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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4526 ..

MR WHITECROSS: Yes, I understood that; but he has, effectively, closed the debate for the moment. Mr Speaker, I seek leave to make a statement just to deal with the conflict of interest issues.

Leave granted.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, I thank the house for its indulgence. I felt that it was appropriate for me to rise again just to deal with the conflict of interest issues which Mr Moore raised in his right of reply but which I did not address in my earlier remarks. To put the Labor Party's position in relation to this matter on the record, the Labor Party certainly supports the kind of approach that has been taken by Mr Osborne in relation to a direct personal benefit gained through poker machines and his decision that that direct personal benefit meant that he should be excluded from the debate. The Labor Party have no argument with that.

However, we do disagree with the argument that the kind of very indirect benefit that Labor members receive because of donations to the Labor Party should exclude members of the Labor Party in this place from voting in relation to this or other legislation affecting gaming machines, affecting licensed clubs, or affecting the interests of any of the other people who have made donations to the party. I have argued in this place before that, given the current electoral funding laws, this Assembly would be simply unworkable if we adopted the principle that members of this place could not vote on matters which related to the interests of anybody who donated to the respective political parties.

That is a problem, not just for members on this side, but also for other members of this place. It may not be a problem for Mr Moore, although I will return to that in a minute; but it is certainly a problem for most members of this place. I accept that Mr Moore has put some arguments today and in the past about this matter and about the size of donations; but Mr Moore, in his argument today, certainly made reference to donations of $12,000 made to the Labor Party and the Liberal Party by the Licensed Clubs Association. I think it would, as I say, render the political system fairly unworkable, given that donations to political parties are allowed, if we were to exclude ourselves from votes on any matter in respect of which we had received donations.

Mr Speaker, having said that, the public interest is protected to a significant extent by the fact that these interests are publicly declared. They are not under the table. Everybody knows about them, and in due course we will be judged by the electorate as to whether people feel that we have advanced the interests of the community and our voters or we have advanced other sectional interests at the expense of the interests of the community and our voters. I am confident that our voters will judge that we have acted in the interests of Labor voters and of the community as a whole.

I also say in relation to this matter that I find it ironic that the argument is continually put that, somehow or other, donations that have been received by the Labor Party have influenced our policy in relation to this matter, when in the past, and even now, our policy in relation to these issues has been different from that of the Licensed Clubs Association.

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