Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I move –
That the bill be now read the second time.
The SPEAKER – Is a vote required today?
Dr WOODRUFF – Yes, it is.
Thank you, honourable Speaker. Democracy, when it is functioning, is a beautiful thing. It is also increasingly under threat and very rare when it comes to talking about what is happening on the planet. When it functions well, it is free from influence of vested interests, powerful lobbyists, and, increasingly, super powerful and self‑interested corporations. It provides a playing field for each person to stand as a representative of their community and its values.
Healthy laws are a check on the advertising and also on the political organising and purchasing power of massive for‑profit corporations. These bodies should have their say, but no greater say than every individual citizen who has equally important perspectives, equally important lived experience, equally important future hopes and dreams, and strongly held values and beliefs.
A healthy democracy should provide a level playing field for all candidates. It gives people full information before they cast their vote at an election about who has given money to support a candidate or a party.
Many Tasmanians are genuinely worried, and rightly so, about the more authoritarian, less democratic shift to executive powers and to an erosion of the proper processes of governance that has occurred globally, especially in the last decade. They are concerned too, about what has been happening in Tasmania. The lack of transparency and accountability that infuses all politics of the major parties and how that has played out over at least the last three elections, and the impact that has on good governance processes like the right to information and access to information about the work of government; like the fact that special enabling legislation has been written in the last couple of decades to fast‑track or override planning laws; to facilitate developments for special interests; to allow harms to the environment to continue unchecked when in the interest of big business.
We have seen, over the 2018 elections, millions of dollars in money flowing into the Liberal and Labor party coffers without ever having to be publicly declared, especially the Liberal Party. In the lead up to the 2017‑18 election, they received $4.167 million but only declared where $925,000 came from. The Labor Party, in the same election, received $1.128 million but only declared $245,000. What we saw in that campaign was a huge fight to control the legislation‑making powers of the government of the day after the 2018 election to favour the federal hotels and big gambling interests. That money flooded into Tasmania. As anyone who remembers and was around for that election would understand, it was not a fair playing field. What we have seen in the chamber with the increase with the Greens and the crossbench is that Tasmanians are sick to their back teeth of that way of campaigning for elections.
It was so obviously a bought election when every masthead, day after day, in the Mercury, Examiner and Advocate tabloids were full of advertising for the Liberals. When every pub in Tasmania had enormous advertising and there was a sea of blue on every single road and highway. We knew that dirty money was flowing into the state and we knew it was influencing the outcome of the election.
There was an outcome for some of the people that we know of who put the money into that election. The $900,000 that the Tasmanian Hospitality Association spent campaigning against the Labor Party and the Greens in 2018 was rewarded by a $15 million donation from the Liberals there afterwards. That is what happens when you stump up and put money into secretive campaigns and you do not have to disclose to the people who are going to the ballot box.
We see it again and we would have seen it operating at the last election with the Liberals and the salmon industries. They had a cosy dinner that the Premier was at, an expensive Liberal Party fundraising dinner and lo, what a surprise that the money has flowed to the Liberal Party and continues to flow there. In the last reporting period, the Liberals declared that they got $2.4 million in donations, but we only know where 80% of that came from. They only declared $420,000 worth.
It is not surprising we did not see JBS and Cook there. Why would they need to make that known? They just do their business quietly in the background and they get rewarded by making sure that flag wavers and there are weak regulations so that the maugean skate remains on the brink of extinction, despite the fact that we know removing salmon farms from the Macquarie Harbour would make the difference to keeping that species with us into the future.
The Labor Party is just doing the same thing. Both parties are doing the same thing. Because in the last reporting period the Labor Party declared they got $1,000,000 in donations but they only disclosed where $16,000 of that came from. 98.4% secret donations.
This is the problem. When you have secret donations, you do not know who is paying the people to represent special interests over your interest. Your interest to get your bus stop fixed up, your interest to get a hospital bed when you need it, your interest to get houses built instead of a stadium. Who is paying for these decisions? That is the basis of the bill that we have before us today.
As it stands in 2018, ABC Fact Check found Tasmania’s donation laws would become the weakest in the country after the Victorian government made reforms. In the years since then, Victoria has reformed their laws, as has New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, who have also passed reforms that have enhanced their political donations and expenditure framework and made them more public.
Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2.30 p.m.
Resumed from above.
Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Tasmania dropped even further behind the rest of the country when we were declared to have the weakest donation laws. The government’s reforms that were passed last year with Labor support, but unfortunately without the amendments they promised to introduce at the time, still leave us in a situation where we have the weakest laws in the country regarding electoral disclosure and funding. The donation disclosure threshold that we have passed of $5000 leaves us with the second-highest threshold of any state or territory. It is only just a scrape ahead of South Australia that has a current index threshold of $6299. Next to Victoria, we remain one of only two states or territories that has no expenditure limit at all.
The government’s reforms, when they are enacted later this year, will bring us in line with three other jurisdictions that have a ban on foreign donations. However, they still fail to adopt a ban on other potentially corrupting donations from the property organisations and the tobacco and gambling industries. It has been long established that these three in particular have an absolutely corrosive effect on democracy with the rivers of money that pour into governments to influence their decisions.
The government’s reforms last year also failed to bring us into line with jurisdictions such as Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, which have introduced caps on political donations. The disclosure time frames that we passed last year are ahead of many jurisdictions. However, even in this matter, the Liberal government failed to bring us into best practice. In Tasmania, we still do not have a requirement for 24‑hour disclosure to Tasmanians in the last seven days before a polling day, which is critical because that is when so much money flows in: just before an election. That means we now have government legislation passed which did not introduce a single measure that is nation leading, and we are equal or near equal to last in three of the most important measures to improve democracy: the cap on donations, a disclosure threshold, and a cap on the amount that parties and candidates can spend at elections.
It is in this context that we are reintroducing our bill today, which would make our laws nation leading. This was something the Greens campaigned on hard in the election campaign we just had, and I also note that independents such as Craig Garland, Kristie Johnston and members of the Jacqui Lambie Network campaigned on transparency and integrity. I do not know about Mr O’Byrne, but I remember those other voices in the campaign making our collective voice against what has been the stranglehold of major parties in Australia over electoral laws to make sure that the people who vote on election day do not know who is paying for the campaigns of the people they might be voting for. They do not understand what interests are at play.
We made a commitment during the election campaign that we would bring in this bill at the first opportunity and we are proud to have put in the work and to have listened to Tasmanians. We have worked very strongly across the crossbench, in particular with independents, minor parties, and also in conversation with the government and the Labor Party to bring forward a set of amendments which are based on what we advocated for when the government’s legislation came to parliament last year. The consultation process for these amendments was done over years.
The Greens’ policies on this matter have been well aired. They have been in the public domain now for more than seven or eight years, and they have been supported by civil society. Calls that have happened since the 2018 election regarding the money that came to the Liberal Party’s campaign from the pokies lobby. There has been common and loud call over years now to strengthen our democracy in these areas.
We know that donation caps are incredibly important. It is where most of the country is lagging. Only Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland have caps on donations at all. Of those three states, Victoria is the only one to have a somewhat restrictive cap at $4160 over a whole term. Queensland’s is a cap of $10,000, and New South Wales has a very high cap on political donations of $26,400. The Victorian cap demonstrates that the cap that we propose in this bill of $1000 a year will not cause the sky to fall in.
It is relevant how much money gets donated because it was summarised in the comments of an anonymous politician in a study in 2018 about electoral reforms. That person said, ‘If someone donates $1000, they support you. If they donate $100,000, they’ve bought you.’ In 2018, we also heard from Michael Yabsley in a similar study. Michael was a former Liberal Party treasurer. He described what he called a ‘commonplace soft corruption in the donations process’, where donations are tied to a commitment to meet with particular ministers or political leaders.
The federal Senate Committee called to look into the political influence of donations found that it is hard to directly prove that donations buy political outcomes. However, the anecdotal evidence between the donations and the outcome is utterly compelling. The Senate Committee also recognised that the amount of any donations cap would be relatively arbitrary. There is no rule book in the universe that states what is the best place to draw the line when it comes to how many donations are okay and how much is too much in a parliamentary term.
The Senate’s inquiry struck, on balance, a recommendation that a donation cap should be set at $3000 per term per donor. We recognise that that number still sounds somewhat arbitrary, but it was referenced to a number of things. For example, the average amount that individual Australians personally donated to charities in 2017-18 was $764. Over a four-year term that sums up to $3056, which is very close to the $3000 donations cap that was ultimately proposed by the Senate Committee.
It was based on a kind of relativity to what seemed, for the average Australian, reasonable to spend and donate to charities in a year. Drawing a connection between expenditure on charities and expenditure on political parties was something that the Senate thought was a reasonable connection.
One of the issues with large political donations, obviously, is that they disproportionately give influence to people or organisations who have more wealth. The Senate Committee evidence showed that $1000 a year in a donations cap would bring the maximum allowable donation down to the same level that is spent by everyday people on issues that matter to them. Honourable Speaker, it confirms that $1000 a year would be a reasonable cap for the purposes of levelling the playing field, which is what this bill intends to do.
On the matter of who is eligible to make political donations, this bill introduces a new division to the act that deals with donations from anyone other than natural persons who are not citizens or permanent residents.
Various jurisdictions in Australia have already banned donations from foreign actors from the property, tobacco and gambling industries. The Greens’ preferred approach is the Canadian donation laws, which allow that only natural persons who are citizens or permanent residents of that country can donate to political parties. The Canadian law is similar to provisions that New South Wales attempted to pass in 2012 that sought to limit donations to persons who are registered on the electoral roll only. This law was overturned by the High Court in 2013 on the basis that it failed to satisfy the Lange test. This was because no clear purposes were articulated for the prohibition.
Our proposed amendment in this bill deals with this matter by limiting donations to natural persons rather than the more restrictive electoral roll requirements that New South Wales was considering. This is outlined in the proposed new section 28A, which articulates the object of the division. What this means is that it can only be individual, natural people who are able to donate to political parties or candidates.
Regarding real-time disclosure of donations, our bill introduces a proper real-time disclosure framework that is modelled on the Queensland legislation. It is a proposal for a blanket requirement for donation disclosure within seven days after the receipt of donations and within 24 hours during the seven days in the lead‑up to the election polling day. Our bill would ensure that all but the donations made in the 24 hours before polling would be disclosed before voters go to the ballot box.
The reforms that the government passed last year are an improvement, but they are still woefully inadequate. As it stands in our legislation, information about any donation that is made seven days before polling day would not be available to the public before polling day itself. That could be as high as 14 days, as the Electoral Commission has to take up to seven days to publish this information.
I want to flag here that we have been in conversations with Ms Beswick from the Jacqui Lambie Network, and they have proposed an amendment to this bill, which we have accepted, that would take the disclosure time period of seven days outside an election to a one‑month disclosure time frame outside an election. If we go into committee, I will discuss that amendment in detail, but it means that by the fifteenth day of a month following a month when a donation had been made or received, a disclosure would need to be made in that period. We think that is a very reasonable balance and we are happy to support that.
On the matter of a donation disclosure threshold – our bill lowers the donation disclosure threshold, which is the level at which a candidate or a party is required to tell Tasmanians where their donation has come from, from $5000 down to $1000.
There is a huge number of submissions to the government’s draft bill last year that included some from the Integrity Commission, the Tasmanian Election Inquiry Limited, the Human Rights Law Centre, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australia Institute and the campaign email that was sent by an undisclosed number of people who advocated for this $1000 threshold. New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory also have this threshold, and Victoria has a threshold just $40 higher. The Northern Territory has a threshold of $1500 and Western Australia is $2500, and South Australia is the only Australian jurisdiction to have a similar threshold as lax as ours at $5000.
Honourable Speaker, any candidate or party registered to run candidates in a federal election would have to comply with federal disclosure thresholds of $1000. Keeping a threshold of $5000, they will effectively be two sets of rules for candidates at Tasmanian elections, depending on the Electoral Commission registration status of candidates.
Finally, our bill also introduces expenditure limits for candidates, the parties, the third-party campaigners, for all House of Assembly elections. Most jurisdictions impose a cap on spending for independent candidates and a cap on parties, with the dollar amount that is multiplied by the number of electorates that the party has endorsed candidates within. This cap can often be distributed across electorates in excess of a candidate’s electoral cap. Tasmania and Victoria are the only states without expenditure caps for lower House elections.
The 2013 Electoral Amendment Bill that passed the House of Assembly stalled at the first reading in the Legislative Council. That bill would have imposed expenditure caps of $75,000 for candidates and $750,000 for a party, that would increase by $1000 and $10,000 a year. That is the model that we passed here in this lower House 11 years ago. It did not make it through the upper House at the time, but we passed it through this place and we are proposing the same model to put expenditure caps on parties and candidates today.
I do not have a lot of time left, and I am looking forward to other members’ contributions. As I mentioned, we announced that we would bring this suite of reforms on during the election campaign. It is unfinished business from last year. Last year, the Labor Party promised that they would introduce amendments that are almost the same as the ones that we are proposing today. And yet, they did not bring those amendments through in the upper House as they promised. They had reasons at the time that they had for not doing that. This is the first opportunity; and we promised Tasmanians that we would come here and do everything we could at this point in time.
While the Electoral Commission is preparing the changes to the legislation that passed last year, now is the time to make these reforms that should have been done last year. The reason they were not done was because the at the time, the Labor Party said they wanted to get some base reforms through before an election. That is where we were. Despite the fact that I have heard some negative comments from Ms White, who is responsible for taking this bill through for Labor, I hope that we have made the very clear point that the Greens want to collaborate and have been collaborating for the past five weeks non-stop, and are trying to find every opportunity to make amendments or remove clauses from this bill so that we can compromise and find a way of passing laws that are better than what we have.
That is the bottom line. We are here to collaborate, to work to pass better laws for Tasmania, to have more transparency, more accountability, more clarity about who is paying for the campaigns for people when they stand for parliament.
We proposed amendments and I made it very clear, in addition to the personal conversations and many text messages I have had this morning, that we are open to and will move a bunch of attached amendments, including the ones that I flagged on behalf of Miriam Beswick from the Jacqui Lambie Network. Also, we are prepared to remove the provisions relating to limitations on the eligibility to make political donations, and also on the cap for political donations and, if required, in the truth in political advertising provisions.
These are matters that Tasmanians want to have resolved. We accept that. It does not in any way change our Greens policy position. We firmly believe that having a cap on donations, banning corporations and just making individuals able to make donations, and to have truth in political advertising is essential for best practice democracy electoral legislation.
However, we are realists and we are here today on behalf of Tasmanians who voted for us, listening to the community who desperately want to work across the parliament, with the crossbench, with the Jacqui Lambie Network, Independents, and the Labor Party, if they will come on board, to make Tasmania’s laws on elections and how they are run better. In good faith, we are open to the changes that we wait to hear from the Labor Party. We would be open to hearing about changes that can be made that will be in our state’s best interests.
I am very confident that is what the majority of Tasmanians want us to be doing. They want us to be working together, they want us to compromise, they want us to reach solutions that overall are improving the state of our democracy.
I will finish by thanking all the members who have worked very hard, attended briefings that we have given, listened to ideas and come up with problems; as well as the JLN for coming up with proposed amendments. It is clear from reading the Hansard of the bill in November 2022 that there were a lot of conversations about things that could be improved. I am looking at the comments made by Labor at the time. Now is the time to put those words into action and make sure that the state’s electoral reform laws on disclosure and funding can be better than the woefully inadequate ones we have at the moment.
Time expired.
