David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of Senator Lambie's urgency motion. I thank her for the opportunity to shine a light on a couple of issues that I think are critical for the Senate to not just think about but address. Transparency in political donations at the federal level is an absolute joke. Unfortunately, as of yet, nothing has changed since we had a change in government. Last week we learnt that some $259 million has poured into political parties in the last financial year, yet we know very little about the sources of much of the funding. In fact, the source of 27 per cent of Labor's income is unknown. That's roughly $23 million of dark money fuelling their political machinery. The coalition, not to be outdone, received some $27.5 million in dark money. Even if we just look at the roughly $160 million in declared funding to the major parties, it's impossible to distinguish between political fundraising and other sources of income.

This isn't good enough. We should be able to see where funding is coming from and who it's coming from. Dodgy business forum memberships and fundraising dinners mean that Australians just don't know who is buying access to their politicians. I welcome the government's commitment to lowering the donation threshold, but more needs to be done to clean up some of these dodgy sources of income and prevent dark money from entering politics. We're clearly running out of time to do this. This is urgent.

The other thing that I think we need to be shining a light on is access to this building. Access is a good thing, but we know that there are now over 2,000 people who have access-all-areas passes to this building, and the Australian public have no idea who they are. This is the people's house. Australians deserve to know who is accessing these halls, who is able to visit senators and members and ministers to talk about upcoming legislation and exert pressure. Access is a good thing. We shouldn't stop access, but I would argue that there needs to be transparency when it comes to who is lobbying. Who are all these in-house lobbyists?

We learnt during Senator McKenzie's inquiry into air services, with the big concerns around the decision made regarding Qatar and Qantas and some of the allegations there, that the current infrastructure minister provides sponsored passes to Qantas government relations staff, and the former coalition infrastructure minister also provided sponsored passes. I think if most Australians heard this, they'd probably say, 'Hang on, maybe that's something we should know about,' when these decisions are made—that this infrastructure minister gave this company an 'access all areas' pass and now he's making a decision. I certainly would love to see more colleagues in here disclosing who they're giving sponsored passes to. And I would love to see, at some point in time, a public registry. Just as we make disclosures through our register of interests, I think details of who we give access to should be on there.

Question agreed to.