Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I move –
That the bill be read a second time.
It gives me great pleasure to stand here as the Greens member for Hobart and bring through our Electoral Disclosure and Funding (Donation Disclosure) Amendment Bill 2024 to the parliament. As members know, we are here because the House of Assembly passed this legislation late last year. It passed with the support of Labor and the independents. We are very thankful for that. Our leader, Dr Rosalie Woodruff, took this bill through the House of Assembly, and I will read into the Hansard our second reading speech with some add-ons from me.
Almost every voter walks to the ballot box with a set of interests guiding their decision to vote. That is normal and a part of democracy. People have different interests, different concerns, and different dreams when they are walking up to vote. Some people are voting for a functioning bus service or a hospital bed. Some people are voting for a secure and affordable home, to protect our environment or to have people in parliament who will push for real climate action, as the Greens always will.
The problem with donations being made in secret to parties or candidates is that voters have no idea which companies and individuals are paying to give their own interests a leg up before everybody else’s, before every other voter. There is no denying the facts. Donations are made with the intention of getting policy outcomes. Secret donations are secret because the influence they are buying is unpalatable and, on full display, it is a naked reveal of influence at work to distort or pervert government processes.
We need look only as far back as the past year. We have had the Liberal government not long after the election rolling over very quickly to the pokies’ lobby and effectively walking away from genuine harm minimisation. We have had a property developer approach, the local Liberal member, who also happens to be the minister for Housing and have their own bespoke legislation come through this place that completely bypasses proper planning processes. We have multinational salmon corporations that right now are part of the largest mass‑mortality event in the state’s history and the people of Tasmania, the people we all represent, still have no real answers about that mass die‑off. There does not seem to be any accountability and, as we should all recognise, the regulations for the salmon industry are weak. There is a very clear and strong connection between secret political donations and poor outcomes for the people, for the environment, and, of course, ultimately for the economy.
The Greens have published as a party the details of our donors, whose total donations to our party were $1500 or more in a financial year. We have been transparent since the beginning and most of our money, of course as you would know, is made by small donors, not major corporations; we do not accept that money.
However, when they have been asked whether specific donations have been made to their parties, both the Liberal and Labor party members refused to answer those questions. Instead, they respond by declaring that is a matter for the party and they are simply doing what is required by the law. The law still only requires parties and candidates in Tasmania to work under federal election disclosure threshold laws. As we know some of those elements will change on 1 July this year, but we want to make it better.
These laws allow any single donation below $16,900, as I understand it, most recently, a year, to remain secret. Multiple donations can be made below that amount if a donor chooses to keep large sums secret. Our office compiled Australian Electoral Commission data over the past five years that revealed that the Liberals had concealed the source of around $13 million in donations to them, while the Labor Party had concealed the source of around $5 million in donations to them. That is $18 million over the past five years, the source of which the Tasmanian people, Tasmanian voters, will never know.
In the 2018 state election, we saw a huge fight played out across the state to control the legislation-making powers of the incoming government to favour Tasmania’s major gambling players, Federal Hotels and the Tasmanian Hospitality Association. The money flooded into Tasmania in that election. I am sure my Labor colleagues have not forgotten it. We certainly have not.
We understand the Liberals received at least $4.167 million but only declared the donors of $925,000 of that for the 2018 state election. After that election, the $900,000 spent by the Tasmanian Hospitality Association to campaign against the Labor Party and the Greens, who held a strong and clear moral policy position on harm minimisation from pokies.
The THA contribution to the Liberal win was rewarded by the Liberals in government with a $15 million funding donation to the Tasmanian Hospitality Association, what an excellent return on investment. This is the same party that is now abandoned its nation leading pokies reform, as I said earlier, moments after the last state election. We will never know how much the influence of donations played on that election, but it was obviously very serious pressure, persuasion, they both have the same effect politically in a democracy.
Next July – this July – the donation disclosure threshold for candidates and parties will drop to $5000 each financial year or reporting period. Even so, it still leaves Tasmania with the second highest threshold of any state or territory in the country, as I understand it, after the Commonwealth. It will also still only require annual reporting time frames for parties to disclose where the donations have come from.
What we have seen as a state over many decades is millions of dollars flowing into the Liberal and Labor Party coffers without the majority of the funding sources ever being revealed to the people we represent. Most people in the community agree that is not providing a fair playing field for all candidates. It encourages deals that favour donor interests over the public interest and the interests of the natural environment and therefore of future generations.
This bill has a long and extended history, as does the Tasmanian Greens persistent push for donations electoral reform. It started life with the government’s legislation that passed late in 2023 with Labor’s support. When that legislation comes into effect from 1 July this year, it will still leave Tasmania with the weakest electoral disclosure and funding laws in the country.
Since 2018, Victoria has reformed its laws, as has New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. All these jurisdictions have passed reforms that have enhanced their political donations and expenditure framework and have made them more publicly accessible. Most of them have donations disclosure thresholds of between $1000 and $1500.
During debate in the other place on the legislation, the principal act that we are seeking to amend today, the Greens introduced a range of amendments in an attempt to strengthen the government’s bill. We moved to have expenditure limits, expenditure periods to have donations caps, a reduction in disclosure thresholds, and an increase in the reporting times. We moved to have real‑time disclosures during the end of campaigns, truth in political advertising and limitations on who can make political donations. Both the Liberal and Labor parties at the time voted against these reforms. We remain implacably committed to them.
On the back of community concern at the Liberals’ obvious policy shift on pokies after the March state election, the Greens made a commitment to try again to improve the state’s woeful electoral laws in the interests of the Tasmanian people.
In June, we introduced the Electoral Disclosure and Funding Amendment Bill with a similar range of amendments to those we previously introduced in an attempt to amend the government’s legislation in late 2023. During the debate on that bill in June, the member for Lyons, Ms White, moved for the House to refer to have an inquiry into the matters and report back to the House. The committee sat and undertook an inquiry, and where there was a clear consensus is where we have focused our efforts in this legislation.
As a result of the inquiry, the committee made a number of recommendations for areas of reform it believed would have majority support among members of parliament. These were:
That the House agrees to amendments to the principal act that provide for a reduction in the threshold for reportable political donation from one of $5000 or more, which will come into effect on 1 July this year, to one of $1000 or more.
That, from the commencement of an election period until seven days from polling day, a reportable political donation is to be disclosed within seven days of the donation being received and that, outside of an election period, a reportable political donation is to be disclosed within 28 days of the donation being received.
The Greens’ amendment bill, which we bring forward, focused on those areas where we knew there was a broad consensus.
Our bill lowers the donation disclosure threshold from $5000 to $1000. New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT have a threshold of $1000, Victoria has a threshold of $1040, just $40 higher, the Northern Territory has a threshold of $1500, and Western Australia sits at $2500. South Australia would be the only Australian jurisdiction to have a similar threshold. Tasmania would have, this year, $5000 subject to indexation. If this bill passes, and we sure hope it does, Tasmania would no longer be at the bottom of the pack in Australia when it comes to donation disclosure thresholds.
Plenty of submissions to the government’s draft bill in late 2023 came through, including from the Integrity Commission, Tasmanian Election Inquiry Ltd., the Human Rights Law Centre, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australia Institute Tasmania, and a campaign email sent by an undisclosed many number of people. All these individuals and groups advocated for this $1000 threshold.
On the second recommendation that the committee that looked into this bill made last year on reporting times, our bill increases the reporting time frame outside of election campaign periods to monthly, whereby each month we will be required to report on the previous month’s donations. Previously, the bill that we tabled last June had required disclosure be made every seven days after a donation was received outside of an election period. There are a number of submissions to the inquiry and witnesses who advocated for this position, a more stringent position of a greater period of transparency, reporting every week after a donation was made outside of an election time frame. It would certainly be good in the last week of a campaign if we had 24‑hour donation disclosure, but we are not quite there yet.
We recognise that, overall, much of the feedback that was given to the committee was that a longer time frame outside of election periods – of a month, and one that is fixed in time, that would be more manageable and more administratively reasonable. Importantly, in our view, the transparency advantages that would be provided through having disclosures made every week compared to every month would be minimal. As a consequence, we have chosen in this bill before us to require disclosures be made monthly outside of an election period.
There are a number of reforms from our original bill that the committee felt needed to have further work so that they would land in a place where reform could be more broadly supported across either or both Houses of the parliament. These included ensuring a fair playing field for all candidates by creating a cap on spending, a cap on the donations that can be received, to have public funding of election campaigns, and to make sure political advertising during election campaigns is truthful and we have a system capable of combating disinformation and banning donations from for‑profit corporations.
We do not read these comments from the committee and we certainly do not believe that they are in any way diminishing the importance of pursuing these reforms. How we read the report, and as we understand from talking to members across the House of Assembly Chamber, it recognises that in this current moment in the parliament, we have more consultation. Maybe, some more research is required to make sure there are no unintended consequences or unresolved concerns to introducing these reforms and importantly, to getting agreement for broad support on any one of those that was mentioned earlier.
The Greens remain committed to strengthening electoral donations and funding laws so that, to the best of their ability, they can help ensure politics is free of corruption in all its forms. We have been campaigning on these matters for decades. It is in our DNA. We have a proud policy platform which is available for anyone to look out and see what our policy positions are. We are completely transparent and proudly so. People can see that we have had these policy positions for a long time. We are certainly not going to let go of working towards, advocating and fighting for having stronger electoral donation and disclosure laws.
I know that a number of my other colleagues in this place feel the same way. It is particularly important now, when we see democracy under assault all over the world, that we do everything within our power, through our people‑powered parliament, to strengthen our little democracy on behalf of the people of Tasmania.
What members have before us tonight is a relatively modest amendment reform bill. The matters that are in this bill have been very well‑aired in debates on previous bills – in the amendments that the Greens made to the government’s legislation last year, or attempted to make, in the debate that we had, in the bill we introduced in the House of Assembly last June, in the committee process, and in the wider views of the witnesses and submissions that were made to that hearing. What we have before us is an improvement, a good use of parliament’s time, and a good dose of sunlight for democracy. It is a very important step for our democracy for increasing transparency and accountability and fairness in the conduct of elections.
The Greens will keep fighting for this bigger suite of reforms. We know that having a reduction in the disclosure threshold to $1000 and the increase in the reporting times outside of election periods will mean that, unlike the current situation where we often do not know where the majority of donations made to political parties come from, and what we do know we know 18 months after an election is held, Tasmanians will have the opportunity to understand, when they go to cast their vote in an election, where the money is coming from, and to whom. That is a really critical step forward for our precious little democracy.
I commend the bill to the House and I look forward to hearing my honourable colleagues’ contributions.
