Page 1593 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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MRS DUNNE: quacks like a duck, then it is safe to assume that it is a duck—or a goose in the case of Mr Hargreaves! So if a body participates in the operation of a political party, if it has a say in picking the policies or the office-bearers or the candidates, if it does not merely make a donation but pays a regular affiliation fee, then yes, it is an associated entity. Any campaigning it does can be safely assumed to not be an independent activity conducted in its own right, deserving of its own spending cap.
In New South Wales they went further, taking the view that all trade unions are associated entities of the ALP. The JACS committee did not take this view and I think that this is the right approach. However, the government’s bill has rejected these extensions to the definition of “associated entity”. I think it is reasonable to speak of it in this way, since the government bill came after my bill, which would more properly be called the JACS committee bill if we are thinking in terms of intellectual property. The government has adopted a number of sections from the bill verbatim, amended others and rejected others.
An affiliated union, according to the government, is not an associated entity unless it can be shown to be controlled by the party—apparently it does not count if it is the other way around, the unions controlling the party—or operates for the benefit of the party. Again, if the party operates for the benefit of the unions, that would not make it an associated entity either. This means that the ALP can get around the approximately $1 million cap proposed for the next ACT election and the unions will get almost an equal amount between them to campaign on behalf of the ALP.
Let us turn to the case of the Labor Club, which is undeniably an associated entity even under the current Electoral Act and is handled even less subtly. Since the Labor Club cannot get a cap in its own right, and since it is really a fundraising body and not a campaigning entity, what our friends opposite want to do is transfer the funds across to the ALP and allow them to spend it. We know that they have been doing this for a significant part of the past year in anticipation of electoral funding reform legislation passing the Assembly, which is why Mr Smyth introduced his donations limitation bill in June last year.
But to allow this situation to continue indefinitely, the government has proposed the even more outrageous idea of simply exempting associated entities like the Labor Club from the gift cap. This provision is clearly designed to allow the Labor Club to pretend to be an arm’s-length, independent body for the purposes of the Gaming Machine Act but pretend to be an integral part of the party organisation for the purposes of transferring funds under the Electoral Act. The ALP, I would submit, cannot have it both ways. It is a bit like being married for the purposes of obtaining a government house but single for the purposes of claiming welfare.
The treatment of raffle tickets, “excess” membership fees et cetera, at first appearance seemed to address a loophole in the legislation, but this too is illusory. At present, payments made for where there is a quid pro quo, such as dinners, raffle tickets and auction items, are not considered gifts and thus they are not reportable. But the solution is still subject to the requirement to demonstrate that there was no or
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