Topics: Political party donations, same sex marriage plebiscite, migration
E&OE…
JONATHAN GREEN:
Donation reform is on the agenda of the Federal Government, Special Minister of State Senator Scott Ryan who joins us now. Senator Ryan, welcome back
SENATOR SCOTT RYAN:
Good evening Jonathan.
GREEN:
This news today, the NSW Division of the [Liberal] Party fined that $600,000 in public funding over illegal donations. Does this highlight one of the areas of need for reform of the system?
SENATOR RYAN:
Well let’s be clear, that only applies to NSW state elections. It’s not an issue to do with Commonwealth law or federal elections at all.
GREEN:
They have a special rule outlawing donations from property developers.
SENATOR RYAN:
NSW and Queensland – and I can’t remember the other states – have a set of rules that apply to state elections. Commonwealth law applies to federal elections.
I am not someone who supports banning particular forms of donations from some bodies corporate. The Greens, for example, have a policy that profit-making companies can’t donate, but not-for-profits can, unions can. Some states have laws about property developers. That’s not in federal law, it does not apply to federal elections and it is not something that I am entirely comfortable with, singling out, at the federal level, particular forms of companies.
GREEN:
It’s an interesting case and it points to the difficulty around regulation, I guess. Here you’ve got this regulation in NSW, so what does the NSW Liberal Party do? It uses the Canberra-based Free Enterprise Foundation – a slush fund – to channel that money. I guess that’s the thing, you’re considering this in a federal sphere, the more dams you put, the more the flow of donations will find their way around them. Parties will find a way to get to that money by hook or by crook.
SENATOR RYAN:
Again, at the federal level, to be fair, we have compliance.
So let me go through what happens federally. Any donation over $12,800 to a state division or branch of the party needs to be declared on an annual basis at the end of the financial year on June 30 and then that is disclosed in February of the following year. Some people have raised whether or not that could be made more rapid, and I’ve said previously, I think technology allows us to do that because that was a principle adopted many, many years ago.
GREEN:
That should be a no-brainer, surely, fairly constant disclosure.
SENATOR RYAN:
What I’m moving to here is we need to look at this comprehensively, like you mentioned. One of the points I’ve made already is, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say, ‘if you’re a profit-making company, you can’t donate. But if you’re a not-for-profit you can’. I just think that’s ridiculous and I don’t think anyone would think that’s a fair approach. Some people say corporates shouldn’t be allowed to donate at all, but at the same time, the High Court might not let us go there. There’ve been two recent cases out of NSW that said some restrictions are ok and some restrictions were not.
GREEN:
It’s constitutionally vexed.
What about a business set up by a party, like Parakeelia say, to sell itself software and then take that money as donations?
SENATOR RYAN:
The Auditor-General put out a statement about that last week following the referral of the matter of Parakeelia, and the Liberal Party federal director Tony Nutt indicated he was cooperating fully with that. While I can’t remember the exact words, the Auditor-General effectively said that by looking at this in the way that he had, he didn’t see a problem with compliance of any law.
GREEN:
Isn’t this the problem in this entire area? I mean, what Sam Dastyari did was entirely within the law, entirely within his rights as an MP.
SENATOR RYAN:
But what he did was very different.
GREEN:
Well let’s not get caught on the detail.
SENATOR RYAN:
But it is an important difference: if I take money to pay a bill myself, it is very different to the political party using money for an election. It is distant from me.
GREEN:
My point about that is though, there are instances all along the way in this area in which people do exactly what’s perfectly fine according to the rules and yet we all know it’s pushing that boat out. It’s not what the people feel comfortable about, it’s not what voters feel comfortable about and yet, it’s within the rules as they stand.
SENATOR RYAN:
I think that when we are looking at limits on speech and political activity and political campaigning, just like the High Court has essentially said in layperson’s terms, we need to identify a harm that’s been caused. We need to identify a risk before we propose a restriction on political activity. Now I think making a donation is a form of political activity and the High Court has expressed a limit on the ability of, in this case, the NSW Parliament to say unions can only spend a certain amount of money. That restriction was thrown out by the High Court recently. So rather than just assume things, we need to identify certain problems.
In the referral to the electoral matters committee I made last week, I did talk about a number of issues with donations. With foreign donations in particular, I’ll say, this is particularly vexed because what do we mean by it? Labor had a bill in Parliament in 2010, which they didn’t even bring to the Senate even though it was guaranteed passage with the Greens to ban foreign donations. It did not cover any of the donations that have been in the media in the past four weeks because it basically had to be foreign money.
GREEN:
Wasn’t there a bill in 2009 voted down by your party and Steve Fielding?
SENATOR RYAN:
2009 is stretching my memory, I did start in the Senate in 2008. But in 2010, the bill wasn’t brought forward. It may have been the same bill and I would have voted against it and I’ll explain why: Are we talking about a foreign person? Foreign money? A foreign entity? A foreign-owned subsidiary? No one is really worried about Toyota or a company like General Electric …
GREEN:
They might be worried about Toyota if you’re engaged in policy discussion around assistance to the auto industry, that could be ample reason to be worried about Toyota.
SENATOR RYAN:
The discussion over the last four or five weeks has not been about that, to go back to what happened with Sam Dastyari. We were talking about influence over an individual, sorry, not influence over an individual, we were talking about paying off a personal debt. I think we need to, and I’ve asked the committee to look at this, that is, to distinguish are we looking at foreign persons, foreign entities, foreign-owned subsidiaries or actual foreign money. They’re all very different.
We’ve then got to look at issues like dual citizens. We are a migrant nation, a lot of people have dual citizenship. Or are we looking at a company that’s set up in Australia, that is sourced from foreign capital, but then conducts business in Australia?
GREEN:
You want to look at third parties too. Organisations like Get Up! that have great political influence.
SENATOR RYAN:
One of the things that has changed over the past decade is that political campaigning used to be just about political parties mainly. Now we’ve got much more influence by third-party groups. I’ve made it very clear I’m not proposing any particular regulation or approach, but I am concerned with having a radically different approach for political parties on one hand, and third-party groups, on the other. In America, I think what has happened is that they’ve regulated heavily in the US political party donations, but they’ve got entirely unregulated, free-flowing money through third-party and activist groups. They can have just as much influence on a political outcome or an election outcome, so I think we need to are we regulating money into politics , not just political parties.
GREEN:
Scott Ryan, Special Minister of State. He is going to be involved in a meeting on Monday with – we mentioned this briefly – Mark Dreyfus, the Attorney General George Brandis, Scott Ryan will be there, to talk about the looming plebiscite on same-sex marriage.
Scott, just to stay with the NSW branch of the party for the moment, are you concerned by reports that far-right NSW members have been caught handing out anti-same sex marriage leaflets that are pretty misleading and offensive?
SENATOR RYAN:
Look I’ve seen news reports, I can’t attest to the veracity of them, I’ll take them at face value. The point I’ll make is, as I understand, those leaflets refer to the Safe Schools Program being compulsory if same-sex marriage were legislated …
GREEN:
Which is the longest of long bows.
SENATOR RYAN:
… Yeah and I don’t agree with that. The point I would make is that to those who are concerned about that, that is happening now. That’s not a result of the plebiscite, it is happening now because there is a debate in the community and I’m all for respectful debate about this. But I don’t think that is an argument against a public vote.
GREEN: This is one of the issues Mark Dreyfus will raise on Monday is the possibility of not giving the public money to the campaign.
SENATOR RYAN:
When I did the press conference with George Brandis last week, I explained that the guiding principles of this plebiscite was to adopt all the provisions in the Referendum Act and the Electoral Act to make it as familiar a voting experience and as familiar a set of rules that every Australian has been used to for a century. In the Referendum Act, when we have a vote like this, people will remember in 1999 they all got mailed a booklet with the Yes and the No case prepared by Members of Parliament on both sides. To do that, to every household in Australia – not even every voter, but every household – would cost substantially more than $15 million.
GREEN:
Surely people are across this as an issue though. This is a thing in which people have well-developed attitudes over many years of discussion and debate around this. We just put it to a vote, do we really need to campaign on this?
SENATOR RYAN:
I’ve never taken polls at face value. I think the important thing about political debates is that people often have open minds. I can remember referenda where they started off with 70 per cent support and they ended up with support in a result in the 30s. Debate itself is important and I think it can change people’s minds in both directions. I think we can all agree that the old idea of a 20-page booklet turning up in your letter box, as last happened in 1999, would have much lesser penetration and much less engagement with voters than something that might be more modern now because the world of information and media has changed.
GREEN: We know this is going to be an ugly conversation though from both sides of the debate.
SENATOR RYAN:
I don’t know, with all due respect …
GREEN:
We’ve seen this before this thing has even started.
SENATOR RYAN:
My point is, I have great faith in the Australian people. I don’t think they respond well to ugly conversations and I don’t think that a fear of a fringe is a reason to argue against democracy.
GREEN: Should the vote be binding? That’s another point, a point that will come up on Monday.
SENATOR RYAN:
Well I think this is being put up as a red herring.
GREEN:
We spend $200 million on …
SENATOR RYAN:
It’s $170 million, the costing of it, not $200 million – I don’t know where Labor is getting $200 million from.
GREEN:
That’s a lot of childcare, it’s a significant amount of state school principals.
SENATOR RYAN:
You could say that about other elections and referenda too. My point is that, I think that having a public vote is important. On an issue that does polarize quite a lot of people, I think a lot of people don’t have strong feelings, but a lot of people do, but having a public vote, delivering on an explicit commitment, a simple one that was the product of high public debate over the last 12 months, being allowed to implement that is actually a very important expression of faith in our democracy.
GREEN:
It seems weird not to have that vote binding though on the Parliament.
SENATOR RYAN:
One of the things I can guarantee – there have been a couple of people who have said that they would still be uncomfortable with it – but every single member that I have spoken to in the Coalition Party Room, bar less than a handful, have said that they will reflect the vote of the electorate with their vote in Parliament. There is nothing more certain than if this vote gets legislated and it is carried on February 11 next year, then very rapidly after that, the Parliament will legislate for same-sex marriage.
GREEN: We’ll see that, I guess, when it happens Scott Ryan.
Just on a final point, I know you’re wary of polls but there was a poll this week that 49 per cent of people in this country are in favour of banning Muslim migration, whatever that might mean.
There is a move afoot by the Labor Party to bring in a code of behaviour for Parliamentarians around race within the Parliament. Is that something which Parliament needs to look at? Do we need to have some sort of leadership from the political class on how we deal with each other along racial and religious lines?
SENATOR RYAN:
The leadership of the political class, in my view, is not expressed by a code of ethics. It goes far from the point that, despite all that’s happened in the world, despite some people saying things I have profoundly disagreed with – and I have publically said I disagree with what Senator Hanson said about Muslim migration, as I did in 1996 about Asian immigration – despite all that’s happening in the world in some very scary circumstances, 51 per cent of people have no interest in that. I say, and as a pollster pointed out during the week, when comments were made in the 1990s about Asian immigration, apparently, Peter Brent mentioned on Twitter, the support for that was 75 per cent. So look, let’s actually start from a positive point of view here. Despite all the things happening in the world, 51 per cent of people are saying ‘I’m not interested in that’.
Political leadership is demonstrated by us saying to people, ‘I understand what your fears are, here is how I am addressing them. Here are the values I think reflect the best of Australia’. I have no doubt that will be overwhelmingly reflected in the Australian community.
GREEN:
A Gallop Poll of Australians some years after World War II said 70 or so per cent wanted no Jewish migrants.
SENATOR RYAN:
Look, you know what the success story of this country is? We need to have more faith in ourselves and occasionally – we always jump on the bad news – I’m Melburnian and I think my city is so much stronger for the diversity, I think it is one of the greatest cities in the world because of that. But the world can be a pretty scary place and it is wrong to dismiss people’s fears. It is wrong to dismiss them outright and not engage with people even when they have views you disagree with. The job of politicians is to listen, but also to lead, and we do that by saying ‘I understand why you are concerned, here is how we are addressing it, here is how that fear you have isn’t necessarily represented by what is answered to that poll’. I think if we go back over the last 20 years, we can remember what happened the last time Senator Hanson made that speech, it was a fear the Australian community did not take up.
GREEN:
Senator Scott Ryan, thanks for your time.