George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commence my remarks by echoing a comment made this morning by Senator Hutchins in respect of the title of this bill and to again point out the consistent use by this government of Orwellian doublespeak in order to describe what it is doing or what it is not doing. This bill is entitled the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2006. When you look at the bill you will see the one thing that it does not contain in any shape or form is integrity. There is no integrity in this bill. It is not about making voting easier, fairer, simpler or transparent or about ensuring that the public are able to maximise—to the extent that they can—their democratic rights. It is in fact about the opposite. It is about making voting more difficult and making it more difficult to enrol. It is about taking away the transparency of electoral donations so that people can donate in secret and not be identified when they make donations to political parties. So in fact what is said in the bill is the opposite of its intention.

Any changes to our electoral system should seek at their heart to promote the inclusion of ordinary Australians in the democratic process. In fact, if you look at our electoral system you will see that it is already too disenfranchising. That was clear at the last federal election when there were over one million informal ballots cast. That was one million people who were effectively disenfranchised from having a say in who should be the government of this country. It is true that many people do not fully understand the inner workings of the electoral system; they do not get as much information about or access to government, political parties and the political system as they could. Information is not clearly expressed in order to ensure that we minimise the number of informal votes that are cast and maximise the value of the vote that is in the hand of every Australian who is registered on the electoral roll.

Australia is a representative democracy and, as elected representatives, we are delegates of the Australian people. We have a responsibility to be answerable and accountable to the people who put us into this house. It is for those reasons that I absolutely reject these electoral amendments. After all, how can anyone who has been elected by the people stand here and vote to make their electoral system less transparent and more difficult for them to operate within and to understand? How could I vote for changes to our electoral system that will make it harder for ordinary people to vote and much easier for business in particular to buy political clout? That is what these amendments do. They prioritise big business over individuals, whom this government claims to value so dearly. They further limit the already limited direct participation by ordinary Australians in their political process.

Let us look at the issue of financial disclosure and tax deductibility. The current threshold sits at $1,500. We know big business contributes to political parties. If you look at the donations of businesses that are disclosed, you will see that they are usually to both political parties and in similar amounts. But we also know that they are constantly looking for ways and means of making donations that cannot be put out into the public arena so that they can pick the political party they think will best favour their interests and promote them to ensure that they have a better-than-even-money opportunity of winning elections. That is what the changes that are promoted in this bill are about. They are about establishing a framework—as a number of speakers have said—which will allow businesses or individuals to be able to donate upwards of $90,000 to political parties without the risk that any of that money will be disclosed publicly.

The Australian public should be uneasy; they are being confronted with a situation where they will have governments elected without knowing whose interests those governments are working for. They will not be able to identify the people who are providing the financial clout to have those governments elected. And it is shameful in the extreme that this government has proposed changes that will diminish rather than enhance financial transparency in our electoral system.

The Australian people have a right to know who is paying for political access, because we all know that in politics he who pays the piper calls the tune. Raising the disclosure threshold is an absolutely self-serving action by this government that does nothing to promote accountability and, more importantly, does nothing to enhance and ensure democracy within our political system. In fact, it is explicitly designed, as I said, to do the reverse. You do not have to take my word for it. The minister who was responsible for having this bill drafted and brought before this parliament, Senator Abetz, said it would be a return to, ‘the good old days when people used to donate to the Liberal Party via lawyers’ trust accounts’, via a circuitous route. Raising the disclosure threshold is not about democracy at all. It is, in fact, about making those sorts of structures easier to access for individuals and companies so that they can keep silent the donations that they make to the political party of their choice.

It also raises fundamental questions about the influence that donors will have on the policies and decisions of government. It restores the old mentality of ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ One senior Victorian Liberal MP, for example, was recently quoted in the Age as saying:

We’ve caught the American disease ... we’ve got a fund-raise or perish mentality ... MPs are directed by party headquarters to attend coffees with key business supporters just because it might lock in our next $15,000 cheque.

We have to question whether, if this bill were passed, we would be heading down the American path where, to get yourself elected to the Senate, or to get yourself elected to the principal office, that of President in the United States, you virtually have to be a millionaire 10 times over. And we all know, because it has been clearly stated, that it is the oil companies that run the White House in the United States these days. They are the business with the greatest influence over the American government because that is where most of the funding comes from.

Do we want to create a situation in this country where the only way a person can play a political role, can be a representative of the community, is to have substantial wealth behind them before they even start along the road? That is not, I would suggest, the sort of democracy this country started out to be or should be.

But maybe it has already started. We saw an episode in one electorate in the last election where one Liberal Party candidate, a former merchant banker, spent substantial sums of his own money, first of all to get himself preselected through the Liberal Party machine and then to get himself elected as the representative for the electorate of Wentworth in New South Wales.

Our public funding system for elections was established and designed to encourage participation in politics by those individuals who could not necessarily afford to bankroll a campaign themselves—to ensure that our houses of parliament, both the Senate and the House of Representatives, broadly reflected the membership of our community. And that is the way it ought to remain.