Page 2458 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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year, as proposed in transitional amendments 507 and 508 of clause 70 relating to the amendment bill.
Amendment agreed to.
Clause 70, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 71 agreed to.
Remainder of bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.57): I would like to make some closing remarks on this important piece of legislation that has been, as my staff would attest, a bit of an albatross around my neck for the past two years. It has been an interesting experience. I have learnt a lot about electoral affairs. I have learnt about negotiating and how not to do it, and I have learnt a lot about drafting.
I would like to place on the record my thanks to some people. I would like to place on the record my thanks to my personal staff and other staff of the Canberra Liberals who have been always there as a sounding board; they have been very supportive and given me every opportunity to explore ideas and to discuss implications of them.
I want to place on record my appreciation for one of my hapless volunteers. On the first day he came in to volunteer in my office he thought that as it was his first day he would probably come in and make the tea. He asked, “Is there anything I can do?” and I said, “Well, actually, I have this bill to introduce tomorrow and the person who was helping me with it has had the audacity to go and get appendicitis. Clinton, I need to write an introductory speech and an explanatory statement.” This was at lunch time, and at 9 o’clock that night we walked out with an introductory speech and explanatory statement, and that volunteer has been since then working diligently on this matter and now knows much more about electoral reform than most people care to.
I want to place on record my esteem and high regard for the professional work of the parliamentary drafters. This has been an extraordinarily difficult job. As one person said to me the other day, “Every time I sit down to do some work on this, I have to sort of recalibrate because it is so complex and there is so much going on in this space.” But the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office have been extraordinarily generous with their time and their professionalism and they have got it right so many times. I thank them very warmly for that. I am glad that they are here. They do a great job.
This is not the outcome that the Canberra Liberals would have hoped for when we set out on this path of campaign finance reform about 2½ years ago, and it certainly was not the path that I thought that we would get to when the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety tabled its recommendations late last year.
We have made some modest steps tonight towards campaign finance reform, but we will have to be back in this space. We will have to be back in this space because the recommendations that the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety worked hard to come up with—a set of recommendations that addressed as many
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