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

The Australian Greens will also be supporting this amendment for the same reasons that the Democrats and the Labor Party have outlined. It would make the Australian electoral process a lot more transparent if we had that particular measure. As other people have indicated, probably all political parties have received donations of various kinds over the years. Certainly, the Australian Greens, when we hosted the global Greens conference in Canberra in 2001, had a donation from the European Greens to help pay for the cost of running the conference that we held. Regardless of that, I still think it would be an important measure for transparency in Australia if we banned all of these foreign donations and loans and if the Australian people had much better disclosure laws or the banning of corporate donations altogether. With regard to this particular amendment, we totally support banning foreign donations and loans as per the amendment, and we support it.