Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the answer given to Senator Lambie's questions on donations. Yesterday was the one day of the year when we find out who is paying who, and what that tells us is that democracy is still for sale. In fact, in terms of the amount of donations that were given during the 2016 election compared to the 2019 election, three times as much money is being paid to political parties. The problem is getting worse, not better, and this government is still doing absolutely nothing to fix it. Donors aren't just donating for the sake of it because they're altruistic. They're donating to get favours; they're donating to buy outcomes. That is what the Australian public think. That's why perceptions of integrity of government are at all-time lows. We had to wait 19 months to find out about those donations. It should be real-time disclosure. We don't find out about all of them because the disclosure threshold is so high. It's $14,000, and it goes up by a little bit each year. That means that, for one-third of the amount of money that is being donated to the big political parties, we will never know the source, precisely because that threshold for disclosure is so high. We think the threshold for disclosure should be much, much lower at $1,000, so that people know who's paying who, so that they can see what outcomes are being bought and, ideally, stop the rot.

What we saw this morning, finally, was some hope for the broader reforms that the Greens have been pushing for for years. We think big money should not influence politics. We think it should not be buying outcomes. We'd like to see bans on donations from certain industries that have a track record of trying to buy outcomes, like the mining industry, the banking sector and the gambling sector. But, ideally, we think donations, no matter where they're coming from, should be tiny. We want to set a cap on donations of $1,000 per year. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter whether you're a big corporate, a union, a grouping or an individual. No-one should be able to buy influence. Democracy shouldn't be for sale.

We were pleased to see some members of the opposition express some support for the notion of a cap on donations. We know that other folk on the crossbench have also pushed for that. In fact, there are a number of private members' bills before this parliament that would cap donations and lower the disclosure threshold. I'm hopeful that we might see some action. I'll be speaking with other members in this chamber to try to deliver donations reform, because the members of the Australian country want their democracy back. They want to know that the folk in here are representing their best interests, not the best interests of whoever just took them out for a lobster lunch or whoever just paid a massive amount of money to buy a government contract. That's the other thing that needs to be fixed. If you're applying for an environmental approval or a government tender, you should not be allowed to bribe your way to that outcome. You should not be allowed to donate while your application is on foot or for six months on either side of it.

There are so many ways we could clean up our system. There are so many opportunities for reform to restore confidence in democracy and in this political system. The Greens look forward to continuing that work and, finally, delivering democracy back to the people.

Question agreed to.