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

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (15 June) . . Page.. 1910 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

will make donations to us. They do not mind if that fact is published. But some smaller people-and there are not many-might treasure anonymity. What on earth is wrong with that? It does not necessarily benefit the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the Greens, the Independents or anyone else. It pans out. It is fair across the board.

It is a slur on members in this place to say that we are influenced by donations to political parties. I would disagree with about 95 per cent of what Mr Berry believes in and sprouts. But there is no way in the world I would say that he is influenced by money given to his party to support them. He does it out of love. He might be misguided, in my opinion, in a lot of instances, but he does it because he is an old traditional unionist. He is an old left-wing member of the party, and he does it because he has a passionate belief in those values.

I would hope the same applies to me and some of the things I believe in. If certain groups give us money because they believe in our philosophy, that does not mean that we are going to favour them. They do it because they think we are probably the better group. We have a certain philosophy. We lay our cards on the table. We put in policies before each election. We are criticised for our policies. This lot opposite have criticised us to buggery in relation to free school buses, but that is a policy of my party, and we are honouring it, whether you like it or not.

We have a lot of policies, and people can judge us on them, as they can judge the Labor Party and the Greens. I disagree with heaps of stuff Ms Tucker says, too, but she has a right to say it. Her party puts it on the table, and people can judge it and accept it or not. The same with you, Mr Rugendyke. You have some policies, a lot of which I would agree with. We have similar views on law and order and a number of other things.

Mr Quinlan: Hang 'em, high.

MR STEFANIAK: You bet, mate. People might well think that Dave Rugendyke is a top Independent worth supporting. But he is an honourable man. That does not mean that he is going to do special deals and special favours for them. I do not think there has been too much of that in state and federal politics in Australia.

There have been instances of corruption. You talk about local councils. That is usually people getting some sort of personal benefit. You talk about Mal Colston from the federal parliament, who was involved in travel rorts. That is just greedy individuals or individuals going off at a bad tangent. That is not people, a party or a group misusing the system. The Bjelke-Petersen government and some other governments with brown paper bags were cases of individuals perhaps being corrupt. That had nothing do with people making donations to political parties.

These donations are very open. I will go through some of them. I have picked up Michael Moore's papers here. Let us look at some of the ones for the old comrades here, Liberal and Labor, in 1997-98. Even the Australian Electoral Commission gave a bit of money. Wayne Berry gave money, as did the CEPU and the CFMEU. There were various MLA donations. Steve Dargavel gave a lot of money. The Canberra Labor Club-one would expect that-Howard Smith Industries, a few more unions, MBA Land and Bob McMullan are a few more taken at random.

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