Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

Before I move on to oppose item 79 of schedule 1, I would like to remark upon what we have just voted for. If a parliamentary party stood 150 lower house candidates, that would cost them $75,000 in nomination deposits—that is, $500 times 150. If they stood three candidates in every Senate sector through eight territories and states at $1,000 a pop, that is $24,000. So, adding those two together, if you completely covered the field as a minor party, it would cost you $99,000. If you were a minor party that got, say, 1.9 per cent—and people have been elected with that—you would lose that $99,000. Some families could never, ever afford that, unless they were really rich families or well-paid senators. People need to be reminded of the aggregate sum of what affects them when they are dealing with things like nomination deposits and so on.

I will now move on. The Democrats oppose schedule 1 in the following terms:

(6)    Schedule 1, item 79, page 20 (line 24) to page 22 (line 11), TO BE OPPOSED.

This concerns the disclosure threshold. I have listened with care to the minister and many others justifying a $10,000 threshold. Without verballing the minister, I summarise his arguments to be: firstly, it is a reasonable amount; secondly, if you compare it to the original disclosure amount, if that had been indexed it would certainly have been far greater than the present $1,500—I think the minister mentioned that it would be at least $5,000 on current indexation; and, thirdly, the $10,000 equates, roughly speaking, with the figure in a number of countries around the world that have disclosure thresholds. All those are arguments to be put in favour of increasing the disclosure threshold.

We have a different view. Our view is that the way in which democracies have moved is to be more rigorous over disclosure and that you cannot look at the disclosure regimes of other countries without looking at them in their total context. For instance, the disclosure regime of the United Kingdom, which was commented on favourably by the minister with respect to the threshold, is extremely rigorous in other respects. Recently I was able to read all about how much the Prime Minister’s wife had spent on hairdos when she accompanied the Prime Minister during the campaign and how much Charles Kennedy had spent on make-up, which strikes me as amusing. Of course, he was a Liberal Democrat, so I suppose it goes hand in hand! They have a far stronger disclosure regime in other areas, and you need to balance it out.

The problem with our disclosure regime is that it is weak. The disclosures that are available—