Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Greens for asking us to commit to comprehensive and immediate political donation reform. I just want to run through that proposition. I start by referring the Greens to the electoral reform green paper on donations funding and expenditure that was released in 2008, which contemplated serious reform to the funding of elections in this country.

Senator Rhiannon interjecting—

I would then refer the Greens, responding to Senator Rhiannon's interjection, to the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2010, which Labor introduced into parliament. That bill would have done a great deal. It would have capped donations and it would have introduced much higher thresholds for transparency. It would have made parties accountable for public funding by linking the funding to actual expenditure and prohibiting the practice that we have witnessed in other parties, where they take the public funding and pocket it. The leaders of those parties pocket it rather than spend it for campaign purposes. And it would have limited the scope for rorts, like donation splitting.

I would also refer the Greens to the comprehensive donations reforms introduced and undertaken by a Labor government in New South Wales. Amongst other things, those reforms limited the ability of property developers and others to subvert democratic outcomes. We must note that it turns out that the Liberal Party have been doing their very best to get around these laws in the intervening period. They have been doing their best to get around that scheme through the use of the Free Enterprise Foundation, a process that was undertaken under the watchful eye of the then Finance Director of the New South Wales Liberal Party, Senator Sinodinos.

I would refer the Greens to the policies on donations that we have taken to the last two elections. Those policies reduce the threshold for disclosure of donations by organisations from $13,200 to just $1,000, reduce the threshold for disclosure of personal donations to just $50, ban foreign donations and introduce real-time disclosure. I do not say all of this to try to make a cheap point.

The point I want to make is that the Labor Party is onto this. We are committed to donations reform and we have been advocating for it for a long time. Labor as a party and as a movement is firmly committed to transparency. It is why, for instance, we hold our conference in public—a position that I know some in the New South Wales Greens are now starting to contemplate. It is why we disclose all of our corporate donations over $1,000, despite the fact that this is not required by law. We do that because we think it is important. That stands in stark contrast to the Liberals, who not only do not obey the spirit of the law but, in New South Wales, seem to make concerted efforts to skirt the letter of it. We now know that the Liberal Party has engaged in a long-running campaign to obscure the names of some of its most generous donors through donation splitting, by allowing people to donate below the cap to each of the state and federal branches, and by the use of corporations to anonymise donations, through the use of the Free Enterprise Foundation and the various other fundraising forums that are used in this way.

It took an ICAC inquiry to find out the details of these schemes, and it turned out that it implicated a number of senior New South Wales Liberals.

We have talked a lot in the last weeks about the potential influence of foreign donations. Businessmen with links to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop have donated half a million dollars to the Western Australian division of the Liberal Party during the last two years. This has been disclosed through the disclosure process. All of those donors have links to the Chinese government, and the vast bulk of that money was given by companies with no apparent interests—no business interests—in Western Australia. The Herald reports that several of the donations have been obscured by the channelling of funds via executives or related companies, or by the donor's failure to disclose to the Electoral Commission, in apparent breach of Commonwealth law.

I say this: if we are serious about protecting the integrity of our politics, we have to get serious about donations reform. The Liberal Party has spent more than a decade fighting Labor proposals for a better system, and it is time to stop.