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

I am certainly not embarrassed. This is a good opportunity to get this on the record. I think the place to start is with a statement that Senator Cameron made in his most recent speech and has made in other speeches. He makes a big flurry about how it is the Liberals who take the big donations. It is disappointing that he is leaving the chamber at this point because he really does need to understand that he has made a very fundamental mistake here.

I would just like to share with you the data from the Australian Electoral Commission from the 2003 and 2004 returns. To remind you again, Senator Cameron has made out that it is always the Liberals who get much bigger donations than Labor. I am just going to give the data for one year. If you look at the trends since this information became electronically available in 1998 what you see is that, when Labor are on the rise and things are going better for them and their fortunes are looking good, they get more money. Here is the data. Remember that Senator Cameron said that the Liberals always outdo them. From 2003 to 2004, the New South Wales ALP got $15.3 million and the New South Wales Liberals got $10.4 million. The national ALP got $6.8 million and the national Liberals got $4 million. So Senator Cameron is clearly wrong. It would be useful if one of the other Labor senators acknowledged that correction and that the error not be repeated.

There are four important amendments before the chamber—I am certainly very happy to acknowledge that—but why are they being introduced at this stage? They are being introduced at this stage to try to embarrass the Greens. We are not embarrassed. We are very proud of our record of standing up on transparency of political donations and the need to ban and cap political donations and limit election expenditure. We have a long history of that and we will continue to pursue it. But, right now, the job before us is Senate voting reform. Senator Cameron has vast experience in negotiating agreements, including many good agreements for the workers in the union that he worked for. He knows that, when you go into an agreement, you do not pile everything in. You work out your time; you work out your place; you work out your tactics—and that is all we have done here.

For people listening and people reading the Hansard, this is quite unfortunate because Labor are exposing themselves here. It is actually disappointing because, again, this is an area where Labor and the Greens could work together. We are long overdue in getting these reforms in place. We know that Labor have committed to this before. It has been mentioned in this debate and I would like to pull it into this part of the discussion. In 2010, in the Greens-Labor agreement, some very important points were agreed on. When Senator Collins spoke, it was interesting to note that she did not deal with that period when Labor were in government and Labor and the Greens had the numbers in the Senate to pass these measures. Remember that Labor's bill got through the House of Representatives and sat in the Senate for a long time. Right through that period, when we could have got it passed, they would never bring it on. It is concerning and disappointing, I have to say, particularly when you see where we have arrived now. This is being used in quite an unscrupulous way to attempt to say, 'Aren't the Greens bad—they don't even vote for their own position.'

As Senator Di Natale has set out, we have a bill before parliament that is now the subject of an inquiry. It contains measures that we have worked on for a long time. It is good that Labor has picked them up. Labor has included most of them, possibly all of them, in the amendments that are before us now. These are issues to do with lowering the threshold on the disclosure of political donations to $1,000, publicly disclosing donations within eight weeks, banning foreign donations, the need for the Australian Electoral Commission to deal with misleading statements and tighter overall penalties. The bill is already before an inquiry. It will be interesting to see how Labor handles that. We are ready to work with Labor when we come before that inquiry.

We note there are four amendments on these issues. It is good to see that Labor is showing an interest in them, but right now is not the appropriate time. I am sure that most people in Labor know that. We are dealing with Senate voting reform. Let's get that through and then work on the next big area of reform, which needs to be not just transparency but the bans on caps on political donations coming into political parties, associated entities and all the rest, and limits on election expenditure. There is certainly a lot more to be done.