Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There's an old saying in politics: if you run a coin down the side of anything that's going on, the first thing you'll expose is self-interest. The Australian people are about to get a classic demonstration of that old adage, because self-interest is right at the heart of this legislation, the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2020. Let's name up what this legislation does. It will legalise money laundering by political parties.

Let's be frank. Political donations corrupt our democracy. They encourage the corruption of individuals, the corruption of members of parliament and senators and the corruption of political parties. This is about the government making it legal to funnel money that would otherwise be illegal under state laws through their federal branches. I want people to understand what is going on. I predict that this legalisation of money laundering, the encouragement of political corruption, is going to slide through with the support of the Labor Party. They're going to make a big hoo-ha now and try to make it look as if they've got some issues here, but I reckon they're going to let it slide through. And it will be very interesting to see how they vote on some of the amendments that the Senate will shortly consider.

I want to remind people that my home state of Tasmania has no state based political donations disclosure laws—none whatsoever. And, believe me, in the last state election in 2018, we lived through the impacts of that lack of state based political donations disclosure laws. The state of Tasmania and the people of Tasmania have never seen anything like what happened in the 2018 state election. It should be a lesson to the Labor Party, because it actually cost them a go at forming government in Tasmania. For once in the Tasmanian Labor Party's recent history, they actually took a half-decent policy on poker machines to the election. It wasn't as strong as the policy the Greens took, but at least it actually had a go at constraining the monopoly power of Federal Group hotels, an obscenely rich, privately owned company from New South Wales that had and still has a monopoly on poker machines in Tasmania. It is a company owned by Greg Farrell, who's made himself obscenely rich by sucking the food off the tables and the money out of the wallets of so many Tasmanian families who are doing it so tough.

That campaign cost Labor a go at forming government. How did it happen? It happened because people like Mr Farrell and people like the mainland pokies barons stuffed millions of dollars into the pockets of the Tasmanian Liberals and into the pockets of the Tasmanian Hospitality Association, run by Mr Steve Old, who prostituted himself for the pokies barons during that election. You couldn't move in Tasmania without seeing the signs on the sides of the pubs that themselves had been making obscene profits from the pokies monopoly for so long. You couldn't move down there. We've never seen anything like it. I've been in politics for a long time; I've never seen anything like it, and the Greens live in this space. We face these campaigns against us every single time in Tasmania—they get bigger every time—and I've still never seen anything like what we saw in 2018. The pokies barons bought government for the Liberal Party in Tasmania, and they are still in government today as a result of that corruption, that base corruption of our democracy in Tasmania, made possible because we don't have any state based donations disclosure laws in my home state. What an utter disgrace that is.

We will never know how much the pokies barons threw at that campaign. We will never know, and we should know, because it is a fundamental right of voters when they go to the ballot box to know who has donated how much to which political party and candidate. Elections should be a contest of ideas; they shouldn't be a competition to see who's got the deepest pockets. But, unfortunately, that is where we are in our completely cooked democracy in this country. Elections have become about who has the deepest pockets, and our democracy has been fundamentally corrupted by political donations.

When you add the effect of political donations on our democracy to the revolving doors that exist between the boardrooms of the big corporations—the greedy profit-making machines that couldn't care less about the impact of their actions on the environment or on our communities—and this place here, where we see, time after time, major party politicians accepting political donations, coming into this place, running corporate agendas, delivering for their political donors and then sliding out the other side of the revolving door and walking straight into a cushy consultancy or a cushy directorship in the boardrooms of those very corporations, it makes me sick. It makes me sick to witness it. And both major parties do it time after time after time. Whether it be big banking, big gaming or big fossil fuels, we see it again and again and again. Who loses? The Australian people, our environment and our democracy lose. Who wins? The big, greedy corporations win again and again.

If you want a prime example of the revolving door, I refer you to the scandal that was the Australian government's bugging of the Timor-Leste government during negotiations around a treaty to allocate fossil fuel resources from the Timor Sea. Australia illegally bugged the Timor-Leste government during the negotiations for that treaty. This is the matter that Mr Collaery is currently undergoing a secret trial in relation to. And what happened? Shortly after that scandal, Mr Downer, a man at the very heart of what happened, walked out of politics and into a cushy consultancy advising Woodside Petroleum, the big corporate beneficiary of that unlawful action. I could go on about that revolving door, but suffice to say it makes me absolutely sick.

This legislation gives us the chance, as Senator Waters said, to actually start fixing up this corruption of our democracy, to start making sure that laws actually do their best to restrain this corruption, to make sure that laws actually do their best to turn elections from being a competition to see who's got the deepest pockets or the thickest wallets into a contest of ideas. Colleagues, surely we can all agree that elections should be a contest of ideas conducted on a level playing field? At the moment, the playing field is tilted and it's tilted in favour of the major parties and the people that they truly represent in this place—particularly the LNP, who, let's face it, are the political arm of corporate Australia.

In my home state of Tasmania you don't have to worry about using a brown paper bag. That's how bad it is down there.

Senator Patrick interjecting—

'It's an Aldi bag!' says Senator Patrick. He makes a fair point. But, whether it's a brown paper or an Aldi bag, the point remains. You don't even need to wrap the cash up down in Tasmania to try to hide it. There's nothing to hide it from, because we don't have state based political donations laws in Tasmania.

There's a lot that Senator Lambie says and does that I don't agree with, and I think that's pretty clearly on the record, but what she said in this debate I 100 per cent concur with, and so do the Australian Greens, because Senator Lambie, like the Australian Greens, has been a long-time campaigner for reform on political donations. We've been at it for decades. She's been at it for a shorter period of time, but that's because she's been in parliament for a shorter period of time. We've been campaigning for this for a long time. I want to thank other members of the crossbench that do demonstrate integrity, like Senator Patrick.

If the LNP need help with integrity, let me spell it for them: i-n-t-e-g-r-i-t-y. Can you say it? Do you know what it means? I don't think you do. What you're doing this this place here today demonstrates that, whether or not you can spell it, you actually don't know what it means. You're bringing this bill in to facilitate money laundering. You're bringing this bill in to facilitate corruption—the corruption of our democracy, the corruption of politics and the corruption of Australia. If you can't have confidence in your democracy and in your political systems, how can you have confidence in anything that goes on in this place?

I look forward to the debate on this bill. As Senator Lambie says, we've got concerns about the position Labor are going to take, particularly in regard to some of our amendments, and we will see whether Labor let this one slide through. I urge senators: please, we need to tidy up our democracy. We need to clean it up, because it's broken, it's cooked and it's not delivering for the Australian people. Who it is delivering for are the big corporations.