Labor has opened the door to big changes in Australia’s funding and disclosure system, flagging continuous disclosure of donations, a boost in public funding and a ban on foreign donations.
In an interview with Guardian Australia on Friday, Labor’s special minister of state, Stephen Conroy, said he was prepared to inject greater transparency in the system to restore public confidence, and he challenged the Coalition to come to the table to overhaul the disclosure regime.
The signal from the ALP came as the prime minister intensified his attack on the Labor senator Sam Dastyari, describing his expenses scandal this past parliamentary week as a “cash for comment” moment.
Dastyari is under fire for asking a private company, the Top Education Institute, to cover a travel budget bill worth $1,670.82, incurred by his office. The company is a private education provider, run by businessman Minshen Zhu, with links to the Chinese government.
Following reports that Dastyari pledged to respect Beijing’s position on the South China Sea at an election campaign news conference for the Chinese community in June, Malcolm Turnbull said on Friday: “He has to explain, is the Labor party’s foreign policy for sale? Was this cash for comment?”
Conroy brushed off Turnbull’s attack on Friday, and said the Coalition had its own explaining to do about its use of associated entities to hide the identity of donors, and its persistent opposition to implementing basic transparency measures, such as requiring disclosure of all political donations of more than $1,000.
The shadow minister of state used the interview to signal new commitments on transparency by Labor over the coming term of parliament.
But he was firm in rejecting calls for a federal anti-corruption body, such as the Independent Commission Against Corruption in New South Wales.
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, had appeared to open the door on a new federal body during the recent election campaign, but Conroy shut that door firmly on Friday.
“I think the NSW Icac has been shown to be deeply flawed,” Conroy said. “I’m not convinced the Icac aren’t worse than the problem they are trying to solve.”
The new transparency measures he has proposed include requiring all political donations to be disclosed by the Australian Electoral Commission within three months, rather than the current system, where public disclosure takes up to 18 months.
“I think a three-month period is more than long enough with the technology that exists today. The situation where it takes a year, or a year and a half with the technology that is available today, we shouldn’t need to have that time lag,” Conroy said.
He also said Labor would be open to increasing the level of public funding of elections as a mechanism for easing some of the fundraising pressure on political parties.
Conroy said Turnbull needed to take the immediate step of banning foreign donations.
He said the Australian political system was under “siege” from the quantity of donations from countries such as China. “If politicians want the Australian people to take us seriously, they want to know that we are independent of that sort of activity and potential conflicts of interest. The first thing you have to do is ban foreign donations.
“That is clear cut, many countries do it, and we have been lagging here. Even today, Malcolm Turnbull isn’t prepared to say that is a minimum that must be done. He’s trying to tie it to other things.
“The Australian political system is under siege from this sort of quantity of donations, and Malcolm Turnbull, if he wants to be credible in ensuring we have a clean electoral system, needs to commit to that first.
“He must commit to ban them.”
Conroy said additional steps might need to be taken to ensure that money was not then shifted from overseas via Australian-based entities. “We need to ensure you can’t set up a $2 company and shift money from overseas to an Australian entity and use that money.
“We need a mechanism to ensure ... the donation is from Australian-sourced revenue.”
But he would not countenance changes that would ban political donations from institutional interests, such as corporations and trade unions. He said those sorts of curbs would run into constitutional problems because of the implied freedom of political communication.
“Any attempt to limit donations by either individuals or corporations will run into problems. What we have to get is maximum transparency as an alternative, and that means exposing third party organisations, like the Free Enterprise Foundation.”
Conroy said all entities that were used to disguise the identity of donors “needed to be completely and utterly outed” to restore confidence in the electoral process.
He said the AEC needed to act, and if it could not or would not, then laws needed to be strengthened.
“If stronger laws are needed, if the AEC after looking at the evidence of the Icac, says we can’t do anything, then you would have to strengthen the laws.”
