Page 4296 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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does not cap donations. So we will throw that one away. Then we have got the Queensland experience and the New South Wales one. The New South Wales one is legislation which was introduced in 2010, last year. The Queensland one? 2011, this year.
We have got threaded through this report, “We should be doing things consistent with Australian jurisdictions.” Well, two out of nine does not, for me, equal consistency. I am sorry about that. If you are one out or two out you might say: “Yes, let’s bring it in. Let’s harmonise it.” But it is not. It is, in fact, wanting to trail blaze. There is a comment in the report—and you have got to really try hard to find it—which says, “Just because it is only two jurisdictions should not be an impediment for us going forward.” On the other hand it says that we need to be consistent. Those two arguments in themselves are inconsistent. If we look at what those two jurisdictions do, they differ in what they do. And what is being proposed here differs from it as well.
Recommendation 4 was an all-out attack on the trade union movement. It may very well be that the Labor Party has a formal association with the trade union movement. That is not the way it is described in here. This is scaremongering. It says:
… an entity with formal connections with a political party, which empower it to contribute to policy development and/or the selection of candidates …
Let me put it on the record that the union movement does not have any power in the selection of candidates. The formal arrangement of association with the trade union movement actually has an involvement by the union movement in policy development of the Labor Party as a community-based political party. Would somebody like to tell me what is wrong with that and why they should be penalised for that? Because I cannot see it.
Maybe it is because the Liberal Party have not got an associated entity. Maybe it is because they have not got any friends out there who want to be tied so closely to the Liberal Party as to identify themselves with that association. This is about coming up with other methodology to supplant the current system of disclosure.
The Labor Party’s income is disclosed openly. Every single member of the Labor Club Group knows that that was the genesis of that community club. They knew it. It is not a for-profit organisation. It is a community-based organisation. But I will bet you, Madam Assistant Speaker, you did not know that the Liberal Party had rental property from which it gained an income, and the average person out in the street does not know that, and under these changes they would be none the wiser. So this does not enhance democracy at all. It does not enhance democracy in any way.
Mrs Dunne interjecting—
MR HARGREAVES: I also note that I heard Mrs Dunne in silence and I would like the same courtesy.
I will make a comment on recommendation 18. That is the proposal put forward by the Greens in the committee about the Electoral Commission conducting research on
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