Page 2416 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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Now the Greens, in their infinite wisdom, which no-one has been able to explain to me, have decided that they want to increase the amount of money that a third-party campaigner can spend by four times what was recommended by the standing committee. So if an organisation is closely affiliated with a party or an independent member, they can extend their expenditure cap. So what happens to everything that everyone has said? Everyone at some stage in this debate, going back to 2010, has said: “We want to put an end to the arms race of expenditure. We want to put an end to the arms race.” The Attorney-General said it himself the other day. I nearly drove off the road when I heard him. Even he had absorbed the rhetoric: “We want to put an end to the arms race.” I challenge the members in here today: if you do not create a process whereby associated entities are incorporated in that cap, you have not put an end to the arms race.
If you go on and address the rate at which the Greens now propose to give third parties the right to campaign, you will see that we will have escalated that quite royally. We will have failed the people of the ACT. We said that we would create an end to the arms race—we would make elections about policies and ideas, not who could raise the most money to run the most ads on TV. What will happen under this scheme if the Labor Party and the Greens do not accept this amendment and they go on to accept the Greens’ proposal for $120,000 for someone who is not prepared to put their name on the ballot paper but who gets to have a say? We will have escalated this beyond the wildest dreams of the average Canberran.
I go back to my favourite phrase about campaign finance reform from President McKinley’s campaign director: “There are two things about elections: there’s money, and I can’t remember what the other one was.” If we do not draw a line in the sand here today and say that associated entities have to be counted in the cap of expenditure by the party or organisation that they are associated with, we will have made elections about money.
That is why this is the most important amendment to this legislation that we will see tonight. If we fail here, we will have failed the people of the ACT.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (7.24): The way Mrs Dunne characterises this amendment is not what this amendment is about. This amendment is about targeting trade unions and targeting political parties themselves in terms of their own operations and saying to them that they must abide by the onerous reporting requirements that are imposed on associated entities.
We do not believe it is appropriate that a trade union should have to report every membership fee it gets from every member of that union. It is completely impractical. For example, the Community and Public Sector Union in this town has thousands and thousands of members. Under this provision, Mrs Dunne is saying they must report all that expenditure, all that income, even though it may not go in any way towards a political campaign.
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