Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

One of the ALP’s 2007 election pledges was to deal with perceived loopholes regarding political donations. In 2008 Senator Faulkner said:

In the short term, the Government will urgently move to:

• Set the campaign donation disclosure threshold at $1000, reversing the Howard’s government huge increase in the threshold which took the disclosure limit from $1,500 to over $10,000;
• Ban donations from overseas or from non-Australian companies, ensuring donations come from a jurisdiction where our laws apply, and can be enforced;
• Tie election funding to reported and verified electoral expenditure directly incurred by a candidate or party for an election, to stop any candidate making a financial gain from the electoral funding system;
• Remove the loophole whereby separate divisions of a party are treated as separate entities, so preventing large donations from being hidden by paying portions across state and territory branches of the same Party; and
• Increase public scrutiny of donations by reducing disclosure timeframes from 12 months to six months.

Reforms to the donation disclosure regime are a priority because, in order to be fully effective, they must operate by the start of the next financial year. [my emphasis]

The Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008 was introduced to the Senate by Special Minister of State Senate Senator Faulkner in March 2008. The Opposition, for some strange reason (see more below*) decided to block it by referring it to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters – to which they eventually made a one page submission. Coalition senators later made a dissenting report demanding a higher threshold for anonymous donations.

Early yesterday afternoon, the Coalition, with the help of Senator Fielding, blocked the passage of the Bill.

Senator Fielding says he voted against the changes because he does not think they go far enough.

"We blocked that bill to get them back to the negotiation table to be fair dinkum about stopping a rort of dipping into the public purse for making political ads," he said.

The Government says it is committed to the changes and will reintroduce the bill to the Lower House as soon as possible.

I feel peculiarly blessed that, as a resident of Victoria, Senator Fielding is one of my parliamentary representatives.

*According to Bernard Keane writing in today’s Crikey, the shadow special minister of state, Senator Ronaldson, has a new member of staff, one Peter Phelps. Webdiarists with long memories may remember Dr Phelps as the (far-)right little charmer who heckled the then Labor candidate for the seat of Eden-Monaro, Mike Kelly, comparing Mr Kelly’s military service in Iraq to that of Nazi guards at the Belsen concentration camp.