Page 5373 - Week 14 - Thursday, 30 November 2017
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cannot be closed, basically, on election day. I think it would be something that would make life easier.
On the subject of making life easier, I would like to talk a little bit about the committee’s recommendation on pre-polling. Basically, the committee has recommended that you no longer should be required to give an excuse to pre-poll; anyone should be able to pre-poll at any time in the three-week polling period. While I am not dissenting from it, I believe it is something that we need to give considerably more thought to. Will the Electoral Commission open more pre-polling locations and for additional hours to cope with increased demand? If they do this, will this lead to a reduction in community spirit? Will we no longer have the democracy sausage? I note that I am a vegetarian, but there are vegetarian sausages, so I am a big fan of the democracy sausage. I think there is a community spirit that goes with the concept that there is a day on which we are all going to vote. I think this is a really nice, important part of the pageantry of democracy. It is the festival of democracy, as Roy and HG always call it, and they are right.
It is also something that we need to look at in terms of the media blackout. We currently have it just before the actual polling day. Presumably, if this occurs, we would have a media blackout for three weeks, it would seem to me. Is that what we actually want? We could have a situation where most people have voted before the formal campaign launches and, certainly under current legislation, before any formal election costings. While I do not object to this recommendation, we need to think about it a little bit more.
I have written extensively, as will surprise nobody, about campaign finance, because this is something that the Greens have been concerned about basically forever. I have known for a long time that you follow the money. It does make a difference. There were considerable changes made in 2012 which were, to quite an extent, reversed in 2015. I would like to see those changes reversed again.
I will talk about public funding. First of all, under the current rules, you have to have at least four per cent of the vote to get any public funding. I have always felt that this was designed to make it hard for independents and small parties. As part of a robust democracy, particularly as part of a multimember democracy, I do not think that this should be the case. We should not be making it harder for people and small parties to be candidates.
I am suggesting that, as long as you receive one per cent of the vote, you should be eligible for public funding, but that this funding should be on a reimbursement basis. In other words, you cannot make a profit out of standing as a candidate, but if you spend X amount of money and you get at least one per cent of the vote, you should be eligible for public funding, just like the bigger parties. Also, talking about levelling the playing field, we could cap administrative funding to the amount spent on five MLAs.
Probably the area where the biggest changes were made in 2015, and where I would like to see it changed back again, was donations. We had legislation in 2012 that restricted donations to only those who could vote in the ACT. That was changed.
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