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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Tens of millions of dollars in “dark” donations to political parties have renewed calls for election funding reform.

The major parties received over 140 million in 2023-24, with close to half of that undisclosed.

And even the donations we do know about are only now just being reported, in some cases 18 months after they were made.

The Albanese government has been proposing to reform the system, but as it negotiates the finer details, independents and minor parties are worried the proposal is a stitch up that would benefit the major parties at their expense.

Today, national correspondent at The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on Australia’s biggest political donors, and the roadblocks to reform.

It’s Wednesday, February 5.

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RUBY:

So, Mike, the Australian Electoral Commission has just released the list of who donated what in Australian politics for the past year. You've been digging into it, having a look, following the money. So tell me what you've learned.

MIKE:

Well, I guess the first thing we always look for is where the big money donors line up, right? So, some familiar faces of course I look for. Gina Rinehart, for example. So Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting gave around $500,000 to various branches of the Liberal National Party. And this of course helps make some sense of, you know, the extent to which we've seen Dutton cosying up to her.

Audio excerpt - Speaker 1:

“And at the end of last week, Peter Dutton squeezed in a trip to Western Australia for Gina Rinehart's birthday party.”

MIKE:

Notably flying across the country from Canberra to Western Australia, on the eve of a vital byelection I might add, so he could attend her birthday party for one hour before flying all the way back again.

Audio excerpt - Speaker 1:

“Maybe Dutton's just a mega fan of Guy Sebastian, who sang the national anthem at Gina's party.”

MIKE:

More recently, of course, we've seen Rinehart come back from meetings with Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago advocating that Australia set up a Department of Government efficiency like the one that's being set up under Musk to slash government spending. Well, guess what?

Audio excerpt - News Host:

“Peter Dutton has appointed Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians to Jacinta Nampijinpa price to a new government efficiency.”

Audio excerpt - Speaker 2:

“Doge!”

Audio excerpt - News Host:

“Tasked with cutting the fat and the fat cats.”

MIKE:

Interestingly, Anthony Pratt, another of our billionaires, showed up on the register. He's another one who spent New Year at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump and with Scott Morrison and with Gina Rinehart.

Audio excerpt - Speaker 3:

“Trump actually at one point taps Pratt’s shoulder in a warm way. Trump’s son Don Jr is just behind them. You can see that in the footage.”

MIKE:

Well, it turns out that Pratt has dropped $1 million into the Labor Party.

RUBY:

Right? Ok So what do we know, Mike, about the relationship between Anthony Pratt and Anthony Albanese?

MIKE:

Look, to me this suggests not particular personal loyalty. You know, I'm sure they get on and everything. But it suggests to me that Anthony Pratt sees value in backing winners.

You know, which is which is what the Labor government look to be when the Pratt donations were made. Some sharp observers have noted that just a few weeks after that pledge, Anthony Albanese attended a private function organised by Pratt at his home in Melbourne, with Katy Perry providing the the entertainment.

Audio excerpt - News Reporter:

“The invitation, in part, reading Anthony Pratt, looks forward to welcoming you on Saturday night for dinner to celebrate Australia's food and beverage manufacturing industries, featuring a live performance by Katy Perry.”

MIKE:

But it's, it's not just Pratt either. They were other big donors to the ALP whose motivations one might suspect.

For example listeners might remember that Labor was at one stage contemplating a blanket ban on gambling advertising last year.

And just by coincidence, it so happens Sportsbet donated $88,000 to Labor. Tabcorp donated $60,500 and responsible wagering so-called gave $66,000. It's just an interesting juxtaposition. I think in very large donations around the time that the Government is considering what it will do about gambling advertising.

Overall, it's worth noting that the ALP and the Liberal National Party's total donations looked very similar, you know, around $64 million each. But there is one big difference, I might add, which is that the Conservatives don't declare donations below the compulsory threshold of 16,300, at which you must say who gave you the money. So roughly a third of their donors go undeclared. Labor declares at a $1,000 threshold, so 90% of their donors are declared.

RUBY:

Okay. Well, that's the two major parties then. But what about the rest of the political class? What about the independents?

MIKE:

Well, Climate 200, which funds the campaigns of a lot of the independents received $5.9 million in donations.

Founder of Climate 200 Simon Holmes à Court kicked in $300,000 in the 23/24 financial year, so that’s, what, about 2% of the total fund. Climate 200 in turn donated to various of the community independents. Zoe Daniels and Monique Ryan got over just 100 grand each. Daniels and Ryan, of course, are the two that are expected to have the toughest fights to hold the seats that they won at the last election. Climate 200 is also expected to donate to kick money into the campaigns of about 30 community independents this year. So yeah, they got a lot of money and they declared at all, which is interesting. If you put in 50 bucks to climate 200 they say where it came from.

Similar to the Greens they did quite well, there's a longtime Greens donor, a professional poker player called Duncan Turpie. He gave 900,000 to the greens. And he gave another 300,000 to Climate 200.

There was one big absence from the register this year, though, and that was Clive Palmer. I mean, this is the bloke who spent 120 odd million dollars at the last election and only got one seat, only got a candidate elected in one seat. Interestingly, he has since deregistered his United Australia Party. He did that in 2022. But I do see that Clive is now starting to run ads on TV and elsewhere, again, with a political message.

Palmer has always admitted that his political parties and there've been a string of them now are less concerned about winning seats than they are with defeating the Labor Party.

RUBY:

And Mike, the thing I think is really important here is you have these big policy decisions being made and we don’t find out until much later that interested parties have been donating around the same time. And what’s more there’s undeclared donations that we still don’t even know about. This was talked about last year as part of the government’s proposed electoral reform, right?

MIKE:

Absolutely. That seems like a worthy reform. And it would not be a hard problem to fix.

RUBY:

So why hasn’t that happened? That’s after the break.

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RUBY:

So, Mike, there's been a lot of discussion around Albanese's attempt to limit the influence of big money in the next election. Last year, he tried to pass these big electoral reforms, but then things went quiet. So what happened?

MIKE:

Well, in a nutshell, the proposal that was put together by Don Farrell, the special Minister of State, is very complex, you know, and some of its provisions, things like real time reporting. He also proposed reducing the disclosure threshold from $17,000 down to 1000. These things were seen as good things.

But there were a slew of other changes. I mean, this was a huge, huge package. And a number of them appeared to be designed at preserving the two party duopoly. For example, there was to be a cap on spending of $90 million by political parties. Right. Which which is is fairly healthy, but only 800,000 on individual campaigns. So if you're an independent running your individual campaign, you've got a limit of 800,000. Meanwhile, the major parties can spend 90 million which would seem to put you at a significant disadvantage.

You know, there's all sorts of other complexities like donation caps, which would be set at $20,000 per donor per party per year. Well, fair enough, you might say. But the Labor Party is actually nine separate entities, so potentially more than $700,000 could be kicked into the pockets of the Labor Party.

And in fact, Don Farrell has been pretty open about the intention of this package. There was one instance last year where Farrell told a story about being approached by Simon Holmes à Court who complained to him that the changes would lock out independent challengers. And Farrell reportedly replied, Well, that's the fucking point.

So this brings us back to the last sitting days of November, you know, where the government was feverishly trying to get a whole bunch of bills through before the end of the year. And they were hoping that they could get the electoral reform bill up on the votes of the Liberal National Party opposition. And then the Coalition came to the conclusion that the changes would disproportionately benefit Labor over them, so then they wouldn't vote for it. So the whole thing petered out in the Senate. And now it’s coming back.

RUBY:

Right. So tell me what is Don Farrell proposing? What can he do?

MIKE:

Well, in those final frenzied days of the last sitting Labor got support from the crossbench to push through a whole lot of bills. And they did it by cutting various deals and getting various promises and one of those promises at the time was that they would engage over the Christmas new year break with the crossbench on the topic of electoral reform and see if they could get something together that would be broadly acceptable. And this was a condition imposed by Senator David Pocock, who along with West Australian independent Kate Chaney, have been sort of the point people for the independents on the subject of electoral reform.

But then last week they wrote a letter complaining that there had in fact been no consultation with them. In the letter addressed to Albanese and Farrell. They called for the Government to split the reform bill and send the less controversial parts of it, that is, you know, real time disclosure, lower donation thresholds, that sort of thing. They said they could get that, they could get that through the Senate like that.

And in the meantime, they said the more controversial elements should go off to a Senate inquiry and then be considered separately at a later date. So consultation was promised. There has been no consultation with the crossbench that I can establish and only the most limited consultation I think in the form of one phone call and possibly one discussion with the Greens.

RUBY:

Right. So, very little consultation or negotiation so far?

MIKE:

Well certainly not with them. In fact, I asked Farrell's office last week, you know, what was the go. And his office insisted that there had been negotiations, but they wouldn't say with whom they were negotiating.

The suspicion, I think, is pretty clear, that the major parties are trying to stitch up a deal here and the Greens and the minors are being left out in the cold.

RUBY:

Right. And I suppose the suspicion is that if the two major parties do manage to agree on this, being one of the only things they agree on, then the laws that we ultimately end up with are going to be laws that suit them, which would likely mean that there's no real time disclosure of of donors. Right?

MIKE:

Well, I don't know if we'll end up with real time disclosure. It would be a great thing if we did. It would be a great thing if if a lot of the dark money was taken out of politics. But I tell you what I do know. I do know that a couple of decades, the share of the vote going to minor parties and independents was in the single digits. At the last election, 2022, almost a third of voters looked at Labor and the Coalition and looked at what they were offering and then voted for someone else. And I do suspect also that the coming election will see a continuation of that trend away from the majors, possibly to the extent where neither of the major parties will be able to form a majority government.

So, bottom line here is, despite the fact that this proposed package contains some good measures, it's always worth asking the old question, cui bono, you know, who benefits? And if we end up with a bipartisan Labor Coalition deal. It will not be in the interests of greater diversity in the Parliament. Let's put it that way.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you for yours.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

The New South Wales transport minister Jo Haylen has resigned from her position, following revelations about her use of a taxpayer funded ministerial car for private purposes.

The former Minister had asked her driver to take her and friends to a winery lunch on a recent weekend. That trip involved a 13-hour 446 kilometre drive, from Sydney to a holiday house on the Central Coast, and then a Hunter Valley winery and back.

Jo Haylen, who will remain an MP, said that while she “did not break the rules” she had “let the public down” and her actions “didn’t pass the pub test”.

And, US President Donald Trump has agreed to pause placing tariffs on Mexico and Canada for one month while the nations negotiate agreements on trade and security.

The last-minute move came hours before a midnight deadline was due to see hefty tariffs come into effect on goods from Mexico, Canada and China.

President Trump confirmed he agreed to the pause after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum committed to sending 10,000 National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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