Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Deputy Speaker, I can indicate a vote is required today. I move –
That the bill be now read a second time.
Almost every voter walks to the ballot box with a set of interests guiding their decision to vote. That is normal and there is nothing wrong with it, but people have different interests when they are walking up to vote. Some people are voting for a functioning bus service or a hospital bed when they need it, or to protect our glorious Tasmanian environment.
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 above everybody else’s. 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. Just last week, the government was fast-tracking planning approvals but would not say whether the developers for Stony Rise had donated to the Liberal Party, which is a shame.
The Greens have published the details of donors whose total donations to our party were $1500 or more in a financial year. However, when they have been asked whether specific donations have been made to their parties, both the Liberal and Labor Party members refuse to answer those questions. Instead, they respond by declaring that they do what is required by law. The law still only requires parties and candidates in Tasmania to work under federal election disclosure threshold laws. These laws allow any single donation below $16,300 a year to remain secret. Multiple donations can be made below that amount if a donor chooses to keep large sums secret.
In the 2018 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. We understand the Liberals received at least $4.167 million, but only declared the donors of $925,000 of that. After that election, the $900,000 spent by the Tasmanian Hospitality Association to campaign against the Labor Party and the Greens was rewarded by the Liberals in government with a $15 million donation. This is the same party that has now abandoned its nation-leading pokies reforms. We never know how much the influence of donations played a role in that recent decision and how much of it was pressure from an industry lobby group. Pressure, persuasion, they both have the same effect.
In the last reporting period, the Liberals declared $2.4 million in donations, but they only declared the donors for $420,000 of that. The Labor Party has been just as secretive. In the 2018 election, Labor reported receiving $1.128 million but declared the source of just $245,000 of that money. In the most recent reporting period, Labor received some $1 million in donations, but only revealed the source of a tiny part of that.
Next July, the disclosure threshold for donations made to candidates and parties will drop to $5000 per financial year or reporting period. Even so, it still leaves Tasmania with the second highest threshold of any state or territory in the country. It will also still only require annual reporting timeframes for parties to disclose where their 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 Tasmanians. 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.
This bill has a long and extended history. It started life with the government’s legislation that passed late last year with Labor’s support. When that legislation comes into effect from 1 July 2025, 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 of those jurisdictions have passed reforms that enhanced their political donations and expenditure framework and have made them more publicly accessible.
During debate on the legislation last year, the Greens introduced a range of amendments in an attempt to strengthen the government’s legislation. We moved to have expenditure limits and expenditure periods, to have donations caps, a reduction in disclosure thresholds and an increase in the reporting period 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 voted against these reforms.
On the back of community concern at the Liberals’ obvious policy shift on pokies in the March state election that the Greens made a commitment to try again to improve our state’s woeful electoral laws. In June, we introduced the Electoral Disclosure and Funding Amendment Bill with a similar range of amendments to those we had previously introduced in an attempt to amend the government’s legislation last year. During the debate on that bill in June, the Labor member for Lyons, Ms White, moved for the House to refer the Greens’ bill to the Standing Committee on Government Administration B to have an inquiry into the matters and report back to the House.
The committee was tasked with taking evidence with the aim of making recommendations that the parliament might adopt to improve the functions of the act. A range of submissions was presented to the committee, including from legal and psephological experts, community advocates, political parties and the Tasmanian Electoral Commission. Their evidence stands as an important contribution to advancing debate about what is healthy for Tasmania’s electoral laws, what is administratively possible, what is reasonable and what the wider community expects. There was a clear theme amongst those who presented for improving the transparency of donations laws in Tasmania. As a result of that inquiry, the committee made a number of recommendations for areas of reform it believed would have majority support among members in parliament. These were:
That the House agree to amendments to the principal act that provide for a reduction in the threshold for a reportable political donation from one of $5000 or more, 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.
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 today is the Electoral Disclosure and Funding (Donation Disclosure) Amendment Bill. In this bill, we include these recommendations from the standing committee.
Our bill lowers the donation disclosure threshold from $5000 to $1000. New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT have a threshold of $1000, and Victoria has a $1040 threshold 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 to the one Tasmania will have next year of $5000, subject to indexation. If this bill passes, Tasmania would no longer be at the bottom of the pack in Australia when it comes to donation disclosure thresholds.
A considerable number of submissions to the government’s draft bill last year included those 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 number of people. All of these individuals and groups advocated for this $1000 threshold.
Regarding the second recommendation the committee made on reporting times, our bill increases the reporting timeframe 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 we tabled in June had required that disclosure be made every seven days after a donation was received outside of an election period. There were a number of submissions to the committee’s inquiry and witnesses who advocated for this position, and that is a more stringent position of a greater period of transparency and reporting every week after a donation was made outside of an election timeframe.
However, we recognise that overall, much of the feedback that was given to the committee was that a longer timeframe outside of election periods – that is, of a month and one that is fixed in time – would be more manageable, more administratively reasonable and 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 the bill before us to require that disclosures be made monthly outside of an election period.
As I flagged, there is a number of reforms from the original Greens bill in June that the committee felt needed to have further work so they would land in a place where reform could be broadly supported across the House. These include 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; to make sure that political advertising during election campaigns is truthful and we have a system capable of combating disinformation; and banning donations from for‑profit corporations.
The Greens do not read these comments from the committee – and we certainly do not believe – as 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 Chamber, it recognises that in this current moment in the parliament we have, more consultation and possibly research is required to make sure there are no unintended consequences to introducing these reforms and, importantly, to getting agreement for broad support on any one of those I have mentioned.
The Greens remain committed to improving our 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. We have a proud policy platform which is available to anyone to look at and see what our policy positions are. People can see we have had these policy positions for a long time, so we are certainly not going let go of working towards advocating and fighting for having stronger electoral donation and disclosure laws. In this power-sharing parliament with a minority government situation, it is a tremendous opportunity to make other changes that we are able to make here now.
What we have before us in this bill is a nugget of gold that has weathered the test of time. They are modest reforms that have been very well aerated in debates on previous bills, in the amendments we made to the government’s legislation last year, in the debate we had and the bill that we introduced in June, in the committee’s process and the wider views of the witnesses and submissions that were made to that hearing. What I see before us is an improvement and I understand all members of parliament – the crossbench, the government and the opposition ‑ have indicated their broad support for the changes we have in this bill. This is a very important step for democracy in Tasmania for increasing transparency and accountability and fairness in the conduct of elections.
I thank all the members of the House that I and my office staff have been working with for many months now. It has been the better half of seven or eight months we have been working on the reforms that we have before us today in this debate. I thank members for having worked in good faith and given their feedback and had the opportunity to use the committee process. It has enabled us to be in the position we are in today of finding these things that we can agree on, I hope and expect.
The Greens will continue to fight for the bigger suite of reforms, but we feel very confident that having a reduction in the disclosure thresholds 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 major political parties come from, Tasmanians will have the opportunity to understand that when they go to cast their vote in an election and that is a really critical step forward for our democracy.
I commend the bill to the House and I look forward to hearing members’ views.
