Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4012 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

The Labor Party's submission was done by hand last time, although I am told that it is now on computer, so I would expect that it would be a similar sort of return had we retained the strength of this part of the disclosure laws. In the Labor Party's case, take out the pages that apply to donations made into the party by elected members of the party. Each member donates a certain percentage of their salary, which is recorded here, and so there is a list of donations - about a dozen or so once a month, if that is how their payments are made. Clearly, that is not an onerous task. If you look at the donations apart from that, you get four or five handwritten pages, almost equivalent to the sort of submission made on computer by the Liberal Party. In the case of the Greens, Mr Osborne and me, it is on one page, so these are minor matters. Anyway, apart from the Greens, we do not have a Federal issue to worry about. It is not an onerous task, by any stretch of the imagination, to ask of parties that they provide to the ACT Electoral Commissioner those receipts. It is a very easy task, and more so when the parties have their receipts computerised.

The second objective is to introduce a requirement that parties and Independent MLAs inform their major donors of a donor's legal obligation to report to the commission. At the moment, the only way we have of double-checking what is declared by the parties is to look at a party's declarations and then go and ask the individual whether that is correct. What I have proposed in my amendments is that, on the receipt that is issued, the parties should stamp "You have an obligation to let the Electoral Commission know annually that you have made a donation to the party". In that way a check can be kept.

The third objective I have is adding to our ACT Electoral Act the additional category of political spending mentioned in the Commonwealth Act, which Mr Humphries's Bill would have added; and, fourthly, curbing the proposed regulation-making power which would allow the Minister to reduce disclosure requirements for the associated entities. This is a very strange regulation indeed. On the one hand, Mr Humphries says, "We want to read and know what associated entities have donated, and we will put it in the legislation". Then it appears, almost as an afterthought, that there is power for the Minister to say, "Actually, with associated entities, we will not necessarily require all the things that we have just set out for them to report. It will be, effectively, up to the Minister's discretion". I do not want to misrepresent that, because the Minister would then table it and it would be a disallowable instrument. I accept that Mr Humphries has used that technique; but I cannot, for the life of me, see any single reason why this situation would apply. It seems quite strange. As we go through the detail stage I will be speaking in detail of those objectives.

Reporting of election expenditure is an accepted part of the law. Just because we have the opportunity to align with the Commonwealth is not a good enough reason for us to weaken our own disclosure laws. Of course we should, where possible, align with the Commonwealth, and particularly when it is of benefit to us; but we are a relatively small jurisdiction that is under very close scrutiny, and to reduce that scrutiny would be entirely inappropriate.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .