<< back to archive index Speeches Regarding Bills Date: 18th October 2006 Subject: Speech by The Hon. Dr ARTHUR CHESTERFIELD-EVANS, on the Election Funding Amendment Bill 2006 From Hansard The Hon. Dr ARTHUR CHESTERFIELD-EVANS: " Often in this House we have to support bills that do not go anywhere near far enough but are a step in the right direction, and this bill is that. I suppose if the glass is a quarter full it is better than its being completely empty. On that basis one supports what one has. Public election funding is money from the taxpayer to fund elections. This was supposed to introduce some equity in electoral funding and lessen the influence of donors. However, the donors are just giving larger and larger amounts: public funding is still a drop in the bucket. Those who pander to the big end of town still reap immense benefits from doing that. Those of us who take very little money from the big end town and try to manage with public funding are immensely disadvantaged by the existing system. The large parties have an immense advantage because of their level of donor funding-indeed, perhaps a decisive advantage in many marginal seat campaigns. If that were not enough, the binary system, which immensely favours large political parties, and the gerrymander of single-seat electorates mean that the major parties almost invariably get a higher percentage of seats than they did of the votes. The lazy media rolls all the votes in to show the two-party preferred situation as if there are only two possibilities, which under the gerrymandered system is the situation in practice. Given that situation, the parties take immense joy in incumbency and abuse it to hell, perhaps to the same extent that they abuse electoral funding. Today's newspaper reports that the State Government has spent more than $6 million of taxpayers' money on a series of advertisements, spinning its virtues just six months out from the next election. If one were to graph government spending on advertising against the electoral cycle, one would see a massive spike. What a surprise! I have proposed legislation that would limit spending on advertising in the year before an election to the amount spent immediately after the election. Of course, that proposal went nowhere. That type of legislation provides the opportunity to show restraint, but the Government was not interested. I have also attempted to introduce transparency in government advertising. It should be scrutinised by a parliamentary committee so that if it is being undertaken for the good of the people of New South Wales-it might be a road safety campaign, a do-more-exercise campaign or a smoke less campaign-people will agree that it is worth while and appropriate expenditure of taxpayers' money, and if it is a self-congratulatory campaign it will not be approved. That could be done through the State Electoral Office or some other neutral body. It could even be done by a respectable, transparent public service body, and the expenditure could be publicly discussed. As it is, the Government simply spends what it likes. Joe Hildebrand reported in the Daily Telegraph: The Coalition will now introduce legislation giving the Auditor-General the power to review all government ads and force the Labor Party to pay for that which is deemed political. The Coalition claims recent campaigns, based around slogans like "Let's get NSW moving" and "A new direction for NSW", are party propaganda and should be paid for by the ALP. The $6 million-plus figure only accounts for placing the ads-it does not cover the cost of getting them made. The Government forked out almost $900,000 for the "A new direction for NSW" campaign and almost as much for the "Let's get NSW moving" ads. The recent TV blitz urging people to join the police service-the Government has pledged 750 new recruits-cost more than $900,000. More than $720,000 was spent on spruiking the new CityRail timetable. By far the biggest slice went to the "Water for Life" campaign, with more than $2 million spent outlining the Government's water plan. By contrast a modest $227,000 was spent publicising the new state infrastructure plan, and $382,000 on ads urging the Federal Government to give NSW its fair share of GST revenue. The cost of placing the ads came to $6,009,141-the production costs have not been released. It has also emerged that the Government spent more than $350,000 mounting its High Court challenge to the federal workplace laws. The ad splurge has prompted claims the Government is misusing public funds. What a surprise! Of course, the Australian Labor Party is throwing stones at the Howard Government, and that is not unreasonable. The Howard Government has spent $1 billion on political advertising. It has also spent $13.5 million on flying the Prime Minister and his entourage around the world over the past nine years. Last year it spent $115 million on private recruitment agencies, $10 million on media monitoring and $89,000 on massages for public servants. Of course, that does not relate to advertising. This Government spends a huge amount on spin doctoring. I have asked for the expenditure figures, but it has been extremely difficult to get them. To its credit, the Opposition has asked many of these questions during estimates committee hearings, but the answers it has received do not relate to finances. They simply refer to the Premier's circular about what is supposedly honourable behaviour. They also do not mention quantities. I have been to public rallies at which I have made statements and sometimes the only medical person there was a representative of Rehame, a taxpayer-funded media monitoring service. The information it collects is not available to all honourable members; we cannot go to the library and request that information despite the fact that it has been paid for by the taxpayers. We cannot use it to see what the electorate wants and what are the issues. No, it is produced for the advantage of the Executive. It is effectively a public subsidy for the Labor Party and it is protected by Cabinet solidarity and kept up at Governor Macquarie Tower so that the Labor Party can have the jump on everyone else involved in political process and squeeze the maximum amount out of its incumbency. Electoral allowances for lower House members are regularly increased so that they can keep the propaganda flowing to their constituents and, as a result, anyone trying to take seats from them is disadvantaged. Members of the upper House are elected by a percentage of voters in the State and some of us see the State as our electorate and the people of New South Wales and their interests as the focus of our efforts. However, our allowances are not increased. Perhaps that is because of the Government's contempt for the upper House. It parachutes in hacks who are loyal to the party rather than require them to be elected in their own right. It does not want or need them to have any money. As a result, it is happy to put the money into lower House seats to suit the gerrymander. This issue is not addressed by the bill, but it is extremely important for election funding and the results of elections in New South Wales. When I say that this bill addresses only a small part of what it should address, that is what I mean. I do not have all the figures, and I believe that they are not available. I note that the Opposition has tried to obtain them in estimates committee hearings but it has not succeeded. All it has received is a bunch of Premier's memoranda. The bill, as far as it goes, amends the provisions of the Electoral Funding Act. It will require the disclosure of political donations and electoral spending incurred in connection with an election. The Electoral Funding Authority has highlighted a recent case that shows the important disclosure provisions of the legislation could be undermined. The authority has no power to require a person to provide information to it about the identity of another person or organisation that may have failed to disclose a political donation or electorate expenditure. The Minister in his second reading speech-which he gave only last night-cited a specific case in which a political group organised for a number of individuals and businesses to make a contribution to the cost of electoral advertising. He stated: The political organisation arranged for the advertisements to be placed in various local media. The organisation also arranged for the media agency, which ran the advertisements, to bill the individuals and businesses that contributed to the advertisements directly, rather than billing the political organisation. The individuals and businesses that paid for the advertisements were required under the Election Funding Act to disclose this expenditure, but did not do so. Neither the media agency nor the political organisation had an obligation to disclose the electoral expenditure, as they had not incurred the advertising expenditure themselves. Further, the authority had no power to require either the political organisation or the media agency to identify those individuals and businesses that had paid for the advertisements. This provision is a positive step towards improving transparency in the funding of political campaigns. Australian Democrats Senator Andrew Murray has campaigned about this issue federally. I congratulate the Government for taking this initiative. I give credit where it is due and I criticise where criticism is warranted. Interestingly, Treasury will be available to cost the election promises made by both the Government and the Opposition. Prior to the 2003 election, I asked the Government to cost the promises made by the smaller parties. We are to have a huge taxpayer-funded scheme to cost Opposition policies and, of course, if they do not add up, the Government will use that information to slur the Opposition in yet another abuse of incumbency. I said that if that system is to be established then the minor parties' policies should also be costed, but I was told that that would be too expensive. I said, "If there are ideas that you want to poo-poo, surely it is a good investment of taxpayers' money to have those ideas costed. If they are ridiculous ideas that are not cost-effective, presumably-if Treasury does its work in a good, public servant, neutral way-those promises will look ridiculous. If, however, they are good, well-costed and innovative ideas that are from left field, and they show possibilities other than the two tired old parties taking their orders from the big end of town, surely the citizens and taxpayers of New South Wales are entitled to have those ideas costed. They are also entitled to have a ballpark figure costing of the promises of the Democrats, who had made a serious attempt to get comprehensive policies in many areas. I think some of the other smaller parties would also be trying to get a comprehensive overview of New South Wales policies, because we take our role in this Parliament seriously. But the Government was too busy using taxpayers' funds to further its own cause. With regard to the world's greatest scam, the GST, the Howard Government spent endless amounts of money on advertisements showing that the Australian tax system was broke. The GST research was highly funded by Treasury, which costed it all out, but there was no public release of the figures relating to the various taxation options to enable the public to debate them. Indeed, the only game in town was the option the Government chose. The costing and design of that option was entirely taxpayer funded, and anyone who sought any information to counter Treasury's immense input of taxpayer funds to look at what the Government wanted to do was not able to get it. I believe that gave the incumbents a huge advantage in the election. Indeed, it basically amounted to an abuse of incumbency by the Liberals at the Federal level. Presumably I will have this debate about the costing of minor parties' electoral promises with the Government shortly, and I hope that this time the Government will have a better attitude than it had under Treasurer Egan. The spin is extremely important and effectively amounts to electoral funding. Provisions of the bill Schedule 1 [2] inserts in the Act provisions to enable the authority or staff members in its employ to demand the name and address of a third person where they reasonably suspect that the other person has failed to disclose political donations or electoral expenditure, as required by the Act. It might be noted that the Freedom Foundation, a Victorian-based foundation that receives donations that are then funnelled straight to the Liberal Party, effectively implements a system of hiding political donations to the Liberal Party. I believe that collection agencies that allow secret donations should be subject to the same declaration standards as those that apply to any other electoral donation given directly. The second reading speech refers to the power to investigate donations as follows: The power will be able to be exercised only in circumstances where the authority or authorised officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person may have information, which enables the person who incurred the electoral expenditure to be identified. Schedule 1 [1] amends provisions of the Act to provide for public funding of election campaigns. Candidates are entitled to make claims for reimbursement of electoral expenditure from the Constituency Fund. Parties, on the other hand, are entitled to make claims on the central fund for expenditure they incur. Item [1] inserts provisions to ensure that a candidate is entitled to claim from the authority campaign expenditure that has been incurred by the party for the benefit of a candidate and invoiced by the party to the candidate. This will apply regardless of whether there is a formal agency arrangement in place, or whether the candidate is legally liable to the party for the expenditure. In the past, candidates have been able to claim from the Constituency Fund amounts that have been invoiced to them by political parties, in circumstances where the party incurs expenditure on behalf of the candidate. Recently the authority sought legal advice from the Crown Solicitor about the Macquarie Fields by-election. In that by-election the Greens candidate submitted invoices received from the Greens for electoral expenditure incurred by the party on behalf of the candidate. However, the authority declined to reimburse those invoices from the Constituency Fund because the Crown Solicitor advised that candidates could only claim for expenditure that they themselves incur, or for expenditure that is incurred by the party for its candidates pursuant to a formal agency arrangement. The Greens candidate had not incurred the expenditure personally, and he did not have a formal agency arrangement with his party. In the context of the by-election, the Greens were ultimately able to obtain reimbursement from the Constituency Fund by resubmitting their claim to ensure it was made by the party and not by the candidate. This is possible because the Election Funding Act enables parties to claim on the Constituency Fund for by-elections. However, that is not the case for general elections. If this claim were to be made in a general election, it would be refused because the Act does not enable parties to claim directly on the Constituency Fund for general elections. The Crown Solicitor has advised that the authority will now need to also refuse claims made in respect of invoices issued by political parties to individual candidates for expenditure incurred by the party on behalf of the candidate, unless a formal agency arrangement is in place. This is despite such claims having been routinely accepted in the past. It all looks very much like a case of "choke off the funds to small parties". There was a huge fuss about Malcolm Jones, who resigned from this House because he was virtually certain to be censured for his use of databases and paper to get his party going. Here we have literally millions of dollars spent on advertising by the incumbents, yet for a few dollars spent on photocopying or accessing databases Malcolm Jones was hounded out of this place and vilified. I had no particular interest in supporting Malcolm Jones. I did not agree with his politics. I note that he came to this place on a preferential system of prearranged preference dominos that pushed him in. I had no time for the way he got here, and I had no time for his politics, but I acknowledge that as an individual the amount of taxpayers' money he took to further his party's cause was absolutely trivial compared with what the Government spends routinely virtually every day. I believe that point needs to be made. Indeed, this week former Premier Carr himself conceded that he saw more of Harry Triguboff, the property developer from Meriton, than he saw of members of his Cabinet. There is also a good deal of discrimination against Independents. Only $200 can be donated to an Independent, yet donations of $5,000 can be made to major parties. That is because in many electorates the Independent is competing head to head with the major parties. The local business people, who may want to help a friend, are disadvantaged immensely, as is the Independent, who is trying to break the hegemony of the two major parties in this State. One would think the major parties have enough of a gerrymander already without also giving themselves a huge advantage with regard to electoral funding. Interjection from The Hon. Duncan Gay (Nationals): You get double the staff we get. The Hon. Dr ARTHUR CHESTERFIELD-EVANS: We do more with them, too. Independents are also not allowed to endorse a party. The lower House Independents are specifically denied the right to help smaller parties in the upper House on the basis that they are trying to break the hegemony of the two major parties. Effectively that means that the major parties are rigging the whole electoral system to further their own cause. However, that is not in any way addressed in the bill. With regard to transparency in the way elections are run, when I suggested in this House that in local government elections candidates who are members of political parties should have their party membership stated on the ballot papers, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition said this would infringe a candidate's civil right to privacy. It is outrageous to suggest that people do not have the right to know what political party they are voting for. Candidates may pretend to be Independents when they are in fact members of major parties-half of them getting experience so they can become members of this place; to climb their way up the party ladder-and the poor old voters are not even informed of that. Yet millions of dollars of advertising expenditure paid for by the taxpayer propagandises them daily as advertisements are watched and surveyed by taxpayer-funded schemes favouring the incumbent parties. To those who say that this does not influence behaviour, I relate the story of how, many years ago when I started the anti-tobacco campaigns, I joined the Liberal Party-foolishly enough. I pointed out to the membership that tobacco was immensely harmful; it was killing 19,000 people a year and it was costing the Australian economy more than $2 billion-it now costs about $6.5 billion. An old chap in the Liberal Party said to me, "Yes, but you may not know they gave our party $30,000 last year." I said, "$30,000! Tobacco is costing the Australian economy over $2 billion". The old guy said, "Yes, sonny, but that's our $30,000". I said, "$30,000 to the Liberal Party is more important than $2 billion to the Australian economy and all those deaths, is it? The going price for the Liberal Party is $30,000, is it?" He said, "You won't get far with an attitude like that, sonny." I confess I did not get very far in the Liberal Party. I walked out the door! And of all the things I have done in my life certainly that is not something I regret. I joined the Australian Democrats because it was the only political party at that time that did not dirty its hands with taking tobacco money. The wimpy, pathetic major parties that we have to put up with in this House with their hegemony and their appalling attitude are still taking money from the pubs and clubs and are still doing nothing about tobacco to this day. Throughout New South Wales $450 million worth of building programs have commenced to create so-called outdoor areas, which are actually indoor areas, to get around the smoking legislation-which, coincidentally, is still not law 55 years after smoking was shown to cause lung cancer. That is the sort of influence that is bought by political donations to wimpy, major political parties who will not do the right thing by the people of New South Wales, and the bill does not address that matter. Reverend the Hon. Fred Nile is having another bash at the poor Democrats and the Eros Foundation, which is pro-sex and very much against the position taken by Reverend the Hon. Fred Nile on such matters. He criticised the Democrats for taking some money from the Eros Foundation. It should be noted that Internet censorship was brought in by some particularly foolish legislation introduced by Brian Harradine. The Democrats managed to have the bill sent off to a committee. The Hon. Doug Moppett commented that there was a suggestion in the legislation that Internet providers in New South Wales should be asked to censor pornographic material. It turns out that less than 1 per cent of porn in Australia is hosted on Australian sites. Of course, because of the prohibitive amount of time it would take to do so, it is not possible for Internet site hosts to monitor the content of all material on their sites. The Hon. Doug Moppett said that banning porn on Australian Internet sites was like shutting the window after the wall had blown down. That comment was made by a National Party member who took a sensible and rational look at the situation. Interestingly, when Internet providing was a growing industry it was said that Australia could do very well with regard to porn on the Internet-I understand that something like half the information stored by Internet providers is, in fact, porn-because although everyone says how awful porn is, a fairly large percentage of people look at it and it is relatively easy to store it in a computer's memory. Because of subsidies from that type of material Internet hosting would have been quite a growth industry. But that entire industry was lost to Australia and went to America, which, although a more prudish country than Australia, has a growing information technology industry because of its willingness to tolerate pornographic material. We may feel jolly that our pornographic material is hosted overseas and not in Australia, but the fact of the matter is that such prudery was not good for the development of the information technology industry in Australia. That fact is probably not known to Reverend the Hon. Fred Nile, who does not follow the economics of the information technology industry. The Eros Foundation also favoured the regulation of pornographic outlets in the Australian Capital Territory. Indeed, the payment of the registration of such outlets would pay for the policing of the material. When one looks at the difference between what is generally known as soft porn-which is consenting adults having sex-as opposed to porn which involves far more brutal and dubious types of unauthorised activities, it can be seen that revenue gained from the registration of porn outlets and the authorisation of soft porn would pay for the policing of hard-core porn. The attempts to ban such content totally has resulted in a far better outcome in the medium term for those who are concerned about the nastier types of porn. The very well thought out position of the Eros Foundation and the position of the Democrats were not inconsistent. That such slurs are thrown at the Democrats about such a small amount of money just shows the absurdity of the position of the Christian Democrats. But to return to the more central issue: Election funding-indeed, the entire electoral system in New South Wales and federally-is significantly skewed towards the major parties, particularly the incumbents. That problem should be addressed far better than it is in the bill. Although the bill does not go nearly as far as it should, we support the changes and improvements that it makes."

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