The Rudd Labor Government will introduce legislation in the next Parliamentary sitting to fix loopholes in donation disclosure and public funding.

The Government will also kick-start a green paper process to reform and modernise our electoral processes. The Prime Minister will ask the States and Territories to join the Commonwealth in examining electoral issues.

In the short term, the Government will urgently move to:

• Set the campaign donation disclosure threshold at $1000, reversing the Howard’s government huge increase in the threshold which took the disclosure limit from $1,500 to over $10,000;
• Ban donations from overseas or from non-Australian companies, ensuring donations come from a jurisdiction where our laws apply, and can be enforced;
• Tie election funding to reported and verified electoral expenditure directly incurred by a candidate or party for an election, to stop any candidate making a financial gain from the electoral funding system;
• Remove the loophole whereby separate divisions of a party are treated as separate entities, so preventing large donations from being hidden by paying portions across state and territory branches of the same Party; and
• Increase public scrutiny of donations by reducing disclosure timeframes from 12 months to six months.
  

Reforms to the donation disclosure regime are a priority because, in order to be fully effective, they must operate by the start of the next financial year.

The Electoral Reform Green Paper will be released in two parts – the first looking at disclosure, funding and expenditure issues, to be released for discussion in July 2008; the second examining a broader range of options aimed at strengthening other areas of our electoral laws. That part of the paper will be released for discussion in October 2008.

The Prime Minister is writing to the Premiers and Chief Ministers to seek their cooperation in progressing electoral reforms and asking them to nominate a relevant Minister to work with the Commonwealth on the green paper process.

The Government will also ask the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) to consider the green paper, and expects to work closely with JSCEM as the process of electoral reform moves ahead.

These measures will restore more transparency and openness to our electoral system and improve electoral mechanisms to ensure that voters can effectively enrol and vote.