Page 4295 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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Furthermore, I introduced the views of Professor Joo-Cheong Tham, an associate professor in the Law Faculty at La Trobe University in Victoria, and there is no entry in this report of the views of Professor Tham—none. He supports the view that directly banning donations or significantly reducing donations will have a very severe impact on the freedom of expression of a party association. It is a constitutional issue. He also says that whilst this does not directly ban or direct parties, it generally makes them unviable unless parties are able to secure sufficient public funding.
The view from the Greens is that if you are going to cap donations, replace them with public funding. On its face, you would say, “That’s fair enough.” Then you look at what is in the report and you see that it says that the formula is whatever the figure is—$80,000 per elected member. Professor Twomey and other academics have said—and I think I am quoting Professor Twomey correctly—the High Court does not like measures which favour incumbents.
Therefore, by definition, if you are going to have a program which gives money only to organisations which have elected members, you are disadvantaging all of the other registered parties in the system. Tell that to the Australian Democrats, the Motorists Party, the Community Alliance Party, as I have indicated in my dissenting report. It is discriminatory. I have no problem with the figures themselves.
The other thing is that we do not make any commentary about what the likely public reaction to this will be. How do you think the public are going to react, Madam Assistant Speaker, when we say to them: “Look, we’ve knocked off the donations for the Labor Party. We have left, however, the Liberal Party to be able to earn their income from their rental properties. But we’re also going to give the Liberal Party over $450,000 per year, forever, by way of support from the public purse.” And that is what this report says: “To the Labor Party, we’ve knocked off their donations but we’re going to give them back 500 grand.” The public are going to say, “I don’t want my money to go to support a political party like the Labor Party, the Liberal Party or the Greens.” They are not going to cop it.
The total amount, according to the formula here, is $1,360,000 out of consolidated revenue each and every year going forward, to support the operational parts and the administrative parts of a political party. I would not want to be going out there and saying in my election promise, “This is what we’re going to do in a budget,” and the government approving that or recommending that.
It also, by paying money out of consolidated revenue, takes away the nature of funding from political parties by transferring it from legitimate business enterprises into the public arena, except for the Liberal Party, who can continue to get their rental property income. This is nothing short, as I say, of an attack on the Labor Party and it needs to be seen like that. It walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck. And guess what? It is a dead duck.
I was very significantly concerned about the way in which this report is based on two experiences interstate. It has quoted New South Wales and Queensland and an experience in the Republic of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland caps expenditure; it
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