Page 28 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 12 February 2019
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jurisdiction should be the ones who influence the politicians of the jurisdiction. It is called representative democracy, and our job is to represent our electorates.
The Greens have a long history both in this place and in other parliaments of pushing for electoral reform to increase transparency and accountability and reduce hidden influences on our government. In the Seventh Assembly I was privileged to be part of the Assembly when it passed legislation to, firstly, institute a limit of $60,000 on campaign expenditure by a candidate or by a third party in support of the candidate or party; secondly, institute a limit on donations of $10,000 per donor per financial year; and, thirdly, ban donations from corporations or private companies. While the cap on electoral expenditure has remained, the Greens were and are disappointed that the other two provisions were removed by the Eighth Assembly.
As well as removing the restrictions on donations, the Eighth Assembly significantly increased the amount of public funding received by parties that get four per cent or more of the vote. Parties now receive $8 per vote. Shane Rattenbury was the sole member arguing against this generosity. This shift to higher public funding was said to balance the commensurate ban on corporate donations, and the restriction to taking donations only from individuals. However, when those restrictions were removed in the Eighth Assembly, the funding for votes was not lowered back to its previous amount.
For a party that fields the full 25 candidates, the expenditure cap is $1 million. That is, of course, both the Liberal and Labor parties, and they each received over $700,000 in public funding after the 2016 election. The Greens received less public funding, although I note we also fielded fewer candidates, so we had a lower expenditure cap. Basically, the point is that the task of financing party campaigns has become a lot less difficult in Canberra, as for any party or individual candidate who gets at least four per cent of the vote the public purse funds a significant amount of their expenditure.
The Eighth Assembly also introduced administrative funding for parties with members in the Assembly, and this is not capped. The combination of these two sources of funding means that political parties and any individuals who are successful in getting elected to the Assembly have a lot of their campaign and operational costs paid by the public purse. Thus there is less need for other income, and the Assembly can legislate to restrict donations without significantly impacting on the capacity of successful candidates and parties to finance their campaigns and ongoing party expenses.
The Greens amendments seek to restore some of the restrictions on donations by restricting the receipt of donations to $10,000 per year from any individual or corporate group. We are seeking to introduce a class of prohibited donors that includes not only property developers but also gambling businesses. We are seeking to rationalise ACT party financing by introducing a cap on administrative expenditure payments to parties at the equivalent of five times the maximum amount payable per MLA. This amount, which at present is around $300,000 per annum, should be adequate to fund party administration. It should also be noted that this party administration funding was put in place to cover the additional costs of managing a
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