Page 2433 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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Clause 15, as amended, agreed to.
Clauses 16 to 18, by leave, taken together and agreed to.
Clause 19.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.39): I move amendment No 6 circulated in my name [see schedule 5 at page 2474].
This amendment seeks to delete division 14.2A from the legislation. I think this is one of the more flawed parts of this legislation. To ensure that we maintain a cap on donations, the government’s proposal requires people to keep a separate ACT election account. A separate ACT election account, as I described it in the in-principle stage, is essentially the Maginot line of campaign finance reform. This bill will create an account. Money can go into that account and it can be used for ACT electoral purposes, but if there is anything more than $10,000 from an individual in any particular year that other money goes somewhere else. As I described it to staff today, it is a 1920s approach to accounting where you had a whole lot of jam jars. You had your electricity money in one jam jar, your groceries money in another jam jar and your school fees in another jam jar. If you had a cash flow problem, you could not take the money out of the school fees jam jar to pay your groceries because, well, that was in the school fees jam jar.
This is what we have here today. Has not anyone on the government benches heard of modern accounting principles? You should be embarrassed. What you need to do, in terms of the most that anyone can donate to an ACT election campaign in any one financial year, is to have a chart of accounts. Political parties and electoral organisations have huge requirements for auditing, for the keeping of accounts and for keeping track of who donates what to whom, when and how much. We already have the system in place. Over that we are going to overlay a system that says, “If somebody makes a donation to the ACT Liberal Party for their 2012 election campaign after 1 July, the ACT Liberal Party has to create an ACT election account and money can go into that.” If somebody wants to donate $20,000 to the Liberal Party, we can put $10,000 into that and we can put the rest in the other bank account. There nothing to stop us saying later on, at the end of the election period: “Gee, there’s only a million dollars in this account and we’ve spent a million and 20. We need to take $20,000 out of another account so that we can pay the bills.” Who is to say that some of that money that was put in over here earlier in the piece does not slough through and come out into this campaign account? The ultimate fungibility of money means that there is no way that you can guarantee that.
The government is going to move some amendments later in the song that will make this a less ludicrous system. If we passed the bill the way the government has drafted it, the only thing that we would account for is actual good, honest cash money. If somebody gives you good, honest cash money, you can put that in an account, but if somebody says, “Gee, I’ve got a printing press and I’ll print you off $10,000 worth of brochures,” that would not have been accounted for in any way. With the government’s amendments it will be accounted for on the way in but it will not be
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