Page 2756 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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Mr Smyth gave them the idea on 22 June—between then and the end of the financial year. We know this because the Labor Club reports actually point to the fact that they may face a penalty, a criminal penalty. It shows that they did not care. They saw that that penalty was the cost of doing business.
During the campaign finance reform discussions after I introduced my bill and after the government introduced their less useful bill, I had a number of discussions with Ms Hunter about what she was going to do about Mr Smyth’s bill. Firstly, she said she did not want to discuss it. Then I was told—not by Ms Hunter directly, but indirectly by her staff—that anything that we needed to do needed to be dealt with in one bill. Then Ms Hunter said to me in a discussion, “We cannot do anything about Mr Smyth’s bill because the horse has bolted on that one.”
The fact is that the Labor Party was given notice—as, too, were the Greens, the Canberra community party, the Canberra Liberals and any other registered organisation in the ACT—that as of a particular day, as of a date in June, if they transferred or received a gift of more than $50,000, they would be subject to fines. There was no retrospectivity about that—none at all.
Mr Corbell gets up on his high horse. I have heard him rehearse these arguments before. I was in his office when he told me just how wicked this was—how this was unconscionable and this was retrospective legislation. It is not, Mr Assistant Speaker. There is no way that this is retrospective legislation.
I will give the example that I have given before. There are many occasions when budgets are passed when people are given notice by means of a press release that, as of the day that the budget is introduced, there will be a particular change in a revenue measure. That is designed so that people cannot, in an interregnum, diddle the system. Mr Smyth did not do that. He did not put out a press release and say, “I am going to introduce a piece of legislation in the future that will make this illegal.” He said: “Here is my legislation. As of today, if you do these things, that will be a problem and you will attract a fine of up to $50,000.”
The Labor Club knew that and they put it in their annual report as a risk. They were actually quite prudent in a strange way. They were up-front with their members and said: “We think we might have broken the law. If we have broken the law, the cost is up to $50,000 and you need to know that.” The only reason that today we know that Mr Smyth’s legislation was circumvented is that the Labor Club actually had a decent annual report. Congratulations to the Labor Club for actually writing a decent annual report.
What actually happened was that everything that Mr Smyth predicted happened. The Greens thought it was a terrible idea that what Mr Smyth was predicting might happen might happen, but when it happened they sort of sat there and went: “I can’t really do anything about it. The horse has bolted on that one.”
What the Greens are saying today is: “It’s all right to break the law, because we are too ineffectual to stand up to the Labor Party on this.” It raises the question of what
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