Page 1591 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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appropriation provisions that only they can pass and have insisted on that basis that, rather than proceed on the basis of the bill that I introduced based on the all-party JACS committee report, they should bring forward this bill.
It is not particularly necessary to do this. The government could have moved the appropriation provisions as a stand-alone provision and concentrated on the excellent work that was done by the JACS committee. Rather, they decided that a whole new bill crafted in their image was desirable. In consequence we have before us today a bill for what might be called “electoral reform lite”. When I say “lite”, I do not mean light on the hill but, rather, lacking in substance. A more Australian term might be “Clayton’s electoral reform”.
As you know, Madam Assistant Speaker Le Couteur, the ALP have a longstanding opposition to electoral reform in this territory and have opposed everything from the introduction of the Hare-Clark system onward, always with the aim of seeking more control by the parties, specifically themselves, and less control by voters.
When this issue was first mooted, well before it was referred to the JACS committee, Jon Stanhope, the then Chief Minister, rejected out of hand the idea of capping donations, arguing, rather bizarrely, that the fact that the ALP received half its funding from its naming rights sponsor, the Labor Club, that was indicative of broad-based—that is a quote from him—support. Yes, Labor receives funding from a broad base of Canberra’s problem gamblers.
On the day in September last year when the JACS committee reported on campaign finance reform, the Attorney-General lambasted the report and went so far as to make the misleading claim in the media that the changes to public funding would cost $30 million a term. Now, however, we are invited to believe that the scales have been lifted from their eyes and that ACT Labor have undergone a road to Damascus conversion—so much so, in fact, that when they saw the bill that I presented to the Assembly implementing the recommendations of the JACS committee, a tripartite committee which I might add considered this matter upon the unanimous referral from the Assembly, they immediately thought: “That’s a really great idea. We can do an even better version.”
That is one version of the narrative. The other might be that this bill is designed to give the appearance of electoral funding reform, while allowing the ALP to carry out business as usual, funnelling money as smoothly as possible from the pockets of poor gamblers directly into their own. Thus we have, for example, a pretend donations cap, reminiscent of the Maginot line—as you might recall, an absolutely impenetrable barrier which you could simply drive around in a tank, or in this case an armoured car laden with poker machine revenue.
I will be charitable and assume that the idea of using a bank account to keep track of election spending is well intentioned. But it would be neither effective nor necessary. I do not know whether the government have noticed, but we already have a system of accounting for electoral expenditure which does not require it to be funnelled through a single bank account. As far as accounting systems are concerned, this is one step up from requiring money for the election to be held in a petty cash tin and about on a par with keeping receipts for the election in a shoebox under the bed.
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