Page 598 - Week 02 - Thursday, 19 February 2015
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It is fairly clear that the Greens would disagree with the Labor Party and the Liberals about the quantum of both the campaign expenditure caps and the quantum of any public funding. But without a limit on donation amounts, debating that quantum in any detail would have been a waste of the Assembly’s time.
If we could have persuaded the Labor Party and the Canberra Liberals to leave the limits in place and indeed reduce the limits then we could have had a discussion about the amount of public funding that would have been suitable, and the Greens would likely have supported a modest increase. However, the fourfold increase in public funding in this bill is untenable. It will take the approximate amount of public funding for ACT elections from around $400,000 to around $1.6 million every four years, and for that ACT voters are not getting any better democracy for their money.
While at the heart of campaign finance reform is ensuring that our political system is not susceptible to inappropriate influence from large corporations or wealthy individuals who seek to influence political outcomes through making donations to candidates, there is another consideration—to ensure a diversity of individuals and parties are represented in our political and electoral processes and are able to campaign for election on a level playing field. Electoral expenditure caps are an important way to help create that level playing field, and while they need to be considerate of not putting limits on political freedoms, they can be used to good effect to reduce the advantages of big players such that independents and smaller players have a reasonable chance to contest elections.
The Greens are proposing that expenditure caps be reined in significantly. There is no doubt that parties running five candidates across all electorates in the ACT will draw a cumulative benefit from the expenditure caps. Advertising spends, polling, design, campaign managers and efficiency in printing costs will all make it cheaper per candidate to run at the election.
Given that Labor and the Liberals will not consider a significant reduction in their spending caps, the Greens will be moving an amendment today that increases the expenditure caps for independents or ungrouped candidates once again. It may have been a reasonable consideration to drop their expenditure cap to $40,000 if the bigger parties were to take a proportional cut, but in the context of the ALP and Liberals getting such cumulative benefits, it is not fair to impose such a limit on an independent candidate who, if they can raise the funds, will not be able to get the same economies of scale or efficiencies per candidate that large parties will be able to.
I will speak further on some of these issues as I table our amendments, but I will briefly flag the nature of the Greens’ other amendments today. We will propose an amendment that sets an expenditure cap for parties running 25 candidates at $500,000, indexed. We will propose that ungrouped candidates and third-party campaigner expenditure caps remain at $60,000, given that candidate expenditure caps are to be reduced to $40,000, and it is highly likely that we will lose the amendment, as I discussed.
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