Under Standing Order 143 I move that the Electoral Legislation Amendment, Electoral Reform Bill 2024 and the electoral legislation amendment, Electoral Communications Bill 2024 be referred to the Joint Standing Committee on electoral reform for consideration and an advisory report by 3rd March 2025. Is the motion seconded? Does the member wish to speak immediately?

These bills make significant changes to who can get into Parliament, especially the first, the electoral reform bill, and these should not be rushed through. The government has said it has consulted thoroughly but this is not the case. The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, the remit for the inquiry was much broader and the conclusions were very high level. The government said they have consulted but we have not seen any legislation until a few days ago. With such a fundamental change we need to consider all the consequences intended, unintended, and this has not been done. The assistant minister spoke about trust and wanting to build trust but the process here does anything but build trust in our parliamentary processes and the way laws are passed. There is a need for reform, we desperately need transparency and I think there is a good case for donation caps at some level. But this bill goes so much further with a massive increase in public funding and spending caps that tip the balance in favour of parties and incumbents. We really need to have serious public scrutiny before this is passed. A bit of history and context about why this need serious scrutiny now. There has been a consistent decline in support for the major parties over the last 40 years. And at the last election we saw the lowest primary vote for majors with one in three voters voting for a minor or independent with their primary vote. The will of the people is changing and this is a threat to the major parties. Parties are now machines designed to win not lead but like any institutions the parties have a strong immune system and are fighting to retain power. This bill is a desperate attempt to arrest that trend. The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters did an inquiry into the 2022 election and I sat on that inquiry on that committee. Evidence was heard, a report was put forward, I put in my additional comments, all the parts that the major parties ignored in the evidence. They were positions put forward by experts, by academics, democracy think tanks, people with an interest in the health of our system, rather than preserving the existing power structures. I provided a path that the government could have taken to show it was respecting the will of the people and the integrity of our political system through the Restoring Trust Bill last August, through the Fair and Transparent bill last February introduced in both houses. The government could have worked with the crossbench to pass legislation with appropriate review and appropriate enquiries. The government stated its policy was real-time disclosure above one's thousand dollars and there have been many private members bills that have been put forward about improving transparency like this. But the government said it could not do this transparency change without addressing other issues such as banning lies and political donations which is now in a separate bill anyway. I and other crossbenchers have engaged in good faith with the minister and provided a pathway to good reform without it being a major party stitch up. The government kept saying it was working on a bill dealing with all parts of electoral reform together, we now have two separate bills, one massively increasing public funding and imposing caps that will lock out competitors and one dealing with banning lies which is probably destined to go nowhere in this Parliament. They have been so many delays and radio silence on the basis that this is very complicated and the drafting was very difficult. We suspected we might see a last minute stitch up by the major parties, presented now at the end of the term to lock in party advantage while it is still possible. That is exactly what we have got and if the major parties want to rebuild trust and regain their vote share this is not the way to do it. If this bill is so complicated that it has taken entire term of Parliament to draft, surely it needs to be considered by a committee and the public given an opportunity to comment, the experts, the people who do not have a vested interest and are interested in protecting political competition and allowing our democracy to keep evolving, need to be able to look at this in detail before it gets passed as law. Voters can see through this cynical approach and cynical attempt to lock in the declining support for the majors. Last time electoral reform was attempted there was public outcry about the increased public funding and it was dropped. Why would it be any different now? It is very hard to see that this is anything other than an attempt to push it through without appropriate review. It needs two types of scrutiny. Firstly we need scrutiny on the intended outcome of the bill. Because we don't let Coles and Woolworths make the laws about supermarket competition but we have the two major party here, banding together to make the laws about who can compete with them. It also need scrutiny to look at the unintended consequences of the way it has been drafted. This is 224 pages long. We have had a few days to look at it. No-one outside a few crossbenchers and a few people have been given access to it. It needs external review so that the experts can really look at this and if it is such complicated drafting, let's make sure we know what it is actually going to do. On public funding, there are a number of issues within the bill that mean it urgently should move to a committee rather than being pushed through. On the public funding, this bill asks taxpayers to pay more to have less choice. There is a huge increase in funding here. Estimates seem to say that it would be about 70 million more dollars in taxpayer's funding if it had been applied in 2022. Those numbers may not be exactly right and all those numbers are based on what we suspect at this point. So we need to understand that more deeply. We have not had enough time to go for it in detail. But this is a massive slap in the face to Australians during a cost-of-living crisis and has the effect of locking in the major parties and the incumbents. The funding is done based on the last election. So if you did not run in the last election you do not have access to any funding. To add insult to injury, the major parties can tap into this funding in advance of an election based on what they expect to win. The fact that this is this possible shows it is a were reliable revenue stream for the status quo and creates another hurdle for challengers. It also includes a huge increase in administrative funding which in my mind is a ridiculous bribe. There is no relationship between the additional $30,000 per year per MP and the actual increase in administrative costs. This is clearly aimed to get broad support from both the major parties. It translates to about $17 million in extra taxpayer funding every year, three-quarters of which goes to major parties. There is not a linear relationship between the number of MPs and the administrative task. And no boardroom in the country would accept the administrative costs were going to increase for the number of people involved. There are economies of scale. We know the ALP currently has four people to meet the administrative needs of 104 parliamentarians. This would massively increase that and there needs to be some evidence that it will actually cause an increase in workload that is commensurate with the increase in funding. But there is absolutely no clear argument been put forward for why that number was chosen. On spending caps, spending caps sound great, no-one likes to see too much money in politics but effectively they lock in the status quo and create not a level playing field. In drafting my legislation I tried to find a model that worked on spending caps but it is almost impossible. But if you address transparency and donation caps, the spending caps become obsolete. If 5000 people donate $200 each to a candidate, why should they not be allowed to spend it on a campaign? The spending caps model locks in the incumbents in two ways. It does not account for incumbent advantages. As a sitting MP I have these advantages, and office, a car, a team, a budget in the hundreds of thousands for communications. None of these count toward my $800,000 dollar cap but a new challenger would have to fund all of these things. That is not a level playing field. Secondly, it does not account for party advantage and there is an outrageous exemption to the divisional cap for party advertising. So as long as they stay within the $90 million cap a party can advertise as much as it likes against a challenger saying vote for the Liberal Party or vote for the Labor Party and that does not count towards the $800,000 cap. That is not a level playing field. The government will say they are caught by the $90 million cap. Sure, if a party intended to run a hard campaign in every seat in the country then they would have to spend less than $800,000 in each seat because of this cap. But we all know how this will actually work. If for example a party ran a full $800,00 personalised campaign in 100 seats they then have a $10 million spare party funding budget which they could use and target in 12 contested seats and double the spending of their challenger. They could double it and that is not even counting their incumbency benefits. On transparency, we desperately need transparency. People should know who's funding their are candidates before they vote but this could have been done on any day of this Parliament with the support in both houses. This does not need to be bundled up with this package of reforms that lock in the status quo. The problem with it now is they have left it so late is that it does not start in time for the next election. So at the next election you will have no idea how much the parties are spending in each electorate. But passing this now will not solve that problem. If it is not going to work in time for the next election we might as well slow it down and actually look at the legislation and see if this is what the Australian public actually want when now one in three are now casting their primary vote for someone other than the major parties. Even within the transparency legislation that has been put forward, there are so many exemptions to the definition of gift. We need to go through those with a fine tooth comb. The definition of gift has been expanded in some small ways but there is a 3-page list of exemptions to what is a gift. And include subscriptions, memberships, related party payments, annual levies on members, staff and employees, disposition of property between members of a party's expenditure group or branches, any equipment sharing, office accommodation, bequest, a loan, a gift to an MP for their personal use, a gift not paid into a federal account. Some of these might be very valid but they need to be looked at if we are going to make these changes, the public deserves better. In summary, this bill is a travesty. It dresses up a cynical anti-competitive oligopoly play as reform which is being fed to an unsuspecting public pretending that it will actually make our system better. There are huge problems with the process it has gone through. There are problems with the massive increase to public funding which locks in the status quo. Problems with limiting spending in way that creates an uneven playing field for new challengers. The transparency reform is too little too late and is a huge disappointment and an insult to the electorate who demanded better. Major parties are relying on the increasing disengagement of the public, the complexity of this bill, the crowded media space and rushing it through to get away with the only path they have got left to arrest the trend of declining support for the sclerotic leadership that the two parties offer to the public. My community sent a message to the major parties at the last election that they will not be taken for granted. They will not be taken for fools and they expect something better than what the major parties are offering. If this goes through the parliament with no inquiry, no public scrutiny, the only choice the public will have is to speak to the major parties in the only currency they understand, votes. I urge the Government to act in the public interest, not in it's own interest and refer this to a committee hearing so the unintended and intended consequences can be fully understood and the experts and the public can have as opportunity to comment and decide whether this is a direction we want to take our democracy.