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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4034 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

I cannot see a sensible reason for doing it. If you do not have a sensible reason for doing it, then why change the status quo? The best two reasons you have been able to come up with so far, I believe I have shown you, are ludicrous. The first is that we keep in line with the Commonwealth. Well, yes; we do that if it is convenient and we do not weaken our own laws. The second is that it places a particularly onerous task on the parties. Both major parties have accepted, and I know the Greens have, that the task is not onerous. We do not at this stage have an onerous task. If this change goes through it will mean that these returns will be tiny; there will be hardly anything in them. If we look at the levels of donations in them, we will find very few donations at all appearing in there.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (9.20): Mr Speaker, I have to rise to answer a question that Mr Moore asked. He said, "Why would you not support this? All we are trying to do is make the law a little tighter. Why would you oppose this?". Well, you would oppose this because Mr Moore is going down a path, with a suite of amendments, which will have the effect of obliging political parties which contest Federal elections as well as ACT elections - of which, of course, Mr Moore is not one, but some of the rest of us are - to submit two returns, with different standards of accounting, in order to satisfy Mr Moore. For the differences that are there, it seems to me it is simply not justified; it is unnecessary bureaucracy for the ACT Electoral Office; it is unnecessary bureaucracy for the political parties; they are just as clearly available, whichever way you do it.

Can I just say for the record that there is no question about the way the Labor Party goes about adding up its numbers to the $1,500. Any donation, whether it is $10 or $1,000, that we have received ends up on the computer and is added in to get to the $1,500. There is no question of the Labor Party playing the kinds of games that Mr Moore suggested might be played, where people go through with a red pen and delete all donations of less than $500, to avoid having to declare people's names in the electoral return. There is a reason why, regardless of the strict provisions of the law, we do not want to do that. It is not, as Mr Moore conjured up, a simple matter of someone sitting at a desk in an office somewhere and comparing individuals' returns with political parties' returns; there are investigative powers set out in this Act. I know for a fact that electoral commissioners, from time to time, do go along and pore over the books of political parties to see whether the books match what they put in their returns. It is not just a matter of a desk audit. There are real investigations done.

I am absolutely confident that the electoral commissioner, whether of the ACT or of the Commonwealth, who came across a situation where a political party was accumulating large amounts of donations which it was deliberately concealing by taking advantage of this kind of provision would have that brought to the attention of people. I do not believe that we are going to end up in a situation where any political party is going to be collecting $5,000 or something in donations and not declaring it. This is not about the right of a political party to conceal donations, as Mr Moore might like to imply. This is about not being put in a position of having to submit two sets of virtually identical returns, which reveal the same things, to two different parties just because we have established a marginally different set of obligations under this Act. I think the question

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