Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

None at all. They're saying: 'Fantastic. Great move. Well done.' God, what a shameful day. They're going to say we should lower the disclosure threshold and speed up disclosure times, but they're just not going to move any amendments to do either of those things. I know you want to move your amendments, but you know you don't have the votes. All you're doing is trying to make yourselves look good. We are on top of it. People aren't fooled anymore by your amendments that say, 'This is what we want,' when you know very well you don't have the numbers. That, in itself, is even more shameful—that you are trying to pull the wool over Australians' eyes. I'm going to call you out for it.

Instead, we're going to pass a bill that insulates donations from any state laws that are tougher and stronger than the federal laws—laws which are, according to every expert who looks at them, the weakest of any jurisdiction in the country. Imagine arguing that we need stronger donation laws and, five minutes later, voting to weaken our donation laws. You have no shame, and I don't even need to argue that point because I imagine there are millions of Australians out there saying: 'They actually have no shame. We've known that for a long time.' You know, because I've told you how this is going to work, that I looked at your amendments for 10 minutes and found a way to get around them—10 minutes! This bill has been through a committee. We're supposed to be with it up here; we're supposed to be leaders. I've looked at the bill for 10 minutes and already I'm finding holes in it. So I ask: was that deliberate? Are we so stupid and incompetent here that we've got holes in the bill? I sincerely believe it's deliberate because I don't believe you're that stupid. I would hope not, because otherwise we've got much bigger problems than I first thought.

Let's go through how this works. Before every election, parties take out massive loans from the banks. They use the money from the loan to pay for their election campaign. Then, after the election, the AEC gives them back all the money they spent, courtesy of the public. You people out there in Australia pay them back the cash. The parties take the money they got from the AEC and give it right back to the bank to pay back their loan. The interest on that loan gets paid by the donors, and none of this system gets touched by this bill—not one bit of it. There is no transparency. It always amuses me how you guys find a way around anything. It's a pity you couldn't put all that energy and effort into actually making something solid, instead of finding wriggle room or ways to go behind so that, you hope, nobody picks up exactly what's going on.

You can take money from any source to be used for federal purposes. Paying back a loan counts as a federal purpose about as much as anything else does, because it doesn't count as anything. There is no transparency going on here. If you want it to be used for state purposes only, that's fine too. You aren't required to take out a loan for federal purposes only or a state purpose only, so you aren't required to repay a loan the same way either. This matters because loans are not counted as donations. Oh, dear. It's a pity we couldn't go and borrow $30 million, isn't it, Senator McKim? We'd get away with this as well. They're not donations; they are called 'other receipts'. If you're not sure what that means, it's because it doesn't mean anything, apart from there being no transparency of who's buying them up this time around. It's designed to mean absolutely nothing. It's like calling a bill 'miscellaneous measures', which is what this one is called. If you want nobody to pay attention to it, call it something boring and chuck it in first thing in the morning so nobody catches on until it's too late.

My amendments would remove the unconstitutional sections 302CA and 314B from the Commonwealth Electoral Act, rather than rewording them. This would mean that state and federal donation regimes would operate together as one scheme—that would be common sense—so state branches of political parties would have to disclose their donations according to the rules in their jurisdiction. In the absence of strong donation laws at the Commonwealth level, this is the only way to ensure that state branches don't use technicalities and loopholes to hide their donations from state disclosure regimes. This is what was recommended by multiple integrity experts in submissions to the inquiry on the bill, including the Human Rights Law Centre, and the Centre For Public Integrity. I do get that word: integrity. So you would think this would be an integral part of bill. If the bill passes with the new section 302CA and section 314B in it, we will be, effectively, knocking the legs out from under the state disclosure regimes. It would be a real shame if that happened, since the states are the only jurisdictions that are doing anything about donation reform at this stage. They're trying to go forward, and we're going backwards—except for the state of Tasmania, which is doing nothing.

If you'd like to support my amendments, that would be great. If you can't, I understand. I'm not getting my hopes up on this one. Once bitten, twice shy—and I've been bitten about 10,000 times by the Labor Party, saying it cares about transparency, only to vote the opposite way. Sooner or later I've got to stop getting my hopes up. I do have faith, I have to be honest, because if you choose between breaking the hearts of voters or your donors, you'll have made up your mind faster than I can finish this sentence, because you'll always put your donors before the voters. And the sooner those millions of Australians get through their thick head what these donations do—there is little transparency on them, there's no time disclosure and 14 months to reveal where your money comes from. Let's be honest, if you've got nothing to hide, what's wrong with seven days?

Then I get some rubbish from Minister Cormann, saying, small business, they give 10,000 bucks and still have the union thugs outside their door. If that's not the biggest load of rubbish I have heard in this chamber since I've been here, then blow me over. I said, 'Where did you get that from?' I haven't read that in any of their submissions—nothing. I think it was just something he made up after his Weetbix yesterday morning; he must have had an extra couple. I mean, come on. This is why the Australian public has very little trust in us, and you people up here are not helping.

You are going in the opposite direction of transparency and making political disclosure reforms. That's what you're doing, and you should be ashamed. You've got the Greens bill. You've got my bill going on. You've got the Centre Alliance bill. But no, the government doesn't want to talk about that. It doesn't want to bring that to the table. Do you know why? Because it would clean it up. You don't care about trust from the community, because you buy your seats with the million dollars worth of donations. But we do, because we have to go and earn it. You let me know when you're standing at traffic lights with campaign signs and spending 50,000 bucks of your own money to earn a seat, and then I might take you seriously. I know I can stand here and truly say that I did not buy my seat; I earned it—and by God did I earn it.