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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4011 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

and it is a credit to Mr Humphries that he has brought this legislation in when it will put a requirement on a club that donated some $90,000 to the Liberal Party, on their last return. Similarly, donations from the unions will be taken into this, and donations made to the Labor Party through unions or some of the clubs in this town will also be able to be identified in this way.

The primary changes made by this Bill, however, which involve the weakening of the ACT's disclosure laws are justified by the Government in the name of copying the Commonwealth provisions. When we look at the annual report of the Electoral Commission, it states on page 23:

The ACT's election funding and financial disclosure (FAD) provisions enacted in 1994 were modelled closely on the comparable Commonwealth provisions. The then ACT Government's intention was to maintain consistency with the Commonwealth FAD scheme. In 1995 the Commonwealth made significant changes to its FAD scheme.

The Commission supports maintaining consistency with the Commonwealth FAD scheme. However, as reported in its review of the electoral legislation, the Commission is concerned that some aspects of the 1995 Commonwealth changes have the potential to weaken the effectiveness of the disclosure laws.

It is a quite good argument to say that we should maintain a consistency with the Commonwealth laws, but surely not at the price of weakening disclosure laws in the ACT. To ordinary people in the community, it would be unacceptable, but it would be particularly unacceptable when there has been a government here that has been to the people on openness. Of all the areas of openness that are important - - -

Mrs Carnell: It is CIR.

MR MOORE: It is not CIR, as the Chief Minister interjects. Of all the areas that are important, electoral funding is the most important, so that not only can people be seen to act independently but how much the donations are can also be seen.

The amendments I will be putting to this Bill to ensure that its strength remains have several objectives. The first is retaining the rigour of our ACT disclosure laws and, as a consequence, abandoning the Government's plan to excuse parties of their ACT reporting obligations by submitting a copy of the less rigorous Commonwealth returns. The argument put to us, and in fact the reason we passed a previous Bill to extend the time, was that it is an onerous task for the parties to have to put separate submissions in to the ACT Electoral Commissioner and to the Commonwealth Electoral Commissioner. I thought I would test this, so I went to the Electoral Commission and got the last submissions. The Liberal Party's last submission was done on computer and, in terms of moneys received, it has 21/2 fairly broadly spaced pages of submissions. That is hardly an onerous task for an organisation like that. To suggest that these 21/2 pages that are drawn off a database from a computer are enough reason for us to say, "No, we have to align with the Federal Electoral Commission so that the parties do not have to make a separate submission in the ACT" is really very questionable.

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