Page 2415 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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This is the most important provision in this legislation as far as the Canberra Liberals are concerned, because it defines the relationship of associated entities with parties. An associated entity—and this is a definition which is extracted substantially from the New South Wales legislation which has recently passed into operation—is an organisation which is controlled by a party or operates completely or to a significant extent for the benefit of the party, or is authorised under the party rules to participate in the formulation of policies, election of office-bearers, or the preselection of candidates. There are similar provisions for associated entities for an MLA or candidate.
This is really the important question, because it depends on how an associated entity is treated as to whether the election expenditure cap—which is essentially, for major parties, $1,020,000—can be breached or not or whether parties can get around the expenditure cap by allowing their associated entities to campaign on their behalf and not have their expenditure included.
It is vitally important, for this legislation to be successful, that the definition of associated entities is tight and that the legislation makes it perfectly clear that if you participate in the decision making of a party or in the decision making of an independent, and if you engage in political expenditure, that expenditure becomes the expenditure of the independent, the individual MLA or the party. What we have all talked about—I even heard the Attorney-General use the phrase the other day when he introduced this bill—is putting an end to the arms race of election campaign expenditure. This is how you put an end to it.
First and foremost, the most important thing to get right is how you count the expenditure of associated organisations. If an organisation is so closely associated with you that they get to choose your preselection candidates, or participate in that, participate in the election of office-bearers and participate in the formulation of policy, then they are part of you, and if they spend money in the election campaign it is as if the party or organisation were expending that money. This is what this definition does.
If we fail here, we will fail the people of the ACT, because we will not bring in real campaign finance reform and we will not be as brave as the New South Wales parliament has been, under both Labor and the Liberals, with the support of the Greens. If we fail with this amendment here, we may as well pack up and go home, because the cap on expenditure will be a fiction. It will mean, if this is the case, that the Liberal Party, if it runs 17 candidates, can spend up to $1,020,000. But there is no reason why organisations associated with us who pay for the privilege of helping to select our candidates, informing the policy debate or selecting our office-bearers cannot do the same. They can go out and they can spend any amount of money that this Assembly allows them to do as third-party campaigners.
This is the real problem. We have had a debate. We had a committee of inquiry. The committee of inquiry said that there should be a cap on expenditure; that that should be $60,000 for every party person who ran as a candidate; and that third parties, people who were not prepared to put their name on the ballot paper but who wanted to participate in the election campaign as observers from the outside, could spend half that amount of money, $30,000.
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