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

The government maintains that this bill, the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Annual Disclosure Equality) Bill 2021, along with the political campaigners bill that they rammed through yesterday, is all about transparency. But they were saying the quiet part out loud when they introduced the bills. Government members have been explicit about their targets: the 'voices of' movement, the Climate 200 group, the OpenAustralia Foundation, They Vote For You. The government are not after transparency for their dirty donors. They're not after transparency for beneficiaries of blind trusts or for meetings with lobbyists. They just want to tie up all those whose activities call out the government or who threaten their electoral prospects. They want to scare off the competition. They want to discourage new voices from putting their hat into the ring for election.

The Greens will always support more transparency, but let's be real about who the government is targeting with this particular bill. On its counterpart bill, the political campaigners bill, Jason Falinski MP said the government was trying to 'turn the rock on all the cockroaches lurking in the dark of Australian democracy'. He said the government wants to prevent parties from campaigning:

… in the shadows, in the darkness, where no-one can see them, where no-one knows what they're up to, where no-one knows, really, who's backing them.

Yet this government's donors love to lurk in the darkness. They wield influence away from the light. They have secret meetings. They exploit the loopholes that allow millions in dark-money donations.

This bill will increase transparency, and we support it for that reason, but it will not shine the light where it most needs to go. In the long list of electoral bills that the government have put up over the last few sittings—I think it's eight now and counting, many of them rammed through without inquiry or proper debate—they've still failed to address the core issues that the public are concerned about. If the government were actually serious about transparency, they would ban dirty donations. As the Greens bill proposes, they would cap donations to no more than $1,000 from anybody, whether it's an individual, a corporation or any sort of organisation at all. That's what needs to be done.

If they were really serious about transparency, they would lower the donations disclosure threshold and they'd require real-time reporting. If they were serious about transparency, they would bring in election spending caps—something that they've also refused to do. If they were serious about transparency, they would stop the revolving door of lobbyists in MPs' offices. And, if they were really serious about transparency, we would have seen the bill for a corruption watchdog that this government promised more than three years ago, before the last election, and that has apparently become a non-core promise in a way that would make John Howard proud.

These are the reforms that Australians actually want to their electoral system. This is what the Australian people deserve to get their democracy back—to get it back from the vested interests and the corporate donors who run both big parties and who engineer the system to get the political and legislative outcomes that suit their private bottom lines, never mind what the rest of the community wants or deserves.