Page 5308 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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Another lesson to be learned from history is that maintaining regulations on the influence of finance requires constant vigilance, continuing monitoring, an open mind and a willing intellect to accept the truth of its requirement and the need for its review.
Across the country, we see that the time for such a review is now upon us. We see it from those from all walks of life engaged in the pursuit of parliamentary equity: politicians from all sides, commentators in the media, academics and researchers—all are calling for change.
From the federal parliamentary level, we see the green papers being prepared by the Labor government, that I have just referred to, which offer a detailed look at reform from a federal Labor perspective. Yet we also have calls from the Liberal opposition matching those calls. In an article titled “Campaign finance needs reform” on 3 August 2009, Tony Bartlett reports:
Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says national reform of campaign finance is needed at every level of government.
At state levels, Labor Premier Nathan Rees was reported on 5 March this year by the ABC as saying he wants to be a campaign informed “cheerleader”—and that was at a time when the New South Wales Premier had three of his own members facing questions about their campaign donations. Mr Rees did not defend the system or deny the problem—he called for reform. On 17 August this year, the Liberal Leader of the Opposition, Barry O’Farrell, issued his own statement calling for reform, saying:
Raising standards is long overdue in NSW. By restoring confidence in decision-making, campaign finance reform would put the public back at the centre of government.
He added his own view on a way forward:
Imposing caps and restricting the source of donations will help allay community concerns about a “decisions for donations” culture. Similar reforms have been successfully implemented in countries such as New Zealand, Canada and Britain, which have comparable democratic institutions and histories.
They are precisely the issues that today we are asking this Assembly to consider via the committee system.
The chorus of support continues into academia. Graeme Orr submitted a peer-reviewed academic paper to the University of New South Wales Law Journal titled The currency of democracy: campaign finance law in Australia in 2003. In it, he detailed several proposals for reform, catalogued many sources of concern and highlighted some of the issues in implementing regulations around those issues. Importantly, at this initial stage in our own discussions, he noted:
The differential receipt of public subsidies can distort a competitive environment—in this case, the electoral playing field. And, if the nature of political competition is affected, the tenor of political debate can also be affected.
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