Page 4293 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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can be put up so that the community can see where the money is coming from. This is an area of openness which is of most importance to ensure that we have an all-round rigorous electoral system.
Moving on, recommendations 17 and 18 address the issue of public funding. We have addressed the issue of public funding in two ways. There is the conventional approach to public funding, which is that participants in the election, once they reach a threshold, receive reimbursement of their per eligible vote. The committee see no reason to depart from this already established practice in the ACT and elsewhere. But we are concerned about the rate at which we are languishing behind other jurisdictions. We have made recommendations in relation to increasing the per eligible vote amount for public funding and recommend that it be tied to the amount for the Australian Senate. This would mean that, in current terms, by the time we go to the next election, instead of receiving 158c per vote we would receive 179c per vote and by 2016 that amount would rise to 203c per vote.
The committee also make recommendations regarding administrative funding. The New South Wales parliament in its legislation has created administrative funding. The committee generally thought that there was considerable merit in the creation of administrative funding. So we have recommended at recommendation 19 that administrative funding be provided to members who are elected to the Legislative Assembly at a general election based on the Election Funding, Expenditure and Disclosures Act 1981 of New South Wales, part 6, which deals with electoral funding. In New South Wales, for each member of the lower house—only the lower house—there is an allowance that goes to their party organisation of $80,000 per member with a cap of $2 million.
There was some discussion in the committee as to the level of funding in the ACT. Mr Hargreaves thought that we should emulate what was happening in New South Wales and Ms Hunter and I thought that perhaps $80,000 per member may be a little on the high side, given the size of the ACT compared with New South Wales. I think that is a matter that the Assembly should contemplate at some length. The committee makes a very firm recommendation that there is merit in the administrative funding. This is balanced by the fact that there is a live argument about the constitutional constraints in the area of free speech and political participation.
The argument has been put forward by a range of academics that there needs to be a measured approach to limiting free speech. I think that in this report we have tried to get that balance between committing too much money to election campaigning and doing things which would prevent members from seeking election or members in parliament from being owned by outside entities and ensuring that political parties can still operate effectively in the modern environment. I think that the approach which was put forward initially by New South Wales of creating an administrative fund for political parties to some extent goes to balance that.
Recommendation 20 deals with anti-smurfing provisions. It is a sort of catch-all recommendation to ensure that no-one tries to give money to a friend to give it to a friend who then donates it to a political party and hence gets around the donation cap recommended in recommendation 1. Most importantly, the committee recommends
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