Page 2417 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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That is what Mrs Dunne is saying. The government does not agree. Affiliated entities, if they make donations to political parties, will have to declare those. They will be captured by the same provisions around a gift as any other entity. Mrs Dunne is trying to go further. She is trying to require a whole range of onerous reporting requirements for those entities in a way which is unjustified.
Trade unions and like bodies play a legitimate role in our democracy. They are part of the social democratic fabric of Australian society. What Mrs Dunne is trying to do is restrict and restrain their capacity to legitimately participate in social democratic debate.
The government does not support this amendment.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (7.26): We will not be supporting this. What Mrs Dunne is proposing is administratively difficult. We did seek advice, and we were given advice by the Electoral Commissioner, who also said that it would be administratively very difficult.
We do not think that this is the best way to achieve the goal that Mrs Dunne wants. We do not agree on the premise of Mrs Dunne’s argument that this will have the dire consequences that she suggests. Despite links through affiliation, unions are separate entities and we need to be very careful about how we regulate them. We do not think that this is the right way to achieve the goal that Mrs Dunne has put out there.
As I said, we did seek advice. This is administratively very difficult. There are too many problems with what she has proposed. Therefore we will not be supporting it.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (7.27): It is delicious to hear the government and the Greens say, “We cannot do this because it is administratively difficult.” They actually dodge the issue. The issue is this: are affiliated organisations counted in the cap for expenditure purposes or are they not?
We have to remember the genesis of this. We had a motion in this place. We referred it to the JACS committee inquiry into this. The majority of the committee—Ms Hunter and I were the majority of the committee—came forward with recommendations that said that affiliated organisations should be counted in the cap.
After that, I introduced a bill that implemented the recommendations of the committee. It is extraordinarily difficult, and there were problems with that bill. The problems of drafting extraordinarily complex legislation from opposition are not to be underestimated. But at no time has the attorney or Ms Hunter come to me and said, “We agree with the principle, but this is a bit onerous.” Ms Hunter said here that it is administratively difficult. Did she offer a suggestion for fixing the administrative difficulty?
We are hanging our hat on the fact that this is administratively difficult and allowing affiliated unions to participate in the election campaign—not to the tune of $30,000,
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