Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Then there is the Free Enterprise Foundation—and I do not think this one has been pinged—where we again have the laundering of illegal donations. It has been reported that Paul Nicolaou, the former New South Wales Liberal chief fundraiser, appears to have come up with the idea of exploiting a loophole so that banned developer donations could be accepted by funnelling them through the federal branch. Westfield gives $150,000; Brickworks, $125,000; and the Walker Group, $100,000. Again, this is exploiting loopholes when we had worked to really clean up the laws in New South Wales with regard to electoral funding. There are so many ways in which this deeply undermines the confidence that people have in the political process. It damages not just those who are involved in these scams but all political parties—the very institutions that we work in and all members of parliament, because people become deeply cynical about how the political process works.

I would like to refer senators to a very important High Court case—it is very relevant to this debate—where the court identified how serious the problem of political donations was. They talk about corruption and that there are two forms of corruption. There is the quid pro quo corruption, as they refer to it, where money is directly handed over for a result—maybe a special development or a mining application. Then they talk about the more subtle kind of corruption where a culture develops whereby those who receive the money feel they need to accommodate that industry, and over time one finds that there is a weakening of the laws. So there is an urgent need to address the whole issue of the corrupting influence of political donations. It is deeply damaging to our political process, to our democracy, and it needs to change.