Page 4292 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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consistency with those other reforming jurisdictions, rather than languishing and waiting for other people to take the first steps.
This report makes a number of recommendations in what is, by any measure, a complex and important area of legislation. We are suggesting a number of innovations which I will highlight today. The committee has made 21 recommendations to the Assembly. The first is that there should be a cap on donations to political parties in each financial year. I need to point out that Mr Hargreaves, to some extent, dissented from this recommendation and has dissenting comments. I will say nothing more about that and leave Mr Hargreaves to address this issue.
Recommendation 2 creates a cap on electoral expenditure for political parties, their candidates and associated entities through a capped period. The committee’s recommendation is that there should be a capped period for electoral expenditure beginning on 1 January in any election year and running until the end of polling day. That cap should limited to $60,000 per person nominated by the political party or organisation.
Recommendation 3 goes closely with recommendation 2 and says that that $60,000 cap should be capped at the maximum number of people who can be elected to the Legislative Assembly, therefore ensuring that people do not overfill their ticket with an opportunity to get around the cap. Effectively, the recommendation is that, in current terms, the cap for each political entity actively running candidates would be $1,020,000 for the capped period, which would be 1 January to polling day in any election year. The committee recommends, at recommendation 6, that there should be significant penalties for breaches of the cap.
There was a discussion about how we should deal with this. I think there is a reasonable analogy with the salary cap in football. The committee looked at various models of penalties in this area. In the NRL, if there is an accounting error and someone overshoots the salary cap by a small amount, almost inadvertently, there is a fine. Usually it is not a very big fine. But if you go out and deliberately attempt to circumvent the cap, you lose the premiership; you have your points taken away from you. The committee believes that that is a reasonable analogy. Although it is not in the narrative of the report, it was the sort of discussion that was had in the committee. Inadvertent breaches of the cap should be fined in a modest way, but where there is a clear attempt to circumvent the cap, there should be serious penalties. Also, there should be serious penalties not just for the entity but for the public officers of the entity so there will be a great disincentive to do so.
The committee also recommends that there should be capped expenditure for third parties—people who are not actually fielding candidates but who may have a view about the outcome of the election. The third party expenditure should be capped at $30,000 per third party entity.
Recommendations 9 to 16 deal with issues of disclosure. The committee is putting forward a whole raft of recommendations to improve disclosure in the ACT. They are principally centred on the establishment of an electronic online reporting system so that all participants in the electoral process can notify their donations quickly and they
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