Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

The truth is that electoral reform requires support from across the parliament. In August this year, as is always the case after an election, the Special Minister of State asked the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters to inquire into and report on all aspects of the conduct of the 2022 federal election, and I think the terms of that referral are important and significant and provide an important opportunity for all senators in this chamber to participate in a structured way in a dialogue with other political parties and civil society about how we best conduct elections. But it is worth looking at the terms, because they refer to reforms to political donation laws, particularly the applicability of real-time disclosure and a reduction of the disclosure threshold to a fixed $1,000; potential reforms to the funding of elections, particularly regarding electoral expenditure caps and public funding of political parties and candidates; and the potential for truth in political advertising laws to enhance the integrity and transparency of the electoral system.

As a government we are interested in exploring with the parliament the ways that we can improve and enhance our electoral systems, and we're interested in doing that in a collaborative way, not in a way that seeks to score cheap political points off political opponents. The truth is that we are very proud as a party of the contribution that we have made in leading reforms to electoral laws. It was Labor that secured the ban on foreign donations, protecting our political system from foreign interference. It was Labor's amendments that linked public funding to campaign expenditure, preventing parties from profiting from the political system. You can go back to Bob Hawke in 1983; Labor, under Prime Minister Hawke, introduced a donations disclosure regime for the first time. It's a Labor reform, and we do those things because we know that transparency is the key to preventing and identifying corruption. I think that those are shared values across the chamber, or at least I hope that they are. It's why we continue to drive a reform agenda. It's actually Labor, not the opposition or the Greens, who have been driving the agenda for political donation reform over a very long time, driving the agenda for transparency and driving the agenda for government accountability. It was Labor who fought for that ban on foreign political donations. The Liberal Party didn't want to stop taking donations from foreign sources, despite the risk of foreign influence to our democracy, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept those amendments. It was Labor, of course, who protected charities—