Page 1732 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Clauses 98 and 99, by leave, taken together and agreed to.
Clause 100.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (12.02 am): I move amendment No 1 circulated in my name [see schedule 4 at page 1784].
I believe the amendment is pretty self-explanatory. I have moved it to give greater transparency to election advertising. I would be surprised if anyone opposed it and would seriously question what their motives would be for doing so. There should not be anyone in this place, or any candidate, who is afraid to list where they have had something printed. My amendment should therefore be supported. It will serve to stop people considering or contemplating cheating on the production of their election materials and attempting to circumvent the disclosure provisions of this act.
One would hope that everybody in this place, indeed every politician in Australia, would have learnt the lessons from events last year in Queensland that saw federal MPs accused of fraudulently misusing their generous printing and postage allowances to assist state candidates. I have not used federal resources to produce election material because I knew to do so would be cheating and would be illegal.
My amendment will require all printed election material distributed after 1 July to have the name and address of the person who printed the material on it. It will remove what might be a temptation for some to cheat and to use federal resources to gain an advantage in the election campaign. It is not an onerous imposition; it involves adding one line to printed material; and, if the material is printed at a local company, it would simply have to contain the line at the bottom of the page, or wherever, “printed by ABC company of such and such an address”. This has been the case in other jurisdictions in which I have lived.
The only people that will be disadvantaged by this change are those seeking to hide where they have had something printed, but I have put a transitional clause in the amendment to give a period of grace until 1 July. It is recognised that some candidates or members might have existing printed material that they need to distribute. I did speak informally with the Attorney-General earlier in the week about this and he focused somewhat on the legal obligations for people to disclose materials and the like and donations.
I do not believe that the Electoral Commission would find the task easy if matters were drawn to their attention without this level of disclosure. At the present time, materials can circulate in the electorate with no indication of where the printing has occurred, which makes it quite a lot easier to circumvent the ACT act, and potentially to defraud the commonwealth by the inappropriate use of commonwealth facilities. I urge the government to consider supporting this; I hope Dr Foskey will consider supporting it; and I hope the Liberal opposition will see that this would ensure that the appropriate level of integrity is applied in the production of materials.
This is a clear gap in the current arrangements and it makes it very difficult for the Electoral Commission to police assistance provided in this regard. Obviously,
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .