Page 4298 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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the committee secretary for all their hard work on this inquiry. As members may well imagine, this was a particularly vexed and difficult issue and it required an enormous amount of work from the committee. I think the contributions this morning will show it is an incredibly difficult and complex issue.
Much progress has been made on the issue of campaign finance recently. The committee report essentially recommends that the ACT emulate the sorts of reforms that we are seeing around the country, albeit slightly adapted to the particular circumstances of the ACT.
Mr Hargreaves did mention that the report does go through the legislation that has been enacted in New South Wales and in Queensland. Of course we know that there has been a conversation at the federal level. Unfortunately it appears to have stalled. I do hope that that conversation moves forward and we see some sort of leadership and movement from the commonwealth on these issues.
The committee did receive a range of very interesting submissions and many of them were particularly critical of the current situation. The Greens certainly agree that substantial reforms are needed in this area. We have long been on the public record arguing in favour of public funding and against reliance on corporate donations. Rather than go through the particular recommendations, although I may touch on some, we do of course see this as the start of a much longer conversation or debate within this place and, I hope, a broader conversation with the community, because this report does raise many new ideas and proposals.
I will briefly cover my additional comments, which I have added to the report, which go to the issue of whom donations can be made by. In my view, we should restrict this to natural persons. As electors, we do all have a right to participate in the system and I think everyone finds it wrong when they see large corporations giving money to political parties on the obvious expectation that they will get something in return.
The phrase “democracy for sale” is used frequently, and quite rightly so. There can be no doubt that at the very least there is a reasonable concern that the beneficiary of those donations will act in the interest of the donors rather than the broader public interest. And this perception of bias would not be tolerated in any other governmental context in our community and certainly offends the standard held in relation to members of the judiciary and other delegated decision makers.
There is of course a simple way to remove this problem, by restricting the ability to make political donations to ACT political parties to natural persons enrolled to vote in the ACT. I do note that the New South Wales government has recently tabled a bill to this effect. The Premier, Barry O’Farrell, has very much embraced this view and has tabled legislation only within the last fortnight. We are a progressive jurisdiction and we should have progressive electoral laws that continually push us to be a better democracy that better serves the interests of all Canberrans.
I will just go to a couple of points that were raised. One of them is that Mr Hargreaves raised the issue about favouring incumbents, and I very much did raise in discussions that we did need to be aware of this issue. As Mr Hargreaves has pointed out, Professor Twomey did say that the High Court took a dim view of all of this.
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