Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very important piece of reform that the parliament is undertaking. The member for Warringah said many things that I agree with. This is the people's parliament. This is their democracy, and it is important that they know who has donated to our campaigns. That is absolutely the case. Therefore, I support this piece of reform because it makes it possible for people to know the answer to that question.

The Australian people, as I'm sure the member for Warringah will agree, are no fools. They know—absolutely. They're not going to be conned by political parties or candidates or, indeed, political movements that try to fool them into believing that they are voting for one thing while voting for another. Just overnight in Victoria we saw a whole bunch of crossbench MPs, who were elected on various issues such as ending plastic bags, getting more money for the taxi industry et cetera, vote for Daniel Andrews's 'reforms' that will give the Premier of Victoria, whoever may sit in that seat—not just Daniel Andrews but whoever comes after him—some extraordinary powers to literally put Australians under house arrest.

I think the voters of Victoria, whether they are voting for a federal member of parliament, a state member of parliament or, indeed, their local councillor, deserve to know where that person is getting financial support from. That is for this reason and this reason only: it has the impact of influencing decisions that they may make and who has access to them when they are making those decisions.

There are, however—it saddens me to say this—a number of issues on which I disagree with the member for Warringah. I don't think this is about political parties. I don't think this is about Climate 200 or 'voices of' front groups or Mackellar souffles or whoever happens to put their name on whatever front group wants to stand up and have a go at campaigns. The fact of the matter remains that election campaigns are a contest of ideas. They're about who has the best ideas to improve the lives of the working men and women of Australia, who has the best ideas to assure those Australians who are seeking financial security in retirement and who has the best ideas to offer hope for Australians who are under the age of 40 who want to purchase their first home so that they can start a family and put down roots in their local community. These are the contests of ideas that excite me. If an election is about those things, that's a good thing. No election should be bought, that's for sure. But it's not about us, it's not about the crossbench, it's not about the front groups and it's certainly not about the Labor Party and the Greens. It is, has been and always will be about the Australian people and their right to know who is funding whom.

On that basis, electoral funding laws in Australia are critically important. I am probably one of very few people in this chamber who disagree with public funding of election campaigns. I think it corrupts the political process. How many candidates do we see running in elections just to collect the public funding that comes from that? Far too many. That's not democracy. That's not a contest of ideas. It's just another arbitrage opportunity that certain people have taken benefit from at the expense of the Australian people. I believe that is the view of very few members of this chamber, but it is a view that I hold strongly.

On the question of what these electoral laws do, our electoral funding rules should make apparent who is making large donations and for what purpose and, therefore, what influence that may have on a person down the track. When people say, 'The major political parties don't reveal where 40, 50 or 60 per cent of their funding comes from,' that is because it comes from small donations. The view of this parliament has been that people who are making small donations are unlikely to be able to influence the decisions of elected members and, therefore, in that balance between a right to privacy and a right to know, the right to privacy prevails. This idea of, 'If you've got nothing to hide, what are you afraid of?' has been uttered by some of the greatest tyrants of the 20th century. It always amazes me the people who come into this chamber and happily make that statement and happily repeat it, forgetting it was one of Stalin's favourite slogans—'If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about.'

This parliament has always believed that individuals are born with certain inalienable rights, and among those rights are a right to privacy, a right to freedom and a right to make your own decisions. And so, unless those donations are large amounts, it is not in the public benefit and not for the public good to actually reveal those donations. In fact, I think it is a matter of great sadness that candidates have to reveal where they get donations from because—and I stress this before it is clipped up and misused—we would want campaigns by all political parties and all political candidates actually funded by a large number of people through small donations.

When you have that, no one single person has enough influence over a candidate for them to take that into consideration when they are making decisions in the best interest of all Australia—not just the electorate that they represent, but all Australians. Therefore, having a broad base of donors whose amounts are small is actually critical to our democracy. I think it is a shame that we have been moving away from that and getting larger and larger donors. How many of those donors, for example, are simply protecting—let's be blunt about this—legislation that this parliament has introduced that has accrued benefits to them? How many times have the unions donated to the Labor Party and, equally, have certain big businesses donated to the Liberal Party, historically, looking to maintain their privileged position under law? Dare I say it, there have been other candidates—not just elected members of this House who are members of political parties, but other candidates—who sit on the crossbench who also may be overly influenced by a particular donor or a group of friends of donors. It's important that the Australian public is able to see who those people are, understand where they're getting support from, and then judge some of the decisions that they make within that context.

The member for Warringah and others have mentioned real-time disclosure. I'm utterly opposed to real-time disclosure. The member for Warringah and I participated in a documentary about donation laws in Australia. It was a very worthwhile exercise, and I highly recommend everyone viewing it on iView. But I will throw a dart at the heart of the hypotheses of the documentary, which I found troubling, and that is this idea, which I don't think anyone in this House or anyone in democratic politics anywhere in the world would deny, that the influence money has on US politics is corrosive. It's up to the United States but they need to look at it more clearly and understand the impact it's having. I don't think there is anyone in this chamber who would say that if we had the amount of money that flows through the US electoral system operating in this system it would be a matter of grave concern. But that documentary constantly went back to provisions in US law and said, 'Well, what if we implemented things like real-time disclosures?' What we know from the United States is that real-time disclosures are fantastic if you are trying to hide where you're getting your money from.

What happens in Australia is that when you give someone $100,000, even if you give it to them in $1,000 increments over 100 days, in the end it all has to be bundled up and reported as one amount. Going to the point that the member for Warringah made: the benefit of being in a political party is that every Australian can see that Jason Falinski, the member for Mackellar, is a member of the Liberal Party, which received $100,000 from BHP, not that BHP paid him $1,000 and then someone else $1,000 and someone else $1,000 and so on. It all gets bundled up so that Australians can see how much money the Liberal Party received from a particular donor. Under real-time donation laws, that doesn't happen. The Liberal Party reveals that on day 1 we got $1,000 and on day 3 we got $1,000 from a different entity, so that, by the time you get to day 100, no-one has been able to keep track of where the money has come from. So it actually has the result of hiding the very thing that electoral funding laws are meant to show the Australian public, which is where political candidates are receiving their money from.

I say to those who are opposed to this bill—and I note what they're saying—that this is actually about putting everyone on a level playing field so the disclosures have to happen at the same time. I don't understand why that's a problem. I don't understand why this has become such a cause celebre for the crossbench.

They are constantly in here telling us that they stand for integrity, that they stand for equality. Here's a piece of legislation that is indisputably about exactly that. I say to them, if I may, that this is something they should give full throated support to, that they shouldn't delay in the House and that they should, if I may say it, congratulate, rather than sneer at, the House for actually passing.

The Australian people are not fools. The Australian people know that these Independents are all part of a coordinated group headed by Simon Holmes a Court and funded through different trusts, funds and front groups. No-one knows where the money is coming from. No-one knows where Climate 200 got it's $3.3 million from. There are a lot of people around saying that $200,000 from Simon Holmes a Court, $100,000 from Nick Fairfax and $100,000 from Simon Hackett does not equal the $3.6 million that they say they have in this front group. No-one is fooled when they go on Facebook and see The Voices Of group. The members of that group all used to be members of the Greens who at the last election were on the campaign committee of the Independent, who was funded by GetUp, who then also had the benefit, I might say, of an offshoot, a new front group, so he could maintain this fiction that The Voices Of group is somehow a community group. This is a RICO, or racketeer influenced and corrupt organisations, case in the making. The tentacles run everywhere. Apparently it's all uncoordinated. Watching their behaviour, I'd believe that. It's all uncoordinated, but the major thing about it is that it's always about hiding who they are, what they stand for and where the money is coming from.

Here we have a piece of legislation that, basically, says to Simon Holmes a Court: tell us where the money is coming from, Simon, and, more importantly for the people of Wentworth, North Sydney, Mackellar, Goldstein, Higgins and Kooyong—all of which, I might add, are Liberal seats—tell us where it's going. Don't get me wrong; they're all about democracy. That's why they target just one political party. We all know what's really going on here. The left wing are now using these front groups to attack Liberals because they know they wouldn't get elected as Labor members, as Labor candidates or as Greens candidates.

That's what's going on. That's why all the money is hidden. That's why the front groups keep sprouting up with different names. It's like drinking new Coke and then going back to Coke classic. The thing inside the can is the same. You're still drinking the same drink. The point of this electoral reform is about making all of that obvious. Please spare us the cant about 'community groups'. There's nothing about them that's community. What there is a lot of with them is how coordinated they are and how much they're hiding.

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