Page 1156 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 April 1994
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MR HUMPHRIES: We have never taken money from the tobacco industry, Mr Berry, and, of course, you would not be offered it. With you gone, perhaps there will be some softening of the view. The fact of life is that public funding has made very little difference here, and it has made little difference in the United States, where it has operated at some levels at least. I am advised that in the US, with the beginning of public funding, there was a great proliferation of so-called political action committees, sponsored by companies or trade unions or whatever, which were designed to channel money into the coffers of political parties. Rather than pretend that public funding has made any difference there, in fact it has made a very big difference by promoting in some senses the range of avenues which parties have explored to supplement their funds. It has been argued academically in the United States that public funding in that sense has helped the Republican Party more than the Democratic Party, but that study has not been done in the ACT.
The suggestion that parties become less dependent on special sources is rubbish. At the first ACT election the ALP, for example, spent in excess of $200,000 on its campaign. I think the figure was closer to $300,000. But it raised less than $40,000 from public funding. Are you telling me that that made one iota of difference? Of course it did not. It made not one iota of difference. Madam Speaker, it seems to me to be a great tragedy, a great waste. I think that Mr Stevenson is right to say that people are not in favour of public funding. I do not know whether I can prove it.
Mr Kaine: I have not yet spoken to anybody who has said yes.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed; yes. My impression is very strong, anecdotally, that there is no support for public funding. My party will continue to promise to the people of the ACT that we will abolish public funding of campaigns, in the event that we are returned to office with a majority. That is not to say that we are therefore opposed, necessarily, to public disclosure provisions. They are another matter altogether. They do not necessarily have to go hand in hand. I think the suggestion was made somewhere that if you abolish public funding you abolish financial disclosure. It does not follow. Madam Speaker, I think that we are doing the ACT a poor service by asking the taxpayers of this Territory to put their hands into their pockets and fund our ads, our how-to-vote cards and our canvassing around the suburbs when the ACT faces so many very serious financial problems at this point in its history.
Ms Follett: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. In the course of his remarks Mr Humphries said that the Government had taken money from the X-rated video industry. That is quite incorrect, and I would like that withdrawn. There was also a strong imputation that members of the Government had taken a particular course of action because of a particular assertion of a donation to the party that they belong to. I would like that imputation withdrawn as well.
Mr Humphries: Madam Speaker, I withdraw the suggestion that the Government took money and say instead that Ms Follett and Mr Wedgwood, as the president and general secretary, or whatever the expression is, of the Australian Labor Party, took the money. That is what happened. There was no inference that the Government voted according to the money that was given to it, but I do make the point that the Government could be seen to have been influenced. That was the point I made.
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