Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At least I want to hear what I have to say. The previous government of course scandalously increased the limits from $1,500 to $10,000 before you had to disclose the identity of political donations. I believe it is a great achievement that the Rudd Labor government is already moving to correct those scandalous changes and I congratulate Minister Faulkner for doing that. I think it goes back to what the Governor-General said at the start about this great democracy that we have, where we can have elections where governments can change by the will of the people. I appreciate that it does not happen that often at the federal level, but they do change and it can be done peacefully. I think it is because of the strength of our electoral system, and creating opportunities for these massive political donations to be given to political parties of whichever persuasion undermines that system.

I note that, at the same time that we had our election last November, there were elections held shortly after in a range of other countries around the world and questions were asked about the efficacy of them. We saw the tragedy of what happened in Pakistan where Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in the lead-up to the election campaign. Questions have been raised about the recent elections in Georgia and in Russia. We need to ensure that our electoral laws are appropriate and not undermined in any way, and I believe that the legislation of the previous government which disenfranchised so many people undermined the integrity of the electoral system.

One of the other important aspects of the new Labor government’s program that we are moving to implement is in the area of trade and multilateral negotiations. The previous government had a policy of withdrawing from multilateral negotiations. They paid lip-service, really, to the Doha Round. They preferred the approach of seeking to negotiate free trade agreements with individual countries at the expense of trying to participate fully in the multilateral system. That was clear, of course, with respect to climate change, where we did not really even have a seat at the table until the new Rudd Labor government signed the Kyoto protocol. The previous government did not really think it was an important issue.

It is the same with trade. I think one of the standout features of the new Rudd Labor government will be that it will lift the profile of the Australian government and the Australian nation around the world. Once again, we will be in there forcefully arguing to reinvigorate the Doha Round and endeavour to get an outcome, something that was one of the great achievements of the Hawke and Keating governments through the establishment of the Cairns Group and APEC, through the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and so on. At the end of the day the prosperity of Australians depends, obviously, on the economic policies of the Australian government, but it also depends very much on our ability to trade, to negotiate and to punch above our weight in the international arena. I applaud the fact that the Prime Minister will shortly be visiting the United States and Europe to promote that objective.