Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I commend Senator Murray for bringing that matter back to the chamber. The Greens supported him in that amendment and we hope the government will reconsider regardless of whether it is recommitted. Before question time today I was speaking to the amendment I have moved with regard to electoral advertisements by third parties. I want to explain to the people of Australia why this is essential and why the government’s changes do not address this issue. I am going to refer to a situation that arose in the Tasmanian election early in 2006. Whilst there are no disclosure laws in Tasmania, so anything goes, exactly the same thing could occur in the federal election in the next year and the same will apply. I would like the minister to respond.

What occurred in the Tasmanian state election was that a mystery TV advertising campaign supporting the return of a stable majority government hit the airways. The two prime time television commercials were followed by press releases, radio campaigns and all sorts of varying manifestations of the same ad, which featured a Tasmanian blue-collar worker and a happy young family relishing their prosperous lifestyle and secure jobs in Tasmania. The end message of the powerful political ads called on Tasmanians to vote for a stable majority government. The ads said: ‘We want the security of knowing that Tasmania will stay this way and it will not return to the bad old days of the mid-90s.’

Clearly, it was not coming from the Liberal Party because in the mid-90s there was a Liberal minority government. A secretive group calling itself Tasmanians for a Better Future funded the commercials. The ads did not disclose who or what organisations were behind the group, or who was paying for the lavish campaign for a majority government. The only authorisation on the end of the ads, as required under the Electoral Act for political advertising during an election, was Tony Harrison, head of Hobart advertising agency Corporate Communications, which made the ads. Mr Harrison, whose business works for some of Tasmania’s largest companies and government organisations including the TT-Line, TasPorts, PowerCo Tasmania, Gunns and Hobart Airport, said that the provider of the funds was confidential. He said that finance had come from ‘a group of concerned Tasmanian businesses and community people’ with the charter to promote the benefits of a stable majority government but not one party. The TV ads, as I said, were joined by press, radio, billboards et cetera.

The Lennon government in Tasmania were adamant that there was no government money in the secretive majority campaign. The Premier of the day said that they did not have any money in it although they were the only ones who could realistically form a majority government. The Liberal Party, foolishly, of course, came out and said that they supported the message of the ads, that is, majority government, even though they could not win one. It beggars belief that they could be that foolish, but they were.

The only hints of possible sources of funding were in the commercials themselves. One featured Forestry Tasmania’s Tahune air walk in the Huon and another a sunlit winery restaurant with a Tamar Ridge wineglass in the foreground. Forestry Tasmania denied it had provided any funding and so did the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Federal Hotels, Timber Communities Tasmania and Forestry Tasmania. They all denied having any money in it, but timber giant Gunns, which owns Tamar Ridge Winery, was asked if it had helped fund the commercial and it refused to respond. The Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chairman, Michael Kent, said he understood that quite a number of small- and medium-sized businesses across the state supported the campaign. He said, ‘They want to see things continue in the vein of the past three or four good years.’

So here we have a group, Tasmanians for a Better Future. They are not registered, we do not know who they are and they have no name or address—nothing. We have people saying they represent 20 or 30 businesspeople who have a certain view, and the ads are authorised by a public relations company, Tony Harrison’s Corporate Communications. Of course, it does not escape my attention that Tony Harrison worked for Robin Gray, the Liberal Premier of Tasmania through the 1990s, as his press secretary. As I indicated when I spoke on this in the debate on the second reading, Concerned Citizens for Tasmania was the bogus group that former Premier Robin Gray set up after the 1989 election. Tony Harrison now says that this group behind the ads is made up of ‘concerned Tasmanians’.

The code of conduct of the Public Relations Institute of Australia requires members to reveal who has funded any PR campaign. Tony Harrison, on behalf of Corporate Communications, utterly refused to do so. And the PR institute just stood by and allowed him to get away with it, which makes a complete mockery of any kind of code of conduct for the public relations industry and confirms what people in the general community think of them.

Here we have a situation which is not addressed by the government’s bill. The government’s bill says that, first of all, a third party that engages in an election campaign has to declare what they are doing if the amount of the expenditure incurred is more than $10,000. In this case it certainly was more than $10,000, so under the Commonwealth’s new legislation you would have a return put in by Corporate Communications, a public relations company, saying that it expended however much. You would have no way of checking, but let us say that it expended a quarter of a million dollars on a public relations campaign. The government’s legislation says that, in that case, if any one of the donors, any one of the 20 or 30 businesspeople, had put in more than $10,000 then they would have had to name them, but if they had not then they would not. The result is that a group of unknown, unnamed shadowy figures can emerge from somewhere and call themselves anything, such as Tasmanians for a Better Future—and, interestingly, that is a similar slogan to the one that the government ran with—and get away with it. They will never be named and will never be known. You will just have the public relations industry declaring its expenditure.

That is the issue. That is why I have moved this amendment. It says that if a third party wants to be involved in an election campaign, first of all it has to register. It has to register so that it provides compulsory identification of that third party, including the identification of all persons in the case of corporations, including directors and other officers of that corporation. Secondly, there has to be compulsory disclosure by a third party of any contributions made to it by any person or corporation. This is how it would catch the 20 or 30 businesspeople who tried this in Tasmania—successfully, I might say. Nobody in Tasmania to this day knows who influenced the outcome of the election by paying Corporate Communications in cash. If Senator Abetz knows then I would really appreciate him telling Tasmanians what we all suspect—that Gunns had a considerable amount of money involved in the campaign. If he knows something to the contrary then he should say so. This amendment requires that anyone who donates more than $1,500 to the PR company or the third company has to be captured in this.

Thirdly, I am making it a requirement that, when they register, the third party must disclose their relationship with a registered political party or independent candidate. As Senator Abetz has claimed on many occasions, there are people working on behalf of other entities. I say that, in that case, they should register their relationship. Another example of that is Dean Cocker, of 13 Elphin Road, Launceston, who put full-page advertisements in the Examiner. As we now know, he is the managing director of JAC Group, yet this ad was put in under his name and address. Under the government’s proposed laws, all that would happen would be that he would have to put in a return if he spent $10,000 or more. The fact is that a full-page ad in Tasmania does not cost $10,000. You can take out an ad up to the value of $10,000 and never have to declare it. What is more, earlier Senator Abetz said, in response to a question that I asked, that if somebody provided the money to someone to then donate or in this case to advertise, they would have to say so. I do not believe that this captures that. If JAC Group provided Dean Cocker, of 13 Elphin Road, Launceston, with the money to place this ad, that is not captured.

Also, I believe that, looking at this ad, it was most likely written and placed by one of the major parties and more likely than not came straight out of the government’s media office or campaign team office. We know from the last federal election that the Liberal Party wrote and placed ads on behalf of other people. Other people put ads in the paper with their names and authorising addresses on them, but we know that the Liberal Party wrote the ads and placed the ads. Somebody else paid for them and authorised them. That is not captured by the third-party amendments.

I would also like to know from Senator Abetz how the government’s proposals are going to be policed. How will the Electoral Commission know who in the community—which third party or which individual—has spent more than $10,000 and therefore has to put in a return? Are they going to look at an opinion poll that someone conducted? How are they going to find out what you paid to have that done? How are they going to know? Are they going to track down advertising agencies? Are they going to have to have police powers? If they go to a printer is the printer required to say that Dean Cocker spent a certain amount? Is a newspaper going to tell you how much this ad incurred and so on? The legislation talks about an annual return relating to political expenditure and says that if a person who is not a political party or candidate spends more than $10,000 they have to put in a return. How is the Electoral Commission going to identify those people or know who should be putting in a return? There is no possible way of knowing that.

I urge the government to recognise that the only way to do this is to require anybody who wants to advertise in an election campaign to register so that you know who they are and who they represent et cetera. Then they should declare what their relationship is with any candidate or political party in the election. For example, are they going to use the same ad agencies? Is the party going to provide the ads for them? Are they going to place the ads for them? Do they have any kind of relationship with people in the campaign?

If this third party has donations from a fourth party given to it then who they are must be able to be seen. Otherwise, you have the situation of Tasmanians for a Better Future, where, to this day, Tasmanians do not know who paid for $200,000 worth—probably more—of advertising that influenced the outcome of the state election. If you do not rein this in now it will mean that there will be a blank cheque for public relations agencies going into the federal election, with the full blessing of the Public Relations Institute of Australia, which will be saying: ‘Forget about our code of conduct. It doesn’t operate. It doesn’t matter. We’re completely self-regulated. We’ll just do as we like and you just go right ahead.’

Next year we will have a plethora of public relations agencies behind which any number of people can hide, providing they do not make an individual donation of more than $10,000 to that public relations agency towards a collective campaign. This is a situation where a chamber of commerce can get half a dozen individuals or a rich family to put in. The point is disclosure. We are not going to know who influences the outcome of elections. If we do not know who is actually paying for these advertisements—who these third parties represent—then after the election we are not going to be able to see the relationship between what they put in and what policy outcomes they get out. That is why I think that is the only way you can control this: if you have registered third parties, they are forced to say what their relationship is to any political party and you can track donations to them of less than $10,000, because in a state like Tasmania $10,000 buys you a lot of advertising and there is no disclosure whatsoever.