Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

Before I commence my remarks on this report by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters I would like to specifically thank the secretariat of the committee. I have on one occasion run out of time and failed to do so. The secretariat of the committee has done a fantastic job in assisting the work of members of the committee.

I want to point out a few very important differences with respect to this report. Senator Brown talked about 'the committee', but we need to make it clear that it was the Labor and Greens members of this committee that supported these recommendations. It is the Labor and Greens members of this committee that do not see a problem with the way this investigation was conducted into the incidents and the scandal about the Health Services Union. This was a limited inquiry into that. Firstly, the evidence that we were presented with as members of the committee, the Labor and Greens majority on this committee have prohibited us from presenting to this parliament. Let us make this clear. The evidence that we were presented with to consider this particular issue: the Labor and Greens majority on this committee has prohibited me informing my fellow senators about that evidence. That places an extraordinary limitation on the validity of this inquiry.

On another matter, we have a situation where the Australian Electoral Commission was presented with more than 500 pages of evidence and asked for a final response to that, and did so in less than 72 hours. Those 500-plus pages are enormously detailed for the AEC to be given a couple of days to respond to and have not given us, as non-government members of the committee, an opportunity to consider the detail of that response. Furthermore, the opposition members of the committee did seek to have another hearing with the Australian Electoral Commission to discuss the response to those 500-plus pages of reports and that opportunity was denied to opposition members of the committee by the Labor Party and the Greens party majority.

They are all issues about the inquiry. There is one other thing is missing in this discussion. We can discuss time and time again the scandal that is the Health Services Union and the misuse of members' money. We get hung up on procedural issues and on whether there were technical breaches or the process of the investigation. And we sometimes forget there is no contest that the money of thousands of members of trade unions, often low paid, was misused. We know that. No-one has come into this chamber or the other place and defended the use of members' money by a member of the other place and the management of the Health Services Union.

I would like to highlight several aspects. Senator Brown in her presentation of the report did talk about the flaws with respect to the associated entities laws. There is a profound flaw in this, and that is that while the state branch of the Health Services Union is considered an associated entity because it sends delegates to a conference of the Labor Party in this case, the missing part of this law is that the national office of the same organisation is not considered an associated entity. That is a major hole in our electoral administration because it provides not only the incentive but the opportunity for a state branch of a union to simply shuffle money to the national office of the union which can then be spent in any particular way and not be covered by the associated entity regime. That is a real hole in our law. It is a recommendation that we have highlighted before and made recommendations about before, but the Labor Party refuse to even acknowledge it. They have not addressed it, they do not acknowledge it and their recommendation does nothing to deal with that problem.

We know why. It is because of the second point I am going to raise, and that is the AEC's use of its audit powers. It disturbed me when I found out in the course of this inquiry that from 2007 until 28 August the Australian Electoral Commission had conducted 256 audits of political parties and associated entities but when we asked a very simple question—'Can we see the list?'—something became very apparent, and that was that only one of those was a trade union. That is one out of 256 in five years. Let us go through some of the organisations that were audited. The Lady Wilson Foundation was audited twice. The Blue Ribbon Foundation was audited. And the Australian Democrats, somewhat smaller in 2011 than the contribution played by trade unions. In the annexure to the opposition's dissenting report there is this list. What we have here is that the only trade union that was audited was the HSU East, and only after that issue hit the newspapers and became a matter of public debate.

That was profoundly disappointing. I am being very careful with the words I use here. It concerned members of the opposition and I think it highlights a significant flaw in the culture of the Electoral Commission. We were given a number of reasons for this—it is all in the Hansard of the hearings. Firstly, we were told that Fair Work Australia does it, as though that somehow removed from the Australian Electoral Commission the responsibility to administer the law with which it is charged. Those laws for Fair Work Australia, we now know, did not work, because it did not uncover this scandal; it did not prevent the misuse of HSU members' money. We would not want to wake up after an election and find out that there had been similar flaws in the management of the finances of an election campaign. It is also a different regulatory environment for a different purpose. Fair Work Australia does not serve the purpose of the electoral law.

We heard the Electoral Commission say it had had no additional resources provided since the changes to the law in 2006 that brought trade unions into the associated entity regime. That is no excuse. It is no excuse to say, 'Well, you'd didn't give us any extra resources, therefore we are going to audit just one side of politics,' even if that happens simply by inertia rather than by intent. When the law changes, the behaviour of the statutory authority should change. When the law changed, the Electoral Commission should not have said: 'We don't have any extra resources; we're going to continue with what we've done.' It should have divided those resources so the appearance of neutrality was immediately apparent to anyone who looked at this list. Only one union was audited out of the 256 audits of organisations. Some of the organisations that were audited donated less than $10,000 over the period in which they were audited, yet we had unions donating in the millions over a five-year period. The Electoral Commission had no answer.

The Electoral Commission had a series of other excuses, such as there sometimes being money shuffling between political parties and associated entities. That is true, but we are looking at amounts of money that are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the same money shuffles that go on between members of political parties—that is, trade unions—and the Labor Party. We have groups that do nothing but fundraise a few thousand dollars in an electoral cycle. If they support a candidate they are dragged into the associated entity net. But the shareholders of the Labor Party—we are not talking about people who just donate money; we are talking about organisations with which many in this chamber are very familiar—who are effectively voting shareholders in one of the major parties in this country, who send along slates of delegates, who donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Labor Party either in membership fees or donations for campaigns and who then run other campaigns on top of that were not audited by the AEC. It did not audit even one of them.

The reason I am being careful with my words is that I do not want to assign a motive to that behaviour. I do want to highlight that continued behaviour like that will draw into question the faith of one side of politics in the fair and impartial administration and use of AEC resources. We cannot go on and find out in another five years that out of another 250 audits the Lady Wilson Foundation has had another couple but the HSU, the CFMEU, the AMWU or any other part of the alphabet soup that makes up the other side of politics has not been audited. That is a real worry. Anyone who dismisses it does not put enough value on having an impartial electoral commission.

Senator Brown also mentioned the series of Labor Party recommendations in this report. None of them relates to anything we heard before the committee. These recommendations are rehashed from previous reports written by the government that are aimed at lowering the donation thresholds. We know that leads to intimidation of donors, as happened with people who might have sparked up and talked about school halls. There was no evidence whatsoever before the committee that said the donation threshold needed to be lowered from $12,000 to $1,000. There was plenty of evidence before the committee that said credit cards are a route to electoral fraud, because we cannot trace cash withdrawals. There was plenty of evidence before the committee that there had not been auditing of trade unions. This report from the Labor Party should not be taken seriously.