Page 4294 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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that these provisions should be in place for the 2012 election. This does impose upon the Assembly a very tight time frame. There may be a necessity for interim measures for the 2012 election, but that is a matter that needs to be sorted out by the Assembly as a whole. The strong recommendation of the committee is that the reforms outlined in this report should be operational for the 2012 election.
Mr Speaker, this is a very important advance by the ACT. I take the view that the electorate in the ACT has a very high interest in electoral transparency, which is why we have the electoral system that we do. I think that this framework for campaign financing will set out a new way forward. I commend the report to the Assembly.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (11.06): This report is nothing much more than a dressed-up attack on the revenue-raising opportunities of one particular party represented in this place. In fact, I think it diminishes the attempts of some people to reform the process because of that particular approach. Off the top of my head, one of the ways in which that is quite clearly demonstrated is that this recommendation—I think it is No 1, in fact—says that we will cap donations. We talk about capping donations for an electoral cycle and we talk about capping expenditure for an electoral period or a campaigning period. Interestingly, we are capping expenditure but we are not capping revenue or income.
It is interesting that the only attack in this report is on donations received by the Labor Party. It does not talk about income generated from rental properties by the Liberal Party. So the actual outcome of that is that the Liberal Party, because it can generate revenue from its rental property, can engage in continuous campaigning for the entirety of the cycle whereas the Labor Party cannot. And the Greens cannot, anyway, because they have not got any money.
Madam Assistant Speaker, I have to tell you that that in itself is not a good reason to bring everybody down to the lowest common denominator. Democracy is not enhanced by bringing people down; it is about encouraging other people to come up and join in. This report does not enhance democracy in this territory; in fact, it diminishes it.
I was a bit disappointed in some of the academic rigour contained in the report. We have some quotes from a number of academics in the report which have been totally ignored. I will give you a couple of examples of that. I refer in particular to Professor Twomey. Professor Toomey was quite clear about the detrimental effects of capping expenditure and, in particular, donations. I invite members to read the passages in the report about that.
They were glossed over because she said, “Okay, you’ve got to remember that when you’re capping donations you’ve got to apply the Lange test.” There is a simple, sweeping statement in the report saying, “The committee thinks that it does.” Well, I do not think that it passes the Lange test. It does not pass the Lange test because the capping of donations is only capping one small part of the income. The theory of double-entry bookkeeping has not been applied in this. I may have had a slightly different view had we been attempting to cap income and expenditure in exactly the same time periods; but no. The inconsistency involves no rental income; the inconsistency is the time line. Those inconsistencies diminish this report.
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