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

Just to follow up from my colleague on the advertisement ‘Keep Howard in Bennelong’, authorised by S Hales of the Meadowbank Education Trust, are we now going to have a situation where private schools put in electoral returns? Is that what should be expected? Interestingly, it is a private school that gets Commonwealth government funding. So we have the Commonwealth government providing funding to the school, the school then advertises ‘Keep Howard in Bennelong’, and the school continues to get its funding. It is a nicely circuitous route. But the issue here is: will the electoral office now go and ask that school to put in an electoral return? This is the point I got to before. How is the electoral office going to spend its time scouring every newspaper and every advertisement or whatever, asking those people how much they paid and getting them to prove that they paid less than $10,000? It is just not going to happen. So who is going to police this legislation? By increasing the threshold to $10,000 it is certainly going to be able to allow a whole lot of this to occur without people actually having to put in an electoral return.

What it does facilitate is one party contesting the election through a third party that is not contesting the election. It was not even voting in this case. This could apply to either the case I mentioned—Tasmanians for a Better Future or the Exclusive Brethren—where a political party that would benefit from negative advertising against its opposition can have a relationship with a group of people which sees the political party contesting the election writing and placing advertisements, but leaving the third party to authorise and put the addresses on them so the party in question does not incur the dirt of being associated with a negative advertising campaign. It is a clever strategy that is going on, and I cannot see how the government’s proposed changes to the electoral act in any way catch those groups or expose them through disclosure. This is trying to make it easy for people who want to influence elections as a third party not standing for the election, and it is trying to achieve secrecy and anonymity for those people.

The other third party organisations that are involved in election campaigns and that advertise to say who they are, what they stand for and why they are there in the campaign are the ones who will be furnishing the returns. Then there will be a whole lot of others who are just not captured. I can tell you, Mr Temporary Chair Barnett, and you would be aware of this yourself, that if Gunns had authorised the advertisements and had admitted to funding Tasmanians for a Better Future, then it would not have had nearly the same impact in Tasmania as an anonymous group pretending to be a group of small business people. If Gunns did not have any money in the advertisements, why did it refuse to confirm or deny it? Why was it allowed to get away with no response? Gunns will continue to get away with no response, as will all of these other people, because under your legislation there is no way of proving how people are actively involved in the campaign.

There is also the issue of the relationship between a third party and a registered political party. Again, that comes down to this important issue of someone backing one political party and doing a deal with another political party to engage in advertising. By that I am referring to Peter Harris and his companies in South Australia meeting with the Prime Minister on behalf of the Assemblies of God and Family First, and organising a deal whereby they would engage in an advertising campaign to attack the Greens. It was a very expensive TV advertising campaign, and they would get Liberal Party preferences. That was the meeting that occurred, and that is what ensued in the campaign. Yet the community has no way of tracking how all that occurred, except that it appeared on the day that the preferences were announced and it was swallowed up in a whole lot of the media. But tracing the amount of money after the election is impossible.

So first of all I would like—through you, Mr Temporary Chair—to ask the minister how, under his proposed laws, a group like Tasmanians for a Better Future, which does not exist, is going to be captured at all under the legislation. I would also like to ask him whether, under the current electoral law, it is lawful to prohibit a person from voting. Also, have the Exclusive Brethren and other churches got exemptions from the electoral act so that they do not have to vote, and it is lawful to prohibit a person from voting if in fact they are not specifically exempted under the law?