Page 4291 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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I have great pleasure in presenting this report to the Assembly today. I hope it will be the next phase in some serious and fundamental reform in the way we administer campaign financing and the financing of elections in the ACT. The committee believes that this was an important inquiry. Most contributors told the committee that the current framework for campaign financing and the financing of elections was inadequate. The underlying message on the whole was that the current system of donation disclosure and public funding just does not regulate sufficiently all the components of campaign finance.
The committee has taken the view that disclosure and public funding alone belong to an earlier era of campaign finance regulation. Legislation was introduced in 2010 to the federal parliament to go beyond this, but it stalled. In the meantime, two states—New South Wales and Queensland—have gone ahead, putting in place further measures to regulate in the area of campaign financing and electoral financing.
These include caps on donations and electoral expenditure and new further measures to support political parties and candidates with their activities. In this way these jurisdictions have constrained the freedom of political expression to a degree and have balanced this with further funding to allow political parties and political participants to administer their activities and, in some cases, even to develop policy. The Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety takes the view that these measures are needed in the ACT to support and protect the status of our electoral process. Without them there is a risk from perceptions that it could be compromised by large donations and unequal expenditure across political parties and political candidates.
The ACT has a long and proud history of electoral reform. We have taken a lot of trouble to ensure that the people of the ACT have a fair and equal electoral system, first by adopting the Hare-Clark system and then by entrenching it, including the system of Robson rotation on ballot papers, and then later modifying Robson rotation to ensure increased fairness. The committee generally believes that the current arrangements for campaign financing are not in keeping with the clear intent of these decisions and that the ACT can only achieve a completely fair system by addressing all aspects of the electoral process, including the money that fuels it.
Mr Speaker, you would recall that when this matter was referred to the standing committee, Mr Seselja, on behalf of the Canberra Liberals, moved a motion to establish a select committee initially and then finally it became a reference to the standing committee. In doing so, Mr Seselja spoke about the arms race in campaign fundraising and campaign spending. There was a view, shared by all members of the Legislative Assembly, that we had to do something to curb that arms race before it got out of control in the ACT.
When this matter was referred to the committee, the committee was asked to look specifically at the actions of the federal parliament which, at that time, had published a green paper on campaign financing. The committee believes that New South Wales and Queensland have overtaken the commonwealth in taking up the initiatives in this area and that the federal parliament has lost the initiative. To be at the forefront of electoral reform, the committee believes that the way forward is for the ACT to find
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