Page 1594 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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inadequate consideration; that is, that the quid pro quo was not value for money. I invite members to consider the difficulty of putting a market value on a dinner with the Attorney-General.
Even the definition of “volunteer labour”, a straightforward concept one might have thought, has been twisted to confer a partisan advantage. It appears—though here, as in many places the government bill introduces vaguely worded concepts which it would require years and millions of dollars in the courts to sort out—that “a service for which a person usually charges a fee” would catch advice from, for example, a self-employed lawyer but not a government lawyer. Would anyone care to venture a view as to which of these groups is more likely to provide advice to the ALP and which is more likely to provide advice to the Liberals?
Incidentally, you may think that because services other than volunteer labour are gifts, and there is claimed to be a $10,000 cap on gifts from any one source, such services would be subject to the cap. But you would be wrong. The cap only applies to gifts that you put in an ACT election bank account. So you see why I say that this separate bank account approach, apart from being an administrative nuisance, does not do what it says on the packet. This is snake-oil salesmanship from the Attorney-General.
The JACS committee were clear in the view that a different level of penalties should be provided for a party that cynically and flagrantly ignores the expenditure cap as proposed, as opposed to minor breaches through administrative oversight. I do note that some of the government’s amendments reduce the risk of the latter. My bill attempted to do this via recklessness provisions. The government’s bill ignores the issue altogether. This may or may not say something about the ALP’s intentions in this area.
This is a very important piece of legislation for this Assembly, for the parties involved in election campaigns and for openness in election campaigning in the ACT.
I note that the Greens claim a strong track record in the area of electoral reform. However, I note that it nearly fell apart in New South Wales in January. I hope it will not fall apart here in the ACT. I hope that they will move to keep Labor honest and put aside the considerations and interests of their coalition partners in favour of real reform recommended by the JACS committee.
I want to spend some time paying tribute to the people who have worked very hard on this. The JACS committee members Mr Hargreaves and Ms Hunter and the staff of the JACS committee, especially Dr Lloyd, who happens to be in the chamber today, worked very hard on the foundation of this. Since that time, officials from the Justice and Community Safety Directorate and the Electoral Commission, and the Electoral Commissioner himself, have worked very hard on this issue, and I thank them for their work. There will be more discussions between now and when this matter is finalised in May.
I particularly want to pay tribute to the office of parliamentary counsel, who do an extraordinarily difficult job, especially when there are two competing pieces of
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