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

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for immediate action on political donations reform, to address the corrupting influence of political donations, including from property developers and fossil fuel companies.

There is systematic failure in the electoral funding system in Australia today. It breeds corruption and it must change. Electoral funding laws are broken. They are broken because they do not work. They do not work for the community and they are deeply damaging to our democracy. They do not work because large donations can be disguised. They can be disguised by a whole range of methods that further undermine the public's confidence. They are also not working because of inconsistencies in disclosure. Transparency is not working. You cannot say that there is transparency when there is such deep inconsistency, often in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, between the disclosure of companies and the disclosure of the parties and the candidates who received the money. The result is that the big donors—powerful players—are perceived to buy influence. Sometimes they appear to buy influence, and that perception is damaging our democracy. It certainly encourages the notion that politicians are for sale.

The public deserve honesty. They deserve honesty in terms of how our funding laws work. Again, the culture is one of dishonesty. It is dishonest because so much is not disclosed, and what is disclosed barely helps inform the public and those who are trying to understand how the current system works. This has been identified very clearly by Transparency International. In a very important report into political funding that they released in 2015, they found:

Australia’s high disclosure threshold on financial contributions to political campaigns means that loopholes can be easily abused.

Those loopholes exist because of a number of factors. One very big one is that, at the moment, you do not have to disclose that you are giving money at a federal level if your donation is under $12,800. But you can give that $12,800 in every state and territory. Multiply that amount eight times and it comes to about $100,000 that you can give without disclosing it.

Our system is also broken because there really is no comeback for people who do the wrong thing. The AEC has not prosecuted anyone under the AEC laws on electoral funding over the past seven years. We can also see how serious this is from a lot of the incidents that were exposed in New South Wales at the Independent Commission Against Corruption, our New South Wales corruption watchdog. Often when I have spoken on this issue people say: 'That is a New South Wales problem. We do not have it at a federal level.' We do not know what we have at a federal level because we do not have a commission to expose it. That is the essence of it, and that is why the New South Wales ICAC has done such an outstanding job.

It is worth sharing some of the examples. They are very worrying. There was a sham company called Eightbyfive. It was run by Tim Koelma, a former staffer of Liberal Party minister Chris Hartcher. He issued false invoices for consulting services to disguise donations. In that period about $400,000 came to the Liberal Party. The Free Enterprise Foundation launders—