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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 5180 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Let me return to the substance of this bill. It is about saying that political donations, when they come from licensed clubs, are so inherently evil and they will influence political parties to such a degree that they should be banned. However, that assumption is not carried across to any other form of political donation, even though you would have to say that, based on the logic of the proposer and supporters of this bill, the same logic would have to apply to every other type of political donation made to any political organisation in the ACT.

For that reason, if you were consistent and logical in developing this legislation, you would be seeking to ban all political donations because of their inherent danger to public policy making. Let's face it, this bill is nothing more and nothing less than a straight political attack, and any attempt to present it as something else is simply an absurd proposition.

The government does not support this legislation today. It is legislation which is based on a false premise: that political donations, when they come from licensed clubs, are inherently evil and influence policy making in a dangerous way. It should be incumbent on those who support this legislation to show why other political donations do not have the same effect.

I will finish by making this comment again: the safeguard of democracy when it comes to donations to political organisations is disclosure of the donation. While we may have arguments in this place about what the threshold is that would require disclosure, the reality is that in a democracy people should first of all be able to choose to support the political party they wish to support, as long as they are equally prepared to disclose the amount of financial assistance they provide to that political organisation.

We have robust and wide-ranging disclosure requirements in the ACT. The disclosure laws require not just reporting through the offices of the Electoral Commission, they require reporting through the Gambling and Racing Commission when it comes to donations made by licensed clubs to political organisations. The government thinks these are strong and reasonable protections when it comes to judging whether or not public policy making is being unduly influenced by any form of political donation. We see absolutely no reason for the application of the absurd and false premise that lies behind this bill.

MS TUCKER (10.05): The Greens will not be supporting this bill. As members would know, we have a long history of pushing for better regulation of gambling and better ways to prevent and deal with gambling-related harm. We have also been strong advocates of reducing the possibility of donations swaying political parties or MLAs' votes and policies.

However, to focus just on political donations from poker machine revenue does not deal with the issue at all. This bill, whatever Mrs Cross' intentions, would have a very disproportionate effect on the sources of funds for one particular political party, which happens in this case to be the Labor Party. It would do this without making any difference to problem gambling or the prevention of harm. The bill does not put forward the means to deal with the harm that results from poker machine gambling.

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