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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3680 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

This amendment relates to exclusion where a contribution by a club is based on a particular condition. One of the conditions that were relayed to me was that one of the larger clubs had been asked to support other sporting bodies and ask that the subsidiary sporting bodies recognise the name so that they were all part of the larger club. This came up as a particular argument. I am not trying to argue against the exclusion of double dealing, if that is what is implied here, but it seemed to me that there was a process which would exclude, say, X football club supporting the local softball club but asking that it be the X softball club. That is the only level of objection I have to that particular condition.

Mr HUMPHRIES (Chief Minister, Minister for Community Affairs, Attorney - General and Treasurer) (6.10): Mr Deputy Speaker, proposed new paragraph 60A(e) needs to be retained as there is a capacity for people to avoid their obligations under these arrangements. Let me say at the outset that I do not foresee that most clubs will try to weasel their way out of these sorts of requirements. I think that most clubs will approach the legislation in a forthright manner and deal with it in the spirit of the legislation. But we also need to be quite clear that the mechanisms are not there to allow people to avoid their obligations.

The reason for proposed new paragraph 60A(e) is that it is possible for this device to be used, but for this paragraph, to allow a club effectively to give money for a "community purpose" but, in fact, to do it as a commercial proposition. For example, if a club wished to avoid having to make the community contribution, it could make a donation to an organisation which, on the face of it, would count as a community contribution, but insist that a condition of its donation was that other benefits be returned with financial value to the club so as to significantly reduce or even cancel, at least significantly reduce, the value of the donation being made to the donee.

For example, rather than making a donation to a sporting organisation and saying to it, "Here is a donation to your sporting organisation for you to spend," a club could say, "You can have this money, but you have to return three - quarters of it to us in advertising and promotion." Mr Deputy Speaker, clearly it is not appropriate to count the totality of that donation as a community contribution, because it is not. Clearly, in those circumstances, it amounts to a commercial arrangement for which the club gets value. Contributions to the community should be donations; at least, the part of them which is claimed as contributions should be donations. Without this arrangement, there would be a way around the provisions.

This provision is not going to prevent clubs making donations or gifts on conditions. They can do that all they like. If a club wishes to give money to, say, a bowling club to assist it and makes the donation unconditionally, subject to the guidelines which I have tabled today, it can count that as a community contribution. If they say to the bowling club, "We will make a donation of $10,000 to you, but you have to spend $7,000 on the promotion of our club within your club," and if the value of that advertising is $7,000 in the hands of the donating club, then quite appropriately the extent of the community contribution should be considered to be $3,000, not $10,000.

I think that it is an appropriate condition. It is not, I point out here, the value in the hands of the donee of what they return to the donating club, but the value in the hands of the donating club. It is an appropriate condition to impose.

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