The Australian Electoral Commission says politicians disqualified by the high court are still entitled to the public funding they get from election campaigns.
With the citizenship fracas generating controversy on multiple fronts, the Australian Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi is pursuing the AEC, arguing that candidates who were never validly elected to parliament, including Barnaby Joyce, should be forced to repay the public funding they were allocated in the last federal election.
Nats got $130K + in public funding for 2016 New England election. Should they pay it back as candidate was not constitutional? #auspol
— Cory Bernardi (@corybernardi) November 6, 2017
Bernardi argues the scrutiny should not just apply just to people like Joyce, who won their electoral contests despite not meeting the constitutional criteria to sit in parliament, but also to “any candidate who has received public funding or directed preferences that have affected political outcomes”.
But the electoral commission has responded to the Bernardi complaint by saying the law stipulates the public funding, which is supplied by taxpayers, does not need to repaid, even in cases where political candidates did not ever meet the constitutional requirements to sit in parliament.
The Australian system says political candidates or Senate groups are eligible for election funding if they obtain at least 4% of the formal first-preference vote in the division or the state or territory they contested.
The amount to be paid is calculated by multiplying the number of votes obtained by the current election funding rate, with the rate indexed every six months to increases in the consumer price index.
“In relation to the possible recovery of public funding, the AEC notes that the entitlement in section 294 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is based on whether the person actually stood as a candidate and received the required minimum number of first-preference votes,” a commission spokesman told Guardian Australia.
“The fact that a person has been subsequently found by the high court to have been disqualified does not impact on that entitlement.”
He said that position had been applied in all previous cases.
Bernardi said that was not good enough and he called for changes to the electoral law to ensure taxpayer interests were safeguarded, given major party political candidates had demonstrated they were not complying with the rules.
“I think this is a very clear case where the law needs to be changed,” Bernardi told Guardian Australia.
