Page 1592 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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Under the Labor government’s approach, caps on spending would be rendered ineffective by the capacity to multiply caps across the union movement. This is a matter I will address a little later. In addition, there is considerable evidence of hasty drafting, even apart from the separate bank account idea, which is particularly troublesome.
Perhaps the most egregious was the idea of including in the definition of party grouping the words “any other person who has incurred electoral expenditure to support a candidate or a prospective candidate for the party in contesting an election”. There is the obvious difficulty of identifying expenditure “to support a candidate”. Does this include general advertising for the party? How about negative advertising against their opponents? Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? More absurdly, however, we would have had the situation of allowing anyone to incur expenditure for a candidate and then have any of their subsequent campaign expenditure deducted from the party’s cap, even if it was incurred campaigning for their opponent. Even more absurd would be the problem that entities could engage in the electoral process without the permission of the party and that expenditure would be included in the cap even if the party did not approve the expenditure.
I am pleased to see that there is a government proposal to abandon this piece of nonsense, but their amendment to remove it would leave a loophole for those who really do act in collusion with political parties or third party campaigners to subvert the expenditure cap. This was addressed in my bill through the “acting in concert” provisions and through the broader definition of “associated entity” which the government saw fit not to include in their bill.
When you look closely at this bill, as my staff and I have done in recent weeks, you will find some very curious beasts indeed. You will find creatures called “associated entities”, which have the chameleon-like capacity to change colour to suit their circumstances.
The JACS committee took the view that to have an effective spending cap you have to close up the loophole of allowing parties to simply set up dummy or front organisations to do the spending; otherwise the whole idea of caps on expenditure would be meaningless. And yet we find that in the government’s view, affiliated trade unions, of which there are 15 in the ACT according to the ALP website, are not associated entities—heavens, no; they are just good friends. Notwithstanding the fact that they can vote on policies, elect office-bearers and even vote to choose candidates, they are not associated entities—if you believe the government. Mr Corbell of course cannot afford to admit that these unions are an integral part of the Labor Party—because they might take away his preselection.
My bill, on the other hand, applies a commonsense, what I might call a “duck”, test: if it walks like a duck, flies like a duck—
Mr Hargreaves interjecting—
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