Page 635 - Week 02 - Thursday, 19 February 2015
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Removing the aggregation provisions will remove any uncertainty about their constitutional validity with no reduction in transparency. Associated entities, party groupings, non-party MLA groupings and third parties will still be subject to electoral expenditure caps and will still be required to give the Electoral Commissioner a return stating all the details of their expenditure.
The bill also removes restrictions on the amount that can be donated to a party or a candidate by repealing sections 205I and 205J of the act. As I said earlier, the experience of New South Wales shows that these provisions are highly vulnerable to a challenge on the grounds of constitutional validity, with the present High Court action targeting prohibitions on donations and donation caps currently underway. Regardless of the outcome of this High Court challenge, it should be emphasised that the removal of donation caps does not reduce the robust framework that exists for reporting political donations in the ACT. Moreover, the government’s reforms in relation to electoral expenditure and public funding provide an effective counterbalance to the removal of these caps by limiting the usefulness of excessive donations.
The bill amends the expenditure cap for election spending by candidates to $40,000 for an individual candidate and $1 million for party expenditure. These changes will reduce the current limits for both candidates and parties in accordance with the recommendations of the select committee.
With the number of territory MLAs increasing to 25, imposing an expenditure cap on a party of $1 million will assist in preventing disadvantage to smaller parties and independents. If the current expenditure cap of $60,000 were retained, the expenditure cap for a party contesting all seats in an election would exceed $1.5 million. The $40,000 expenditure cap for individuals will also apply to third-party campaigners and associated entities. Penalties will continue to apply for electoral expenditure that exceeds this cap.
The Electoral Act currently mandates the establishment of an ACT election account out of which all electoral expenditure must be paid. Section 205I, which is being repealed in line with the High Court decision, limited the amount of gifts from a person that could be deposited into this account. With the abolition of donation caps and the availability of more sophisticated accounting systems, the use of this mechanism is no longer required. Therefore, the bill abolishes this requirement.
The current act also limits to $10,000 payments that may be made to a party by a related political party for the purposes of expenditure in relation to an ACT election. While it is the government’s intention to retain this limit, feedback I have received is that the amendments in the bill as currently constructed could result in some ambiguity. Therefore, as I have foreshadowed to members already, I will be moving a government amendment to section 205K to clarify that a party can only use $10,000 of funds received from a related party for the purposes of incurring ACT electoral expenditure. This amendment will preserve the policy intent of this section and ensures that the act does not inadvertently seek to constrain other expenditure such as in federal elections. I will be tabling a supplementary explanatory statement addressing this proposed amendment.
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