Electoral law reform nudge
ELECTORAL law reform is needed urgently to clean up the corrupting influence of secret donations to political parties in Tasmania, a reform group says.
Election Funding Reform Tasmania has released an eight-point plan — including calls for a ban on foreign and secret donations, a $4000 cap on total donations every four years, and real time disclosure.
Spokesman Roland Browne said the public overwhelmingly wanted action but the government was dragging its heels. “It’s time to get the big money out of elections, and we saw what they did in 2018 with the state awash with money from the gambling industry. That has to stop and it can never be repeated,” he said.
“After the election, the Premier proposed there would be electoral reform in Tasmania. That was two years ago, and nothing has happened.”
Tasmania’s rules on electoral donations are the weakest in the nation — a non-existent disclosure regimen which defaults to the federal scheme and allows most donations to be kept secret.
Independent federal MP for Clark Andrew Wilkie said he wondered what the state government had to hide by delaying reform.
“There’s two sorts of corruption. There’s criminal corruption where someone breaks the law, but there’s also the corruption of good government and governance, and Tasmania at the moment has that sort of corruption,” he said. “To turn it around, we need the sort of electoral reform we’re discussing today, and we need to fix the Integrity Commission. We need to resource it properly, give it a very broad remit, give it the power to investigate things retrospectively and to go after the people in this state — that I’m happy to put on the record — who are at least corrupt as far as corruption of governance, and for all we know are criminally corrupt.”
Premier Peter Gutwein said there was plenty of time to fix the issue: “Andrew might have been tucked away comfortably in Glenorchy for the last couple of months, but I have been dealing with a pandemic and, to be frank, the state election isn’t due until 2022, so we’ve got plenty of time to deal with those matters.”
Independent Upper House MP Meg Webb said the government had missed its own timelines for producing a report on the matter.
“Tasmania is falling embarrassingly behind our interstate counterparts who have moved to tighten and modernise their laws on political donations disclosure and electoral expenditure,” Ms Webb said.