Page 1941 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 August 2014
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I would also like to thank the committee secretary, Louise Gell, in particular. It was a complex inquiry and there were some complex issues there. She did a very good job of keeping us on track and keeping track of the discussions, even seeking out additional information at times to assist the committee in what was a reasonably tight time frame for getting the report done. Overall, as my dissenting report notes at the end, I actually agreed with the bulk of the recommendations. Mr Gentleman has given a good summary of those. Mr Coe has added some comments. I do not propose to reflect any further on those other than to give them my endorsement.
The area where I did have some different views was around issues of campaign finance and funding. I feel that the committee could have gone further in ensuring that a stronger level of integrity was built into the electoral reform system. The issue of campaign finance reform, in my view, needs to be addressed in a holistic way to ensure the right levers are being used to achieve the desired outcome. I think there are three key levers available in that context: the campaign expenditure cap, donation caps and public funding of elections.
Mr Gentleman spoke of campaign expenditure caps. There was some adjustment, with the increased number of candidates we will see at the election, to bring the cap down to $40,000 per candidate and, therefore, produce an overall cap of $1 million. I certainly support the cumulative party cap for parties. I think that is the right approach, but I do think that there is scope to reduce the expenditure cap further here in the ACT.
I submitted that a cap on party campaigning should be in the order of $500,000, perhaps higher. I know there was a higher view. Perhaps we could have found a middle ground there somewhere. I think that to place a cumulative cap on it takes away the need to seek out funding to run expensive election campaigns and puts a stronger emphasis on simply getting out and communicating with voters. That is one where I would have made a different recommendation.
Attached to that is the cap on donations. The ACT currently has a donations cap of $10,000 and a restriction that these donations can only be made by people enrolled to vote on the ACT electoral roll. There are issues, of course, arising from the Unions New South Wales case in New South Wales. I think that matter was dealt with in the committee’s report in a consensus way. The committee did, however, consider reviewing the cap on donations. I think there was a sense that that might be a cap that could increase. I have put a recommendation that the cap on donations should be reduced from $10,000 to $5,000. I think it is quite appropriate that we limit the amount of influence that one individual donation can have and that having a lower limit is an effective way to do that.
The third area of those three key levers that I spoke of is the public funding of elections. The majority of the committee put a view that that should be increased to $8. Of course, the Greens have long had a view that there should be public funding for elections. I think that the Unions New South Wales case has put an interesting interpretation on that. The High Court—and the committee reflected on this to some extent—has made 100 per cent public funding perhaps not legally possible. That is certainly the way that I understood the Unions New South Wales case.
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