Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I likewise am concerned about the ability of people who do not declare where they are coming from to enter into election campaigns as things stand. Unless this legislation is amended, it will give them a freer hand. I spoke earlier today about the Exclusive Brethren and I draw the committee’s attention to an advertisement which appeared in the Eastern Courier in Adelaide on 6 October 2004. That was during the last federal election campaign. It is in a gay pink colour and it says: ‘John Howard provides strong leadership for Australia. Keep Australia in safe hands.’ Under that, it has a list of issues, including national security, allied relations, inflation and home interest rates. It compares the Liberals favourably with the failed policies of the Labor Party in each case. There is no mention of the Greens here. It is very clearly an advertisement for the government in a key seat of South Australia.

This advertisement was authorised by D Burgess of 363 Swansea Road, Lilydale, Victoria 3140. That led an academic from South Australia, Mr Trainer, to ask who had placed the ad, because he was clearly under the impression that it was a Liberal Party ad. Why wouldn’t you have that impression, as there is a picture of the smiling Prime Minister in the advertisement. He was surprised to find after quite a long and exhaustive investigation that in fact the authoriser of that ad is a member of the Exclusive Brethren. After some confusion at the newspaper, the Liberal Party denied that they had produced that advertisement.

My reckoning is that that advertisement alone is worth more than $1,500. I would be interested to know from the Electoral Commission whether D Burgess of 363 Swansea Road, Lilydale filed a return and put on public record with the Electoral Commission this spending—which was part of a wider Exclusive Brethren input to the election campaign—on advertising against the Labor Party and in favour of the government in Adelaide during the last federal election campaign.

At the same time, a brochure appeared in Tasmania. It was headlined, ‘Beware,’ with a picture of forest behind it. On the back, it says, ‘What policies are you really’—with ‘really’ underlined—‘supporting?’ Then it had a list of the environmental policies of the Howard government headed, ‘Fact: the Howard government is committed to our environment.’ It says: ‘The government spent $1.1 billion in 2004. That is almost triple what the previous government allocated and $400 million more than estimates expenditure in 2003-04.’ It also says that the government spent ‘$300 million for the National Heritage Trust and $463.6 million for climate change programs’, et cetera. It says, ‘This is responsible and balanced, contrary to the Greens’ policies.’ This brochure alleged that the Greens’ policies would ‘ruin Australia’.

The interesting thing about this is that it was authorised by M William Mackenzie of 11 Baden Powell Place, North Rocks, New South Wales, 2151. People who are aware of North Rocks would be aware that it is near Parramatta. It was printed by Woolston Printing, 111 Elisabeth Street, Launceston, Tasmania, 7250. This brochure was letter-boxed widely in Tasmania. I cannot think that there is any way that it would have cost under $1,500. It has come from—on my understanding, and I will be very happy to retract this if there is evidence to the contrary—a printing firm owned by an Exclusive Brethren member and was authorised from faraway Sydney by another member of the Exclusive Brethren who, by the way, did not reside at that address.

On the other side, under the heading ‘The Green delusion’—a heading which was to be used a few months later in a very similar pamphlet produced in New Zealand by Exclusive Brethren businesspeople against the Labour Party and the Greens—it points out that there are a whole lot of things wrong with the Greens’ policies. Among those was an increase in company tax from 30 per cent to 49 per cent. The problem with that is that the Greens have no such policy. We did have a policy for a 33 per cent company tax, but that is a long way short of 49 per cent.

The old policy of 49 per cent, which I think all parties in this parliament have held at some time, has been abandoned by the Greens, as it has by the other parties, but the Liberal Party in Victoria, along with Business Council of Australia, continued to assert that the Greens had a 49 per cent tax policy. I disavowed that to those groups. In fact, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, which followed up that wrong tax policy attributed to the Greens, was good enough to print a retraction the next day, effectively, and to set the record straight. The newspaper wanted to make sure that it was not misinforming readers. That did not stop the Exclusive Brethren’s William Mackenzie, of an unknown address—but certainly not of 11 Baden Powell Road, North Rocks—from continuing to lie to the electorate of Tasmania by putting out this brochure with that information in it.

It is interesting that, along the way, there has been a more generalised attack on the Greens as having failed communist and socialist ideologies. Let me say here at the outset that, if one thing has made me formulate my thinking in the world, it is the horror of Stalin and Mao and what they did to their own people. Here we have an organisation which is secretive, which bans its members from voting and which has a head who can dictate assent to people’s relationships, to where they live, to how they work and to how they move, daring to make such an accusation about the Greens. I think every elector has a right to know who was behind this brochure, but they did not find that out. I hope the electoral office is successful in discovering that, but it will be a difficult job because a real effort has been made here to not let people know that the Exclusive Brethren, who do not allow their members to vote, have got so entangled in promoting the Howard government against other political groups in the community.

More directly, in Mr Howard’s own electorate, there was a colour advertisement saying, ‘Keep Bennelong in safe hands; keep Australia in safe hands’—