Page 595 - Week 02 - Thursday, 19 February 2015
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For the record, the Greens did not support the configuration of five electorates of five members for the new size of the Assembly as we did not believe that it was the best outcome for improving representative democracy in the ACT. Those are arguments that we prosecuted when we voted against the five-by-five model to the Electoral Act last year. I will not repeat them again now in detail. Suffice to say that an increase to a 25-member Assembly is the context we found ourselves in for the select committee. So further amendments to the Electoral Act were viewed through that lens.
I was on the select committee looking into the Electoral Act and I proposed amendments. I was pleased with the way that the committee worked collaboratively to reach a number of points of agreement and to discuss ideas that were put on the table. I did, as members would be aware, also release a dissenting report. I will be tabling today a number of amendments that reflect those dissenting comments as well as some that I believe are contingent on the issues raised in the dissenting report. I will also be putting forward some amendments that reflect the view of the committee but that the government did not address in their bill.
Perhaps the key issue that I should touch on in this speech, as it will impact on the amendments that I will table later, is the issue of the removal of caps on donations. Indeed, this bill removes the entire section 205I, which deals with the limits on gifts, and the offence clause 205J, which outlines offences of indirect gifts to avoid the statutory limit.
I want to talk about this first as it affects a number of other clauses in the bill that the Greens cannot support in the context of the limit on gifts being removed. It speaks to what I believe should be the right framework for electoral reform and the levers that should be in place. Political donations made to political parties from organisations or businesses are something that we should be trying to avoid in our democracy. There is no doubt that donations to political parties leave politicians at risk of corruption or undue influence and that donors believe that they are indeed purchasing a degree of influence.
The Greens advocated in 2012 for the current provisions in the Electoral Act that restricted donations to individuals on the roll for the election in 2012. It was a workable process. While we acknowledge that the High Court decision, in the eyes of many, would appear to render the ACT’s provision unconstitutional, the Greens would have been content to have let those provisions stand and be tested.
However, now that the offending paragraph 205I(4) in the Electoral Act is to be removed, political parties will be able to receive donations from corporations, unions and any other organisations. One would have thought, given that this now opens up donations from corporations and unions, that any MLA in this place who believed in improving our democratic institutions and reducing the risk of corruption would be supporting measures that reduce the potential influence that can be bought, and especially bought by these donors.
The Director of the Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of New South Wales, George Williams, described this perfectly in an interview he gave on ABC TV last year:
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