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

I move the Australian Greens amendment (1) on sheet 4972:

(1)    Schedule 1, page 26 (after line 8), after item 87, insert:

87A  After section 328

Insert:

328B  Electoral advertisements by third parties

        (1)    A third party commits an offence if either:

             (a)    it prints, publishes or distributes an electoral advertisement; or

             (b)    it causes, permits or authorises an electoral advertisement to be printed, published or distributed; and

the electoral advertisement is intended to affect the casting of a vote in an election.

        (2)    Subsection (1) does not apply if the following registration requirements prescribed under the regulations are met:

             (a)    compulsory identification of a third party, including the identification of all persons and in the case of a corporation, directors and other officers of that corporation; and

             (b)    compulsory disclosure by a third party of any contributions made to it by any person, or in the case of a corporation, directors and other officers of that corporation who have made a contribution of more than $1,500 for the purposes of electoral advertising; and

             (c)    compulsory disclosure by a third party of its relationship with a registered political party or independent candidate.

This is with regard to electoral advertising by third parties. It goes to the heart of what I was saying before. I appreciate Senator Abetz’s explanation that if a company gives money to a board of directors to give on to a political party then they would have to declare it. However, if a company coincidently increases board fees and at the same time individual board members give the same amount of money then it would not have to be disclosed. So I stand precisely by what I said before about the extent to which these donations can be made to the government, or to any political party for that matter.

The other clarification I would make before question time is that Senator Abetz referred to a Hobart columnist. He was talking about Greg Barns, a disendorsed Liberal Party candidate of the past who writes columns for the Mercury. He talked about the Greens having $750,000 between 2001 and 2005 which were not donations. No, that is right. It was money which was paid back in public funding for campaigns, so where that money came from can be very clearly traced. It is certainly wrong to infer that those donations had not been in any way declared. It was very clear that it was public funding and I want to put that on the record.

With regard to third parties, the issue here relates to a specific example during the last election when, in Tasmania, a group called Tasmanians for a Better Future—who were not incorporated, who have no names associated with them, no addresses or anything—suddenly came out of nowhere and started advertising in the campaign. They got a public relations company to act on their behalf. The way that this legislation is currently set out means that corporate Australia, or any business which does not want to be known for what it is doing in influencing elections, can go to a public relations company. The public relations company can then run a half a million dollar or a million dollar campaign if it wants to. The public relations company would have to put in the electoral return that it had spent the money on the election, but the people who donated to the public relations company do not have to be named if the donations they have made under this legislation are less than $10,000.

So 20 or 30 businessmen can get together, put in $10,000 each and then run a campaign, and you can never establish who these people are. This is what occurred in the last election. The level of dishonesty associated with it was appalling to the point where one person—the President of the Chamber of Commerce in Tasmania, Michael Kent—when he was questioned about it denied knowledge of it, saying he thought they were just concerned businesspeople. Later he proved to be one of them.

Progress reported.