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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 765 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

He seems to have adopted the approach that if you use a scattergun and fire it often enough the issue will go away. I submit that, from the point of view of members of the Labor Party, they ought not to treat it in such a cavalier fashion, because they are the potential victims if they ignore the warning inherent in this motion.

Mr Whitecross says that he has never received a direct financial benefit. We are talking about poker machines. We know that the Labor Club, if we just focus on that, makes a significant income from poker machines. We know that it, in turn, makes a significant contribution to the Labor Party and we know that that significant contribution to the Labor Party is used for election campaigns. There is almost a dollar for dollar relationship between the amount of money that comes out of the Labor Club into the Labor Party and the amount of money that is spent on election campaigns.

The six people sitting opposite here are not only members of the Labor Club but also elected members of the Labor Party who had a direct benefit when that $300,000 a year that is contributed by the Labor Club was spent in getting them elected to this place. They simply cannot deny the fact that each one of them has received a direct financial benefit as a result of the money that is contributed by the Labor Club to the Labor Party. It is not good enough for Mr Whitecross simply to get up, wave his arms around, get very agitated and say, "I have not received a direct financial benefit". He has. It is irrefutable.

He then launched into the broader attack. As I say, if you fire the scattergun often enough you might disperse the issue. He said, "What we are doing is ensuring that anybody who has received a donation has a pecuniary interest, a conflict of interest". That is an absolute nonsense. It is an absolute nonsense because both of the major parties receive significant contributions from all kinds of people and those moneys are used for a number of things. He focused on $120,000, or $200,000 I think he said, as the figure that is raised by the Liberal Party from the building that it owns and rents out. I have seen the books. As far as I know, that money is almost entirely used on the administration of the party. None of it is used for conducting election campaigns. We go out and we seek donations to the party to finance election campaigns, just as the Labor Party does. There is no relationship whatsoever between the money that the Liberal Party receives by way of rental of commercial accommodation on the one hand and the money that the Labor Party gets by way of a direct donation from the Labor Club which, again, is directly derived from the operation of poker machines. There is just no relationship between the two things.

Mr Whitecross alleged that contributions from the 250 Club are secret donations. They are not secret. If they were, how does he know about them? They are not secret because they are declared by the party in its annual return to the Electoral Commission. There is nothing secret about it. I am sure Mr Whitecross knows as well as I do who many of the members of the 250 Club are. There is no secret about the membership of it. It is not a secret society in any way. The response from the Labor Party raised questions in my mind about the conflict of interest question that I did not have before. It was just sitting listening to Mr Whitecross and his peculiar overreaction to the suggestion prompted me to speak on the issue. I think the question of the conflict of interest is a serious one. It is not one to be shrugged off lightly, not one to be pushed aside on some sort of spurious argument that says, "It does not apply to me".

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