Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Can the Prime Minister confirm that Australian charities will be caught in the government's foreign donation laws? Why is the good work of Australian charities being put at risk because of the Prime Minister's inept handling of foreign donation laws?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is a fundamental principle that I would have thought all members would agree upon and it is this: that Australians should be the only ones who are putting money into Australian political contests. Surely we have enough pride in ourselves and in our nation that we would say it is Australians who should be determining who sits on the treasury bench here and that we shouldn't have foreign organisations or foreign billionaires pouring money into Australian political campaigns. You would think that that would unite both sides of the House, but, apparently, not.

We are committed to ensuring that we keep Australian politics and Australian political decisions within the hands and the influence of Australians. The reality is this: the Labor Party's own proposed legislation sought to ban all entities, including charities, from using foreign money donated for political purposes to finance political campaigning. The only problem was that Labor's legislation defined 'foreign donation' so narrowly as 'money being physically located outside of Australia' so that, if the money was brought into an Australian bank account, it wasn't caught by this really tough law. That was Labor standing up to defend our system. Labor's foreign donations legislation was a joke.

It is a very simple point. Under our bill, charities are able to take as much money from foreign entities as they want, but they can't use that foreign money to fund political campaigning in Australia. It has long been a requirement for any individual or entity that incurs a significant amount of political expenditure to disclose this to the Electoral Commission. Just seven out of 55,500 registered charities in Australia reported political expenditure last financial year. That represents 0.01 per cent of Australian charities. So the bill has no effect on foreign funding for charities' non-political activity or charities' political campaigning where it is funded by Australians. So talking about St Vincent de Paul or World Vision is a simple exercise by the Labor Party in trying to distract from the fact that GetUp! wants to raise millions of dollars from overseas, to use foreign money, to influence the politics of our nation—and we won't have a bar of it. (Time expired)