Page 1429 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 6 May 2008
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What is the rationale there, Mr Speaker? It is supposedly to protect the identities of those who make the payments for those goods and services. But that, I submit, is rubbish. Its purpose is purely and simply to try to conceal the fact that this ACT Labor Party receives the vast bulk of its funding from poker machine gambling—pure and simple—and no-one else does. It is all very well for those opposite to bleat: “Well, you could have done that in the eighties. Other parties could have but they didn’t.” The fact of the matter is that you do and you are protecting your source. No matter how you try to dress it up, that is what it is about.
If the Labor Party were so concerned about protecting the identity of the individuals who buy food and liquor and who play the pokies, they could have introduced a provision that allows the Labor Club to collate the figures and report them in total. But, no, the government have to hide behind the veil of seeming to protect the privacy of private citizens. Again, that is a somewhat shameless abuse of this particular bill.
Then we have the government’s amendment to considerably broaden the definition of “fundraising event”. It is clear that that amendment is intended to catch the other major party here, the Liberal Party. But it is not a case of goose and gander; it is a case of “show me yours and I’m not going to show you mine”. For example, if a patron of the Labor Club spends more than $1,500 a year on poker machines—now, with their amendment, that would be $1,000 a year—that expenditure will not have to be reported.
However, if a member of the Liberal Party, or indeed the Greens or another party, spends more than $1,000 in any one year attending fundraising events, that expenditure and the name of the person will have to be reported. Where is the equity in that? Again, it is a self-serving series of amendments to benefit the Labor Party to the detriment of others.
There are a number of other areas in this bill which I am not going to canvass because we will be going through it in the detail stage, but there is another matter on which I am pleased to see the government appears now to have accepted advice that it would be a problem, and that is removing the onus currently on the commission under section 300 to pursue matters of defamation of election candidates. The government had indicated—and I assume it has had a change of mind with this one at least—that the lot of the injured candidate to pursue defamation action could be taken up through the civil law.
This amendment was the result of an Electoral Commission recommendation of July 2005. I am pleased to see that is going to change because that was a severe problem in itself. The problem there basically was it would take a great length of time for a person who had been defamed to take a person to court—defamation actions go on for years—whereas the current provision, which now looks like being retained, at least has a possible deterrent effect and enables quick action to be taken under the criminal law to prevent further acts at the very least.
We have had situations in the territory where candidates have been unfairly defamed. At least this provision and others will deter the people defaming them from taking further actions to damage the candidates. I think in one instance about six suburbs
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