Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This debate needs to be seen in the wider context of strengthening our democratic process. We urgently need politics to be cleaned up in this country. That needs to go much further than just dealing with the issues of today around Senator Sinodinos, because there is a real thread through so much of this work with regard to lobbying and how it is conducted in this country. But it goes much wider than that, and that has implications for political donations. Our houses do not fully come under freedom of information requirements; there is the question of how entitlements from members of parliament are managed; there are codes of conduct for ministers and MPs and the need for those codes to be legislated—these are all highly relevant to this issue. You can see why there is increasing cynicism from members of the public. They do see MPs as a protected species—and that applies to all of us—because what has happened today damages the standing of parliaments and the parliamentarians who attempt to do this work, and the very fabric of our democracy is undermined. We need to address greater transparency and improve accountability so that the public can scrutinise the work more readily, because that certainly is not possible at present.

I start with the issue of donations, and this certainly goes back to how the Prime Minister operates. In the latest release of data from the Australian Electoral Commission that came out on 1 February, we saw that tobacco and mining money still found its way into the coffers of the coalition, and the alcohol industry was there to benefit both Labor and the coalition in that case. Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris spent about $4.5 million under their own names, and the Alliance of Australian Retailers—which just seemed to appear out of nowhere but really had so much to do with plain packaging—dispersed $9 million. The Minerals Council of Australia reported $4 million and the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies reported $2.2 million. This, interestingly, was around the time of the debate about the mining tax, and it is worth remembering that those companies spent $22 million on advertising. These are big companies influencing and being very close to key politicians in this place, and people are not able to open a window on how that influence is exerted and what discussions go on behind closed doors. That it is certainly very relevant to what we are discussing here.