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

Both parties also had more than $1 million in receipts. As I said, I'm all for getting big money out of politics, but this bill doesn't get big money out of politics. It will result in more than $80 million worth of additional taxpayer money being spent on the major parties, and that's every single electoral cycle. So it's not actually about less money; it's about Australian taxpayers picking up the bill. More than that, it's about the major parties reducing competition in a desperate attempt to plug the leaking of votes of Australians who see that there are better options. There are other options in the political landscape now. It's a last-gasp attempt to hold back a rising tide of Independents and minor parties. Rather than stepping up and meeting this challenge and reconnecting with the people you should be representing, you're seeking to skew our electoral system even further to your advantage. My hope is that communities will see through this attempt to suppress community voices, and it will fail.

There are so many loopholes built into this bill. They're clearly designed to stifle competition. Senator McGrath made a contribution earlier. I fear that he misunderstands the issues that Independents have with this bill. He talked about a spending cap of $800,000 per electorate and $200,000 per state or territory in the Senate election, but, if you actually look at the details, that is the individual spending cap. If you stack up some of these contests around the country, where you have a first-time Independent, no-name candidate spending $800,000, an incumbent major party candidate spending $800,000, this bill allows the party to then spend basically an unlimited amount of money up to their $90 million national cap to shore up support in that electorate. There could be $800,000 backing the Liberal or Labor candidate by name and $2 million backing the Liberals or Labor—just don't mention the name. That's not a level playing field. It would be a very different conversation if it truly created a level playing field.

The second loophole is that the major parties can receive unlimited transfers from what are now being called 'nominated entities'. In the last election cycle, the coalition accepted nearly $10 million from the Cormack Foundation and the Labor Party accepted around $6 million from Labor Services & Holdings Pty Ltd.

The third loophole is something called administrative funding. Administrative funding can be used for all kinds of party expenditure, but it doesn't count a cent towards spending caps. It basically makes spending caps meaningless. In a briefing with the department when asking about this—basically anyone who isn't directly campaigning isn't counted in your spending. We know the party infrastructure. People organise events and doorknock and do all the other things. That's not counted. So when the government says, 'We've been spending $120 million on elections and we're going down to $90 million,' that's very disingenuous because that $120 million is actually all the in-kind hours that people are putting into it. Now that's not counted. You've essentially said: 'What do we currently spend on elections? Let's get a lot more of that from the taxpayer, and let's ensure that Independents who are trying to challenge us have a very hard time doing it.'

The increase in taxpayer funding is huge. First—and this is one I take real exception to—is for administrative expenses, which don't account for economies of scale and greatly advantage the major parties. You can't tell me that, with $30,000 per MP, at some point you haven't covered your administrative expenses. That should not scale in a linear fashion. For the coalition, who keep telling us they're the party of business and all the rest, you'd surely know that that is not the case. In South Australia I think they cap it at $5,000, which is probably fair enough. With $5,000, that's enough money to do your administrative tasks.

On top of that—others have talked about this—there's taxpayer funding from votes, from three to five bucks per vote.

Finally, the definition of 'gift', which is really a donation, has three pages of exceptions. The major parties say, 'If the gambling industry takes us out for a birthday dinner, that will be a donation,' but if the gambling industry has a subscription to the Federal Labor Business Forum or whoever it might be—no; that's a subscription. The fact that you may get a few dinners here and there is just one of the perks of having a subscription. As I said, there are three pages of exceptions: subscriptions, levies and dozens of other things. I don't see how you can say with a straight face that this is creating a level playing field, particularly given how challenging so many Australians are finding it.

The major parties want to give themselves millions of extra dollars and don't want to accept the responsibility of truth in political advertising. It's very telling that Labor introduced two bills. One they basically shelved—a bill that had the support of the crossbench to pass. Then they do a deal with the coalition that is clearly in their interests. A bill like this not going through a Senate committee process is, I think, tragic and reflects really badly on this Senate. We call it the house of review—that's not for this bill. In the words of Professor Anne Twomey:

Any suggestion that this bill has already been subject to proper scrutiny is completely disingenuous.

Do the major parties want transparency or scrutiny? It seems like what they really want, when it's in their interest, is a stitch-up. This is a sad, sad day for our democracy. You're ramming through electoral reform that's going to reduce competition at a time when Australians want more competition. They want more competition in politics and more competition across our economy. One of my observations is that there are a whole bunch of things that Australians want that the major parties team up to block, like getting more money for the gas that we export and actually transitioning away from fossil fuels. The major parties voted together to expand the fossil fuel industry. Major parties will vote together on gambling reform. You guys totally squibbed scams legislation to actually protect Australians. We had an opportunity to protect Australians being scammed. We've got half-baked legislation that's just passed: mandatory minimum sentencing, things with absolutely no evidence behind them and protecting lobbyists. We should have more regulation around lobbyists. The list goes on and on.