Page 1596 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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or not decisions or policies were actually made in donors’ interests because of their donations is irrelevant; the perception of money buying influence undoubtedly damages the public perception of politicians and governments.
The fact that most articles on the issue of electoral reform start with a quote from a significant historical figure talking about the role of money in politics and dollars buying influence is testament to the need to very carefully regulate the role of money in politics. The fact that even though here in the ACT we have not had scandals like in the UK does not detract from the need for very careful regulation.
The sale of government favours and conflicts of interest for politicians who depend on their party donors is one and perhaps the most insidious reason for reform, but it is certainly not the only one. The other major reason for reform is to ensure that politics does not depend on money and that we have a system that allows anyone who wants to run for political office and compete in the electoral process a fair opportunity to do so. It should not be the case that candidates can get lost or drowned out in the very large amounts of money that can be spent on election campaigns by large party machines.
The Greens are very pleased to be debating this bill today. As most people know, the issue of electoral reform is something the Greens around Australia have campaigned on for many years. We included an improved disclosure scheme in the parliamentary agreement. The New South Wales Greens started the democracy for sale project, which exposed many of the corrupt practices in New South Wales and which has now grown into an enormous public resource. Unfortunately, it does not cover the ACT yet, but federal, New South Wales and South Australian donations are all covered.
The website allows people to search donations by donation category as well as by party and year. For example, you can see that over the last 10 years property developers gave the federal Liberal Party about $9 million—about the same as unions gave to the federal ALP. You can see all the donations from tobacco companies and gaming advocates, as well as almost every other corporate grouping you can think of. There are also many articles and links to other resources all working towards cleaning up Australian politics.
Certainly, as I said, the ACT has not had the kinds of problems seen elsewhere in Australia, notably in New South Wales. However, we have increasing amounts of money spent at our elections. A quick look at the local electoral returns, whilst certainly not as alarming as the larger jurisdictions, gives rise to a number of questions.
As we all know, the Labor Party receive very large amounts of money from their clubs that operate a large number of poker machines. Two years ago when I proposed a mandatory fund for gaming machine licence holders to assist problem gamblers, the Labor Party moved an amendment to reduce the amount of the contribution they would have to pay. There is no question they had a conflict of interest in this matter.
The Liberal Party too, it could be argued, have conflicts of interest when it comes to their assets. They have substantial property holdings, and over the years they have
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