessarily influence but the ability to put their case.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to support the report. I am delighted with the work that the committee has done. As I say, despite the fact that we have different political views, this committee works fairly well. To my mind, the fact that the dissenting report has been modest—on a sensitive area of the work we do—is a testimony to the way that the committee, particularly the chair, Mr Daryl Melham, and the deputy chair, Mr Scott Morrison, have been able to work together to overcome those issues as best we can. We will never actually see eye to eye on these matters, I suspect, but if we can go a long way towards doing that then I think that the people of Australia are well served.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking on this report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, the Advisory report on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008, I want to commend the committee’s chair, the honourable member for Banks, for his firm conduct of this inquiry; he was collegial but he was firm. I thank other members of the committee for their contributions. I also acknowledge the secretariat’s work to support the committee’s deliberations.

Some of you will know that I am not sure that the issue of political donations is the most important issue in the area that the electoral matters committee looks at—the democratic reform of Australia. In particular, I would have thought that issues emerging from the last government’s regressive legislation, issues of provisional voting and early closure of the roll, are just as important. It is my contention that, in the area of provisional voting, the changes that the previous government wrought to the electoral legislation probably affected three or maybe four seats at the last federal election in a way that disadvantaged the current government.

Having said that, I do not really think that this inquiry, in another sense, was necessary. It was forced on us by the Senate when the government did not have a majority—and it still does not have a majority. The Rudd government has a clear mandate for this piece of legislation. At the time the Howard government foreshadowed the legislation which this bill overturns, we said we would oppose it. When the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters conducted its inquiry into the Howard government’s legislation, we exposed many of its deficiencies and the Labor members of the committee wrote a minority report saying why we would oppose it. During the last election campaign, the then opposition pledged to overturn this harmful, regressive and undemocratic legislation, and now that we are in government we are carrying out that commitment.

The opposition members of this committee, led by the deputy chair, the honourable member for Cook, have presented a dissenting report to the committee’s report. This is, of course, their right. But they cannot claim that this legislation came as a surprise to them. We said all along—and I personally said many times in this House before the election and publicly—that we opposed the Howard government’s damaging changes to our electoral laws and that we would repeal them as soon as we had the opportunity to do so. So opposition members are entitled to go on arguing the case for discredited legislation but they cannot deny that we have a mandate to overturn it. Opposition members said in their dissenting report:

A responsible government would adopt a holistic, broad, bi-partisan view of the issue and most importantly, consider what is in the best interests of the community and our democracy.

I am delighted to see that the opposition has been converted to the principle of bipartisanship now that they are out of government. I am entitled to ask how much bipartisanship the previous government showed when it rammed electoral laws through both this House and the Senate in 2006.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You were deputy chairman, so you should know we have done consensual reports with no dissents, so don’t try and—

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Kooyong will not disrupt. The member for Melbourne Ports has the call.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Georgiou interjecting

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Melbourne Ports will be heard in silence.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, to be fair, we issued a dissenting report with the last report, for the 2004 election—maybe not when the member for Kooyong was chair of that committee.

The opposition also used a lot of evidence adduced from recognised experts in the area, Brian Coster and Emeritus Professor Colin Hughes, that was simply ignored. Maybe the member for Kooyong was a secret dissenter, as he was a dissenter on other issues, from the then minister, Senator Abetz.

The bill the committee has just examined is part of a fulfilment of Labor’s commitment to, as I say, undo these regressive changes to our electoral laws by the former government. It reverses the decision by the Howard government which made it easier for individuals and corporations to give money to political parties without disclosure—a decision that was widely seen as a device to put more money in the coffers of the Liberal Party. The Howard government’s change to financial disclosure arrangements, most notably lifting the disclosure threshold from $1,500 to more than $10,000, allowed large sums to be donated to the Liberal Party without being disclosed, and, of course, that was the intention of the legislation. The delay in the publication of disclosures made above this higher threshold has meant that up to one year and three months could elapse after a donation had been made before it was made public. That is quite unacceptable.

The days when the Liberal Party can rewrite our election law to suit their own partisan fundraising needs I hope have now ended for good. I have particular hope that this bill will reduce the likelihood of a repetition of the events we saw in the seat of Indi in 2004, which I drew to the attention of the House at the time, when tobacco interests used an entity called the Friends of Indi to channel money without disclosure to the honourable member for Indi. After an inquiry that lasted for most of 2007 the Australian Electoral Commission found in November last year that the Friends of Indi was an associated entity of the Liberal Party and either the Liberal Party or the honourable member for Indi had a disclosure obligation in relation to gifts of the kind provided by the Friends of Indi.

The Liberal Party then lodged an amended return for the 2004 financial year disclosing $23,514 in additional total receipts and $16,158 in additional detailed receipts. I do not think Australians in Indi or elsewhere like the idea of members of parliament being in receipt of secret donations, especially from organisations as controversial as the tobacco lobby. If honourable members want to take money from the tobacco lobby, that is their right but they should do so in the light of day so that their electors can see what they are doing. It has not been disclosed whether the tobacco lobby demanded action or response from the member for Indi. Perhaps she will tell the House one day, but it is clear that the previous government’s legislation made it easier for interest groups like this to buy influence by giving money under the threshold to members of parliament. The Rudd government’s legislation will make it harder for them to do so. I think I know which approach the Australian people will support.

The bill which is the subject of this report will do a number of things. Firstly, it will reduce the disclosure threshold from more than $10,000, indexed to the CPI, to $1,000, not indexed. Next, the bill will require people who donate to political parties during election campaigns to furnish a return within eight weeks of the polling day. Next, the bill will require people who make gifts and others to furnish twice-yearly returns. Next, it will close a loophole which allows people to donate to each state branch of a political party and claim each donation as a separate donation.

Finally, the bill will close what I call the ‘Pauline Hanson’ loophole, which allows a person who is a well-known name to nominate for the Senate, appear on Dancing with the Stars, poll four per cent of the vote without doing any campaigning and then automatically receive public funding. In the 2004 election the former One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, a person who that year—I am sure it will depress the member for Kooyong to be reminded of this—was a guest at the Liberal Party’s 60th anniversary celebrations, pocketed almost $200,000 of public funding while spending only $35,000 on her campaign. This was the person described by the honourable member for Mackellar as a ‘political prisoner’ when she was convicted for fraud in 2003. The law will now limit public funding to actual expenditure incurred by the party or candidate. Since I used a series of speeches and articles to draw attention to this abuse of the public funding provisions of the act that were used by Ms Hanson in the 2004 and 2007 elections, I think I can claim some small amount of credit for the provisions of this bill.

I said earlier that I did not think this inquiry was necessary. That is not to say that nothing useful has come from it. As a result of our deliberations we have recommended two amendments to the bill, which I hope the minister will take on board. The first is that definition of electoral expenditure be expanded to allow reasonable administrative expenses related to campaigning. This will ensure that minor parties are not disadvantaged by the proposed closing of the Hanson loophole. The second proposal is that anonymous donations below $50 be allowed since we recognise that a complete ban on anonymous donations might create a situation where, for example, a party could not sell a raffle ticket or accept small cash donations at public events.

As the member for Longman said, I think the government remains reasonable on this issue. Fifty dollars may not be the appropriate level. It may be slightly higher, as the dissenting report demands. If the minister feels that small lunches or dinners that some individual candidates have are going to be wrapped up in this legislation if anonymous donation is set at that level, he may feel that that would be administratively impossible to deal with. I think that other members of the government would go along with him. This report is another stage in carrying out the Rudd government’s commitment to electoral reform. We have a mandate for these reforms. They are in the interests of Australian democracy and we intend carrying them through.

Debate (on motion by Mr Hayes) adjourned.