Talking Point: No election should be for sale

ROLAND BROWNE: One year on, we’ve moved on from last year’s vote, but we want real reform of electoral laws.

CHANGE: We’ve moved on from last year’s vote, but we want reform of electoral laws.

TWELVE months ago this Sunday, Tasmania went to the polls. It was another election held under the weakest regimen of electoral disclosure laws in Australia.

We knew a fair bit about the policies of the three parties in relation to gaming and poker machines.

The Greens had a longstanding opposition to poker machines in pubs and clubs and the Labor Party had late in 2017 come on board.

On the other hand, the Liberals’ policy was to entrench poker machines in the community until 2043. That’s what we knew about gambling policies.

The pro-Liberal policy inclination was clear from the extensive and expensive advertising campaigns. It was everywhere and it was in our faces.

What we didn’t know was the flood of large sums of money directly into the Liberal Party, much of which came from the Federal Group and the Tasmanian Hospitality Association.

We had to wait almost a year for any information to become available. And even then, what has been disclosed is hardly illuminating. For example, $190,000 is disclosed by the Australian Electoral Commission as having come into the Liberal Party from its Tasmanian division. We have no idea where that money originated. We should know that.

The funding disclosed by the Australian Electoral Commission is probably the tip of the iceberg. There are a multitude of ways that money can be given to a political party in Tasmania without it being disclosed.

There are a multitude of ways that an entity such as a large corporation can assist a political party, again without disclosing what assistance has been given.

Tasmanian 2018 Electoral Inquiry Ltd was formed in the aftermath of the March 2018 Tasmanian State Election.

We want answers to a series of questions about receipts of money from the major parties, and especially from the Liberal Party.

We want an explanation for the multitude of coincidences surrounding election promises and electoral funding.

For example, how is it that the Tasmanian Hospitality Association (THA) put a fortune of its funds into promoting Liberal Party policies in that election and then, soon after the election, it emerged that THA had received a threefold increase in its government funding to $5.9 million? There’s no suggestion the THA did anything wrong but the question remains about the electoral funding system.

And how was it that the changes to biomass limits in Macquarie Harbour were only announced the first working day after the election? Why was that held up?

We can then look at firearms, where the Government released its policy to a select group of shooting groups a few weeks before the election.

This was of tremendous public interest because it involved watering down of the state’s gun laws in breach of the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA).

Leaving to one side the Premier’s lame denials that these proposals breached the NFA, the bigger question is why these policies were kept secret from the electorate at all. In June 2018 we wrote to the Premier, asking him to explain the money flowing into the Liberal Party from the gambling industry, the secrecy surrounding the policy on Liberalisation of gun laws and a raft of other issues of accountability that arose from the aftermath of the election.

The Premier responded to the letter but never actually answered any of our questions.

This Sunday at 11am we are holding a public meeting at the Hobart Town Hall to bring together members of the community who want answers to these questions. Our meeting will also look to the withering state of our democracy, where large corporate interests seemingly bought the result of the election.

It seems that the Liberals received something like $4 million in funding — most of which likely came from large corporate and vested interests — for the 2018 election.

The Labor Party received some $1.1 million. If the ALP had received $4 million, it would now be in government. That shows the power of money and its insidious influence on our democratic process.

Tasmanian 2018 Election Inquiry Ltd accepts the result of the election; we are moving on. But we are determined that no Tasmanian election should ever be up for sale again.

We want to see real and meaningful reform of the Electoral Act. We want to see caps on donations, prohibitions on overseas electoral donations and a prohibition on profit-based corporations putting money into the electoral system.

After all, neither corporations nor overseas residents can vote in Tasmania. So why should they be able to skew the result of the election by the payment of large sums of money?

With the system we now have, it means that our political representatives will inevitably chase the biggest and most accessible source of funding. That is, corporate money. They will not try to appeal to individuals for donations by proposing policies that support people, families, the environment and the like.

If that was where they were headed, then they would hardly be entrenching gambling for another 24 years. It’s time for wholesale reform.

Roland Browne is a Hobart lawyer, vice-president of Gun Control Australia and a director of Tasmanian 2018 Election Inquiry Ltd.