Donations disclosure requirements for federal political parties are the loosest in the country.
Any donation worth less than $14 300 doesn't need to be made public. Parties aren’t required to tell voters about multiple donations from the same donor if each donation is under the threshold, so it's easy to 'split' larger payments into smaller parts and obscure where the money came from.
The definition of a donation (or a 'gift', as it's called under the Act) is set so narrowly that money for fundraising dinners doesn’t get declared as a donation. Membership fees to political party fundraising bodies are treated the same way. It's impossible for the public to know whether income classified as an 'other receipt' is money given for fundraising purposes, or income from investments.
Disclosures aren't timely. It can take up to nineteen months for a donation to be made public, by which time its relevance may be missed.
The federal government is a laggard in respect to donations reform. Over recent years the states and territories have made substantial changes to their own disclosure requirements. For example, donations worth $5 000 or less are now required to be disclosed in all states except Tasmania. Most states have banned 'donations splitting' by requiring political parties to aggregate donations under the threshold and declare them once the sum is worth more than the threshold. NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and the ACT require parties and donors to disclose donations in real-time during an election campaign, and Queensland has included payments for fundraising dinners in their definition of a gift.
There is no reason political actors at a federal level should not be subject to similar reporting requirements. Federal parliamentarians are not more saintly than their counterparts. They are just as likely as politicians in the states and territories to be tempted to put their own interests (or their party's interest) over the public interest. They are just as likely to open doors to large donors that wouldn't be opened for regular people, and they're just as likely to let those donors sway their decision-making on matters of public policy.
That's why this bill seeks to bring the Commonwealth disclosure regime into line with the reporting requirements set in the states and territories. It does this by reducing the disclosure threshold, introducing real-time reporting, improving compliance with disclosure requirements, providing greater detail on the sources of reporting entities' income, and generating more accessible donations data.
These reforms would fix the wide holes in the federal donations disclosure regime, which create corruption risks and undermine Australians' faith in our democracy. They are necessary changes to reduce corruption in federal politics, and increase the transparency and accountability over the influence of donations on parliamentarians.
As noted by the vast majority of submitters to this inquiry, integrity experts, community groups, and political parties on the crossbench have been campaigning for these reforms for years. But despite broad calls for change, and support for this bill, the majority committee report recommends we stick to the status quo.
A reason for this is the committee's concern that the reforms would be administratively burdensome. It isn't a surprise to see this assertion. Like clockwork, fears about administrative burden are consistently raised as an excuse to do nothing about our shoddy donations system. But this contention doesn't stack up. We know the provisions would be workable because they're working already in the states and territories. And while the Jacqui Lambie Network appreciates the (obviously deeply sincere) concern for the burden of these provisions on small campaigners and minor parties, we've proposed these amendments knowing that they would be perfectly manageable for our small team. We even believe that the major parties would be able to get their papers in order and release reports according to stricter rules.
However, the JLN does acknowledge that the current mechanisms for disclosing donations are clunky, both for reporting entities making disclosures, and for members of the public seeking to get access to data. The proposed legislation includes measures that would establish an AEC Disclosure Portal to address these issues.
The disclosure purpose of the portal is to bring political donations disclosures into the 21st century by automatically collating information on donors, keeping count of the amounts they've contributed (and to whom), and notifying people and reporting entities when they're required to make a disclosure. Similar portals already provide these services in South Australia and Queensland, and they've worked well to facilitate real-time disclosure in those states.
The portal would also serve an electoral expenditure purpose. This would allow the portal to act as a payment and transfer mechanism for the income reporting entities use to pay for electoral matters. From the perspective of the reporting entity and the donor, all this would mean is that credits to a reporting entity’s electoral expenditure account must be recorded and made public according to the disclosure requirements. Despite the concerns raised in the majority committee report, there's no reason this process couldn't be automated and unobtrusive. AEC personnel would not need to run checks on the veracity of the information provided prior to the receipt being transferred to the reporting entity's account, but the process would allow easier auditing of reporting entities' accounts.
The majority committee report also claims that the provisions in this bill would 'rub against the democratic freedom to be able to freely sponsor participants in public debate' because of the 'cancel culture tactics' of certain political groups. We had a good laugh at that one. You've got to at least admire the shamelessness of a political party that's prepared to argue that, because the director of Guardians of the Galaxy had to apologise for some tweets from 2009, we don't have to tell you where our money's coming from.
The political acrobatics are something to behold, but we suggest they put more effort into getting their priorities in order. This contention wrongly prioritises certain donors’ desire for privacy over the need to push back on the risk of undue influence and corruption that comes from a lack of transparency in our donations disclosure system. It completely ignores the substantial costs that the status quo imposes by corroding faith in our democratic system and reducing the integrity of the federal parliament.
As is well established in constitutional law, the implied freedom of political communication (i.e. the right to donate to a political party) is a qualified limitation of legislative power. It may be burdened by a legislative change if the law's purpose is legitimate to the maintenance of representative government, and the law is appropriate and adapted to advancing that legitimate purpose. That's what the provisions in this bill would do.
The fundamental point is – voters should know when significant sums of money changes hands between donors and political parties. That's not what's happening right now. Right now, political parties can hide the sources of over $100 million in donations during an election campaign. The Liberal Party is getting away with not telling people where it gets 40% of its income, and Labor is getting away with hiding 28%. That's the situation we're in, and it's obvious to everyone who isn't a member of the Government that it's high time we did something about it.
Instead the majority committee report supports the status quo, and seeks to protect the rights of donors and political parties to keep voters in the dark about who's bankrolling federal election campaigns. It prioritises donors and political parties over the right for all Australians to expect integrity and accountability from the nation's top leaders.
The current disclosure regime is clearly outdated compared to the standards set by the states and territories. The provisions in this bill would bring it into line with what's already happening elsewhere, and would vastly improve the functioning of our democratic system.
Recommendation
Notwithstanding the Liberal Party's warnings about it being mocked by left wing Twitter users, JLN recommends that the Senate pass the bill.