Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This month the Rudd government is sending its bill on donations to political parties back to the Senate for a second time. The coalition parties have already rejected the bill once. I hope this time they will do the decent thing and pass it.

Australia has a very clean election system by world standards. We do not hear complaints in Australia that elections have been rigged, but one area that has caused concern recently is the non-transparent donation of large sums of money to political parties. This raises the possibility of corruption, which can be addressed properly by openness and transparency.

In 1984 the Hawke government brought in laws that required all donations to political parties, whether by individuals, companies or organisations such as unions, to be promptly declared to the public if they exceeded $1,500. At the same time, public funding was made available to political parties so that they would not be dependent on donations. This system worked well for 20 years. But in 2004 the Howard government gained control of the Senate, and one of the first things they did was to change the laws on political donations. They lifted the disclosure threshold from $1,500 to more than $10,000. This would have allowed large amounts of money to be donated to the Liberal Party without being disclosed. It would be possible to make separate donations to each of the eight state and territory divisions of the Liberal Party, which meant that donations of up to $80,000 could have been made without disclosure.

The Liberals also made other changes to our basic electoral laws, such as requiring people to produce photo ID when enrolling to vote and when casting a provisional vote at elections. This was designed to make it harder for groups of people the Liberals thought likely to be Labor voters, such as itinerant workers, or new citizens, to enrol and vote.

Labor opposed all these changes when we were in opposition, and we said we would reverse them in government. Leading election experts such as Malcolm Mackerras and Professor Brian Costar agreed with us that these laws were partisan and unfair, and bad for our democracy. No-one can say we do not have a mandate for our legislation.

The bill on political donations will reduce the disclosure threshold from more than $10,000 to $1,000. It will require people who donate to political parties during election campaigns to report the donation within eight weeks of the polling day. It will close the loophole which allows people to donate to each state branch of the Liberal Party and claim each donation as a separate donation.

As I said earlier, the Senate has blocked this bill once. The bill having been rejected, the government is taking the opportunity to refine it. While the Senate will see the refined bill in coming weeks, it is my view that the bill needs to address certain key issues. The first issue it needs to deal with relates to the inclusion in this bill of a measure that meets the government’s pre-election commitment to roll back the early closure of the rolls introduced by the Howard government. This was outlined in the excellent report brought down by the member for Banks and the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that also said the requirement for evidence of identity to enable provisional votes to be included in the count should be repealed.

There is a deadline at every federal election after which the roll will be closed for an election. This is known as the close of rolls and defines the date that the electoral roll is closed to changes prior to an election. The roll at the date of the close of rolls is the list of electors who are entitled to vote at an election. The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2006 provided for two close of roll deadlines. The first deadline is 8 pm on the day the writ is issued. The second deadline is 8 pm on the third working day after the writ has been issued, for electors who are currently enrolled but need to update enrolment details.

This made it so complicated that many people, particularly young people, were unable to get their enrolment in on time. It was a process which the previous government had been elected on in the elections from 1996 to 2004 and at no stage did they claim those elections were bodgie. They were quite happy to be elected with a one-week closure of the roll and to allow younger people particularly to enrol.

We are going to, in my view, accept the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Electoral Matters and roll back this regressive change to our democracy that was agreed before the last election precisely to cut out younger people. Similarly, evidence of identity in provisional votes needs to be taken into consideration by this government when it brings legislation back into the Senate, because we do not want tens of thousands of Australians to be excluded, as they were at the last election, when they had never been excluded in the periods prior to the 2007 election. The Liberal Party were quite happy to be elected on their votes previously and never said the elections were bodgie. We are going to go back to the days when tens of thousands of Australians were allowed to vote provisionally because they lived in the electorates; there was no attempt to scam the electoral system. We have a very honest system of elections in Australia and we should go back— (Time expired)