Page 1600 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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The bill represents a sensible, balanced approach to the concept of caps. It balances the rights of political entities against the concern that elections could be unduly influenced by disproportionate funding and donations. As the ACT has never imposed caps on political expenditure and donations, the bill has required very careful consideration by the government and the Electoral Commission to ensure that it captures all of the possible scenarios that may arise from the implementation of caps. The government has had constructive discussions with the opposition and the Greens—and I thank Ms Hunter and Mrs Dunne for that—which have generated important issues to consider.
Not surprisingly, several improvements have been identified. To that end, the government is proposing a number of amendments to this bill, which I would now like to go through in some detail. Amendments 1 and 2 of the government amendments refer to clause 12 of the Electoral Amendment Bill which inserts new definitions—“non-party candidate grouping” and “non-party prospective candidate grouping”—into section 198 of the Electoral Act.
Paragraph (b) of each of the definitions of “non-party candidate grouping” and “non-party prospective candidate grouping” as currently drafted would capture any person who has incurred electoral expenditure to support a candidate or prospective candidate without the knowledge of the candidate or prospective candidate. This is not the intention of the amendment as it is unreasonable that a candidate or prospective candidate should be held responsible for expenditure that has been incurred without their knowledge or authority.
Accordingly, the government proposes to amend these definitions to provide that they only apply in cases where the person incurring the expenditure has done so on the authority of the candidate or prospective candidate. It is conceivable that a person or organisation could deliberately undertake such expenditure to embarrass a candidate or prospective candidate, leading to prosecution of the relevant financial representative.
Amendment 3 refers to clause 12 of the Electoral Amendment Bill, which inserts a new definition, “party grouping,” into section 198 of the Electoral Act. Paragraph (g) of the currently drafted definition of “party grouping” has been inadvertently included in the definition. As I have already outlined in relation to amendments 1 and 2, it would be inappropriate to make the financial representative responsible for expenditure incurred by an unrelated person or organisation whereby that expenditure pushes the sum of expenditure incurred by the party grouping over the expenditure cap.
Amendment 4 amends clause 26 of the Electoral Amendment Bill, which inserts a new section 216A into the Electoral Act. Amendment 4 specifically addresses a drafting issue identified in section 216A(1)(e). The new section 216A provides for regular disclosure of gifts received, and subsection (1) lists those to whom the section applies. As it is currently drafted, the new section 216A(1) duplicates the reporting requirements with respect to an associated entity.
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