Page 597 - Week 02 - Thursday, 19 February 2015
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this situation is that while the ALP and the Liberals support opening up unlimited donations to corporates and unions, they are also going to vote for a proposal today to dig deeper into the public purse and increase the public funding per vote from $2 to $8—and all in the name of better democracy.
I would like to be clear about our position on this. In principle, the Greens support increasing public funding as one of a suite of measures to improve the democratic process around elections—not this exact model or the amount being proposed today, but we support it in principle. But we cannot support it while at the same time other provisions to improve democracy are removed. We cannot support it when there is a concurrent proposal to remove the limit on gifts.
What is the plan here? Thanks to the ACT taxpayer, 70 to 80 per cent of party campaign expenses will be paid for from the public purse, and the ALP and Canberra Liberals would then also like to source unlimited donations from whomever they see fit to take them. It is quite astounding that the other parties in this place, and in this jurisdiction where our electoral laws are already quite progressive, are taking this backward step. I was interested to see that the public funding debate has also been running in the Northern Territory, and I was amused to note that even David Tollner, that rather infamous Country Liberal Party member, had advocated public funding hand in hand with donation caps of $1,000.
The policy objective of public funding is to reduce influence or the risk of corruption, and, as such, should only be increased when there is a corresponding decrease in the influence that could be brought through making political donations to candidates and parties. There is little benefit in increasing public funding when there is still significant opportunity for corporations or wealthy individuals to buy influence through making sizeable donations. Public funding of this order would result in a net financial gain to political parties without any net increase to democratic protections. This could reasonably be interpreted by the public as an unjustifiable transfer of public wealth to the political class and serve to compound the cynicism that the public have in politicians and the electoral process.
I was interested to see today what the Liberal Party rationale might have been for defending this removal of the donation limit, as I had been led to believe they may support improvements to our democratic institutions through increased public funding, campaign expenditure limits and fewer big donations. But it seems they will be supporting the removal of donation limits today as well, which can only mean that they, too, have both hands out for the cash.
Electoral expenditure caps are also an important consideration when looking at a public funding model. It was fairly clear from when this bill was tabled that the two old parties were likely to support this package that delivers financial windfalls for them. Under this bill the total party expenditure cap for parties running 25 candidates in the 2016 election will be $1 million, a much bigger expenditure cap than the Greens will be putting forward here today. If the party cap was smaller, then all the parties would spend less and would therefore require less public funding for electoral campaigning.
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