Wednesday, 3 June 2026

 The SPEAKER (12:09): I have received a message from the Governor recommending and appropriation for the purposes of the Electoral Further Amendment Bill 2026.

 James NEWBURY (Brighton) (12:10): I rise to speak on the Electoral Further Amendment Bill 2026. I start by saying that this bill comes from a desperate government in its final days in an attempt to rig the system. We are here because the Labor government introduced a set of dodgy laws that the High Court threw out. That is why we are here. The government, under the former Premier Daniel Andrews, the king of dodginess, introduced a set of laws when he was Premier that the High Court threw out as unconstitutional – and they threw them out in a far broader way than anyone had anticipated. The High Court said these laws simply entrenched incumbency in a way that was unconstitutional. When the High Court delivered their judgement, we took the view and said publicly how strongly we believed as a coalition that we would have laws in place that protected a robust system, a democratic system, an electoral system that allowed donations but ones that were guided by a number of principles. We wanted to ensure transparency in the system, we wanted to support a ban on overseas donations, and we wanted to support retrospectivity in the system – of course we did. In fact on the day of the announcement, I asked the Premier’s office to announce retrospectivity, because of course you cannot have a system in place that does not have those principles in place.

Instead we have a bill that has just been introduced with a forced debate now that rigs the system for a government that is in its last days. How does it do that? It suffocates all money going to opposing candidates and entrenches incumbency in a dramatic way and, frankly, in a shameful way. I suspect these laws will be considered by the High Court again. If you read media reports of what others are saying about these proposed laws, they are already flagging constitutional concerns – and those concerns are real. If you read the judgement of the High Court when they threw out the previous laws, they made it clear that there were substantial parts they felt were unconstitutional. They could not simply fix them, is what the High Court said, in short. They said they could not simply pull out certain parts and fix them, so the entire swathe of part 12 was removed and found to be unconstitutional. It was found to be unconstitutional for a very good reason, which is why we have said we are concerned about a number of principles that underpin this bill, and we confirmed our concerns immediately.

As I said, we let the government know how strongly we felt about supporting particular elements – retrospectivity, bans on foreign donations, these types of matters – which we of course discussed as points of important principle. But what the government is proposing to do with this bill is block all big money from the system, except from the unions.

How can it be that this government is proposing a set of laws that bans all big money, except from the unions? These laws are not just rigged; they are shonky, they are dodgy. There is no other way that you can look at them. How can anybody possibly vote for laws that simply allow Labor to have funnelled to them millions of dollars? I say to the crossbench: I agree we need laws in place, I agree that it is urgent to do so, I agree that we need transparent laws in place as soon as possible, but how could you possibly vote for a set of laws that simply game the system? What I think it shows me is that this government are so desperate, are so concerned about their standing that they are willing to throw out any moral clarity in the laws they are proposing.

You can see it only today when the laws were introduced in the statement of compatibility that is attached to the proposed laws. Only a few weeks ago the government put in place law that requires each new bill to include a statement of treaty compatibility. When it was attached to this bill it made clear that the First Peoples’ Assembly was not given the opportunity to advise on the bill. This bill is so rushed the government breached their own treaty obligations. It shows the lack of morality this government is showing on this bill.

No matter what Labor say, and they are saying a lot, we will not have it said that we have not supported basic underlying principles, and we have been very clear on that. But what we have also said is there has to be a constitutional validity to what is being proposed, because as the Premier has stated publicly, these laws will be challenged – the Premier said that. The Premier said these laws will be challenged. I suspect the challenge will be heard quickly. As has been discussed publicly, the challenge will occur quickly, because we are talking about a replacement set of laws to a set of subject matter that the High Court threw out. So I do believe that the speed with which they hear it will be quicker, and the Premier has also spoken to that. She has spoken to her view that a challenge will be heard before the election.

So how important is it to get right? Well, on her timeline – the timeline the Premier has set out – this Parliament will have been prorogued by the time that this matter is heard, so there will be no opportunity for the Parliament to come back and close any loophole. So the importance of getting this right is absolutely critical, which is why we said from the get-go we have to make sure that what is being proposed will stand up to a further challenge. What did the government say? ‘We will not negotiate on any of the constitutional matters contained in the bill. We won’t negotiate on it,’ and they have not. They have not at any point negotiated on the matters that relate to the constitutionality.

My view has been for some time that the negotiation process on this bill was in fact a sham. At no time really did I believe that the Premier genuinely wanted to work with the other side of the chamber on laws that could work. From almost the get-go I did not believe the Premier.

I am not saying that the Premier sending out her 15th order adviser to deal with the negotiations on this bill was an indication of that. I am not saying that the fact that her minister – well, she did not have one at the time. Even now, I do not think anyone has had any consultation with the minister. The minister is just getting paid for the job; they are certainly not doing anything for it. No, that is wrong – the minister stood behind the Premier at the press conference and nodded the other day, so she is doing something. But at no point has she had anything to do with this bill, that I am aware of. The Premier sent out her 15th order adviser to negotiate on this bill, which led me to believe from the get-go that the Premier had no real interest in proper negotiation on this bill. I believe that the Premier wanted to do a deal with the crossbench immediately, because I believe that they knew that the crossbench would do a deal based on certain particulars of the legislation rather than the robustness or whether it was constitutional, and that appears to be the case. I look forward to hearing the crossbench contributions as to whether or not they feel the legality of the bill will stack up, because there is no point dealing with the particulars of a bill if you feel the legal validity of it is shaky, especially when there is a real threat, as the Premier has said herself, of a challenge on the legislation imminently in the lead-up to the election. I do not think any good Victorian wants to see laws thrown out in the weeks before an election. I do not think any Victorian wants to see that, which is why it was so important that this draft legislation be right before it came to this place, and sadly, what this draft legislation is is wrong. It is also rigging the system by Labor – I will talk about it in more detail – on things like donation caps. There were conversations about donation caps, including as recently as last night. The government came to us and offered $20,000 donation caps last night, and we agreed.

On every occasion that we have talked about caps throughout the process – what the cap should be – I have made the point that if you have too low caps, then I am concerned about the constitutional validity of the fact the government is proposing higher public funding, because if you are entrenching advantage through higher public funding, then you certainly cannot disadvantage new entrants. By keeping very low caps, I am concerned that – well, in fact I do not think it is a point for debate; I think it is actually just fact – the public funding eclipses what the donation cap is. But on donation caps in those consultations, what did the government say back? Did they say to me, ‘Well, James, let’s discuss the constitutional merit of the argument. Let’s talk through the merit of whether or not the cap level’s right versus the public funding’? Do you know what they said? ‘But we’re worried about west matters.’ That is what they said to me: ‘We’re worried about west matters in our seats.’ And I get it. I get that Labor’s entire strategy is to suffocate money out of opponents. I think that becomes very clear.

I think the principal failure in this bill is the government’s cravenness to increase public funding in a cost-of-living crisis and keep caps low in a way that I think will be the core of why this proposed set of laws will fall over. There are a number of issues with it, but centrally I believe that mix between low caps and high increases in public funding will be the core of the constitutional challenge, because I think it is the biggest concern.

But what did Labor do when we discussed the issue? They said, ‘But we want more public funding. We said, ‘Well, are you proposing public funding increases on the per vote public funding or the administration funding?’ For the house’s background there are two forms of public funding – one for each primary vote and one for each party. The government said, ‘No, no, no, we don’t want to increase the per vote funding because that might assist the parties who are not elected but are receiving strong support in the community. We only want to increase public administration funding because we are here. We are here, and that won’t cause issues in relation to the challenges that will be mounted’ – in the government’s words – ‘from the West.’ But when they design a system that is based on squeezing out their opponents and they design a system that puts Labor’s hand further into your pocket so they can take more money out, it is doomed to fail.

That is what we will see with these proposed laws, I suspect, because the problems that the High Court identified with the first set of laws, which underpinned the reason they threw them out, are now worse. Objectively, when you look at what is being put forward, it is hard not to see them as being worse. They are worse. The problems are worse because the hurdles with things like, as I just spoke to, the differential between low donation caps and public funding have actually got greater. I suspect that if this is challenged, the core of what the challenge may look to is that difference, because new entrants can now raise very little and the Labor Party is taking more money – not because they went to an election and elected more members of Parliament or saw more people vote for them by way of primary vote. No. What this bill does is simply say, ‘We are going to significantly increase the public admin funding through this bill.’ When I say increase it, for the first member under the previous laws it was $200,000. What is being proposed is $300,000 – a 50 per cent increase. If you are an independent member raising that difference with these caps, it is an enormous challenge. In fact you could argue that differential is so great that it is not possible. When the increase on the donation cap has been so small, it is hard not to see that being at the core of the issue.

We have heard through the debate on these matters that by raising our concerns about the legal validity somehow we are not concerned about the fact that there are no laws. I would start by saying these proposed laws are retrospective. So whatever has happened since the High Court struck it down, if it was in breach of the new laws, it will be accounted for, and it will be accounted for speedily. There is no question about that. I do not think there has been any public debate in opposition to that. I do not think anybody is saying, ‘Let’s keep the overseas money dark so that it can’t be banned.’ I do not think anyone has mounted that argument. I do not think anybody has said that donations should not be declared. I do not think anybody said that. Of course there have been conversations about where the donation cap should kick in and what the declaration figure should be in terms of what is disclosed. I think those things have been discussed, but they have been discussed by the government. To think that the bill today is the final position of the government and has been the final position of the government for some weeks is just factually wrong.

As I said earlier, there have been ongoing conversations between not just the coalition but I am sure other members of this place and the other place as to what those numbers are. I do not think that is unreasonable. I think having a conversation about those things is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. At no point have we stopped attempting in good faith to negotiate. But what struck me on all of these matters was that the government did not appear in any way interested in a set of negotiations that went to the concerns we had as to why the High Court struck down the laws and what we see as problems with this proposal in moving forward into this bill form. The only answer to why the government have not considered changing what they had proposed regarding those matters, the only possible conclusion that you could draw, is the raw, rank politics of wanting to rig the system. Because from the moment public funding was raised, the increases in public funding, the first thing I know I said was, ‘We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.’ It was the very first thing I said. How could a major party want to put their hand further into the pockets of Victorians and take more money? How could they want to do that? But that is what these proposed laws do.

On top of that, of course when we raised our concerns about big money being banned except for the unions, you can imagine how much interest there was in that conversation. You can just imagine it, can’t you? You can just imagine the conversation happening. But Labor, under your proposed laws only the unions can tip millions of dollars into your pocket – only the unions. All other money is banned. How is that a fair and reasonable set of laws? And the government’s response was very, very short, I can assure you. The idea that they accidentally tripped into that outcome is laughable. It is by design. These laws rig the system, and unfortunately I cannot see the other place fully thinking through the outcome of supporting these laws. I suspect unfortunately that the government will have worked with the crossbench on these laws and that they will support them. I know of one group of members who in their negotiations with the government said, ‘All we want is more public funding.’ There was no meaningful point of negotiation other than increasing public funding. That is the kind of horsetrading that unfortunately has happened here. And the government have delivered that in this bill – they are increasing public funding. But the meaningful debate about whether these laws stack up and a bill that comes forward that accounts for those concerns have not happened, which is why we do not support them. Of course we do not support them. How could we support them? What, a rigged system? I can understand why the Premier is of a mind to rig the system. As I said in the conversations around this bill, the focus was on things like West Party matters and their political fortunes in certain Labor incumbent seats. I get where they are coming from. I do not agree with it, but I get it. I understand it; I understand where they are coming from. That is their concern. That is what has led the drafting of this bill.

It is transparent for all, which is why the law is being rammed through this place. But the moment of judgement will be, if these laws are challenged, what the High Court says. I suspect that not only will the previous judgement see other states’ Labor laws fall over, but soon I suspect the federal laws will fall over too, because Labor, in typical form, have copied and pasted Daniel Andrews’s laws around other parts of the country. Unfortunately for Labor, when one falls over, they all fall over. I suspect you will see other states’ and the federal laws fall over.

What is interesting on the federal position – here is a little bit of an insight – is the federal Labor government is so worried about their standing on their laws that when the state case was being heard in the High Court the federal government had more lawyers in the room than the state government did. What does that tell you? That tells you they are worried. What I understand in relation to the federal law is there is a section in it that says if one single section is unconstitutional, the entire law falls over. It is a complete 100 per cent clean bill of health that the federal government is seeking with the High Court challenge to the federal laws or those laws fall over.

As I said, we do not support what Labor has proposed. We do not support rigged laws. We have also committed to reforming them after the election. I have said that clearly. I have said clearly that we will reform these laws if we are elected. I have also said that we are considering our legal position, because my view is these laws are not constitutional, so why wouldn’t we consider that? Why wouldn’t we consider our legal position? Of course we would. Now that we have the bill, we can consider it in detail, because these laws are unconstitutional. You can see the number of people coming out of the woodwork who have similar views on the validity of the laws that are being proposed, which is why we cannot support them.

These laws entrench incumbency, and they entrench incumbency worse than the laws that were thrown out because they suffocate new entrants at the same time as disproportionately increasing public funding. I suspect that will be the heart of the challenge to these laws, because in terms of the issues that exist there are many issues, and I have spoken to some of them. That, in my view, is where these laws fall over, because the government took a policy view to only consider issues relating to nominated entities and ignore the rest of the judgement. Why? Because of politics. This is about rigging the system.

This is about a Premier who is so worried about her own seat that she is announcing sporting events and music concerts in her seat at a rate higher than we have ever seen from a state government in Victoria’s history. I mean, the only thing she is doing between announcing events in her own seat is doorknocking. Sadly, it does not sound like she is getting much chop. I can understand when you are sitting on a 60–40 in your seat why you would be worried. I get it. When the Premier is sitting on a –I should say it the other way – 40–60, I get why they would be worried. I get why you would be putting your sneakers on and trying to announce events in your seat, but rigging the system is not the way to fix it. Victorians will see it; we will not stand for it.

I suspect we will see these laws challenged in the manner that I discussed. Unfortunately we might see these laws fall over, and no Victorian wants to see that before the election. We have tried in good faith to avoid it. Unfortunately Labor has played politics by trying to rig the system with this bill.

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (12:40): Before addressing the Electoral Further Amendment Bill 2026, I want to begin by just picking up on a point that we have already debated with the member for Brighton and the Leader of the Nationals, and that relates to the Statewide Treaty Act 2025 in operation in this state. I just reiterate for their benefit that section 66(3) of that act says that the First Peoples’ Assembly will be given an opportunity to be consulted with on bills. It does not say that it is mandatory. I reiterate a point I made in the procedural debate that if the opposition are going to shamefully oppose treaty, they should at least have the decency to carefully read the act that they are shamefully opposing.

Just picking up again on something that came out of the procedural debate, I want to come back to reiterating the core problem here: there is a gaping hole in our donations system. There is a potential problem of foreign money flowing into Victorian politics, dark money flowing into Victorian politics. That is not good for any of us, but as we discussed in the procedural debate, it is particularly concerning in light of the rise of One Nation and the fact that at least some of those increased One Nation voters are being driven to One Nation by a perception that our system does not have integrity.

I thought that the contribution from the member for Caulfield in the procedural debate, particularly, was astonishing. The member for Caulfield stood in this place and said Labor are rigging the election. He said Labor are funnelling union money to themselves to ‘steal an election’. They are the exact words of the member for Caulfield. I want to caution the opposition parties that this is not helping their cause. It is not helping any of our democratic cause, but nor is it helping the cause of anyone currently represented in this chamber. The movement of the Liberals and indeed sometimes the Greens to this hypertabloid populism – TikTok populism – is not benefiting incumbent parties anywhere.

Now, I acknowledge that of course the rise of One Nation is not just being driven by that. There is a very concerning, bigoted, discriminatory, often gendered component to it. But part of it is being driven by people like the member for Caulfield walking around and saying to ordinary Victorians, ‘The system is rigged. You can’t possibly influence it. Your government is against you. The government is against the people.’ It is simply not true. In Victoria and Australia we should all be proud of the fact that we have a reasonably good collective decision-making system. Of course there are places to reform it, and that is what we are doing here today. But walking around and saying the whole system is rigged against you and people cheat and steal elections is wrong. It is populist. I just want to reiterate to the Greens and the Nationals and the Liberals that it is not driving votes to them. It is driving votes to One Nation and the Victorian Socialists, who will always have more credibility claiming that the whole system is rigged, because they are not currently inside it.

Danny O’Brien interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: Through you, Chair, I will not take up the interjection by the Leader of the Nationals. I will make one more point on that, though, which is that the member for Brighton said nobody supports foreign money coming into this country. Nobody supports dark money. I just suggest to the Leader of the Nationals and the member for Brighton that they look a little bit to their right. I worry that some of that may be happening now in their right fringe, and it is a serious concern for all of us.

Having dealt with that, which I think is an absolutely core issue – integrity and the reason we are here to fill a gap that is a very real gap – I also want to turn to what I think personally is the very core problem here, which I do not think was perhaps sufficiently contemplated by the High Court judgement. To go back to the absolute basics here, we have always had a bit of a problem in that no legal entity in this country suits a modern political party. Parties are a very important part of our system. We need to have parties. But parties have always faced this very fundamental problem. On the one hand, you want to have internal party rules that allow you to collectively decision-make and play the important role that you play in the system, but if you are going to do that – if you are going to have any political party in this country that plays that role – you cannot be a corporation, because the corporations act has very specific rules that you cannot adhere to and, frankly, quite crude democratic rules that would never work for any political party. You cannot be an incorporated association, because, similarly, it has very crude rules that are very difficult to fashion into a political party. Every political party, with a couple of exceptions, has gone down the same route of deciding it has to be an unincorporated association in order to have its party rules operate.

But then you have the problem that an unincorporated association is not a legal entity. Modern political parties are engaged in serious large-scale operations: they canvass people, they book advertising, they run conferences. They do all those sorts of things. In order to do that they need employees, they need assets and they need financial resources. All of those things are best placed within a corporation.

The answer that most parties have reached, and indeed certainly the answer that the Victorian branch of the Labor Party has reached, is you ultimately need to have a hybrid structure that consists of an unincorporated association that has your rules and elects your governing body, and then that governing body controls some sort of holding company into which you put your financial assets and into which you enter into your contractual obligations. That is a perfectly legal, legitimate, defensible way to deal with the fact that there is no good, appropriate legal entity for a political party.

It is very striking to me that the High Court did not really touch on this core challenge we have all had to solve. Indeed the High Court, reading the judgement, appears to believe that if the Labor Party takes some membership revenue, puts it for reasons of good governance into a holding company and then pays out from that membership revenue an invoice to print some how-to-votes, that paying out is a donation or what the Greens actually sometimes refer to as a nefarious slush fund. It is nothing of the sort. It is merely following good governance: moving your money into a vehicle where every bit of governance in this country says you should put it, and then using your members dues to pay for an invoice.

One may ask: why do the Greens in particular characterise it that way? It is because they – uniquely amongst parties, including parties of the left – have adopted what is I suppose a crude mechanism of taking the incorporated association structure and bending it into a political party. Those familiar with the Greens – and in our part of the world in Darebin we have many Greens; we also have some people who have left the Greens – know that parts of their constitution they have attempted to make work, and in fairness I think attempted in good faith to make work, but part 4 of their constitution has always been problematic. Most notably what the Greens have attempted to do – the criticism they get is not only from us but from the Victorian Socialists and others – is that choosing that particular structure means they cannot possibly have affiliated trade unions involved with their party. That is certainly why the Labor Party could never choose that structure.

Ellen Sandell interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: The member for Melbourne is interjecting. I put to her a very serious point that I want to make in this contribution, which is the best solution to this would be for all of us to get together and create a legal entity that actually works for political parties properly. In fact the member for Belmont in Western Australia Cassie Rowe and I once put this to Gary Gray when he was Special Minister of State. I still think, and I will put it now to Senator Farrell – a very good Special Minister of State – that the feds need to think about this problem, which is that we really do need an entity that suits political parties. All the problems we have here, all the confusion of the High Court about nominated entities and everything like that, come back to this same problem, that it is still impossible in this country to set up a political party without using a slightly unwieldy hybrid arrangement of an unincorporated association and then something else that serves to hold your assets.

If I can add one final thing to that particular point, if it were just Labor Services & Holdings – and for the Nationals, Leader of the Nationals, I think it is called Pilliwinks; they sort of do the same thing – or if it were just us and the Greens, I do not think we would actually have a problem. If it were just us, the Nationals and the Greens, I do not think we would have the problem, because the real problem here – the Leader of the Nationals himself in the procedural debate said, ‘Whose fault is this?’– is the Cormack Foundation. The one party that has a structure that is really problematic is the Liberal Party, because the Cormack Foundation not only has $90 million or whatever it is sitting in it, but its problem, as the Liberal Party found out themselves in a very famous court case in the Federal Court, is it is not solely controlled by the Liberal Party but is somewhat independent. It is 50 per cent kind of playing the role that Pilliwinks and Labor Services & Holdings is playing, but it is also slightly independent. I think that is really why the nominated entity section was a great problem for the High Court, because it is very difficult when you consider the Cormack Foundation and what to do with it.

The real correct public policy outcome here is that we get in place a decent legal structure at some point, led by the federal government, that allows political parties to solve the hybrid problem that I have talked about, and then the Liberal Party give up on the Cormack Foundation or, and this may actually appeal to them, simply bring it within their structure so it is fully controlled with their party and it plays the same role that these holding companies play with other parties here in Victoria and indeed with other parties of different political flavours right around this country.

Having stepped through I suppose what I see as the core problem we are solving here, I just want to point out that the solution we have today is urgent. Notwithstanding those broader challenges, it is the best that we can put together, given the circumstances we find ourselves in, and I commend it wholly to the house.

 Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (12:50): I will begin on the Electoral Further Amendment Bill 2026 by saying that, yes, as the member for Brighton indicated, we will be opposing this legislation. We came to it with good intentions, with an openness to negotiating with the government and to working through the decisions in the High Court. I think, though, that perhaps some of the issues that we have now seen in this bill that is being rushed through the Parliament were highlighted by the member for Preston’s commentary just now that somehow this is all the Liberal Party’s fault. Far be it for me as Leader of the Nationals to defend the Liberal Party, but hello – we are in this situation because of the legislation that your government introduced back before 2018. That is not the Liberal Party or Cormack’s fault, it is because you messed up that legislation. No-one was desperately saying we had to have legislation to fix this situation with donations and elections. It was Daniel Andrews and your government – their government, Acting Speaker – that caused this. And for the member for Preston to now say we are in this situation because of the Cormack Foundation and the Liberal Party is pretty rich.

It is also incumbent upon on me to say we absolutely think there needs to be a fair system. But the principles are pretty clear here: you either say people can make donations to political parties and influence elections to whatever extent that they want, or you say they cannot do it and the public then has to pay for it through taxpayer funds, because elections cost money. I would prefer that taxpayers did not have to bear the burden of it, but I understand – the perception, at least – that if big donations are being made, that may have an influence on decisions being made by governments in the future. It is about getting the balance right, and I think that is what is being attempted here. But I do not believe that we are, in fact, getting the balance right.

As the member for Preston indicated, this whole legislation, the reform in the last couple of weeks, has come about because of the actions in the High Court and the decision in the High Court on 15 April. I will not reflect on the High Court’s judgement in this respect, but there is a bit of a principle here that is a problem in that the major parties – some might call them the legacy parties, the parties that have been around a long time, the Labor Party for over 100 years, the Nationals for 110 years and I think the Libs for around 80-odd years – not surprisingly have built up some reserves in that time and actually tried to look after their own interests. And effectively we are being penalised for that, because now the funds that those parties have actually saved over time through their fundraising, through whatever activities and investments, are no longer going to be available to us for running campaigns. And I think, as a principle, that is a concern, notwithstanding that is the situation we have got to.

It is a concern to me, I guess, that what this legislation does is potentially only going to open us up to a constitutional challenge. The member for Brighton has a legal background; he has outlined his views. We have just been joined by the member for Malvern, who, I have said before, I am glad I am not following, because he is a former barrister and it would be like – who did I say at the time? – Justin Bieber following Pavarotti if I were to try and give my legal opinion versus that of the member for Malvern. But nonetheless I think there is a very serious risk that the legislation that is before us will be challenged again. In fact it is almost certain, from what I am hearing, and that is about this issue of entrenchment. The additional public funding for administration of the parties, including independents, in this legislation I think will go to that to a degree.

I have not had time to read the second-reading speech, because we only got it, like, an hour ago. We certainly have not heard from anyone on the government side justifying why the public funding for administration needs to be increased. But I think that in itself will be a concern for the High Court in terms of making sure that we have equality of opportunity for all entrants, new or otherwise, when it comes to running elections.

I have said before that when it comes to support from the public – whether it is corporations, whether it is individuals, whether it is workers or whether it is small businesses – they often will support the candidate or the political party that they believe supports them. I remember many years ago an independent – an independent who represented Gippsland East actually – having a crack at the Nationals for supporting the timber industry because we got a donation from the Heyfield mill. I remember pointing out to a journalist at the time that perhaps the Heyfield mill supported us because we support the timber industry. That is actually how it works, and that should be the case in a free and fair democracy where people are entitled to literally put their money where their mouth is.

Members interjecting.

Danny O’BRIEN: I am hearing a little bit of caterwauling starting from over there, but it is exactly the same reason that the Labor unions support the Labor Party. They take their members’ money and make no bones about the fact that they are there to support the Labor Party. They want to see a Labor Party in government, and that is entirely up to them. Where it gets tricky under this legislation and under the arrangements that this government has put together is that we now have a situation where exactly that will happen, unions will be able to continue to support the ALP through affiliation fees but we on this side of Parliament will not get that same opportunity. I know members of my party have a view on this. Repeatedly they ask me, ‘Hang on. Isn’t it true that the Labor Party can still get affiliation fees from the unions and we cannot get donations above what is now going to be $7500?’ The answer to that is yes. That is not free and fair, so I do not know how in a legal sense that can be allowed to be the case. That is a concern when it comes to it.

It is often suggested that the parties of the right get all the big corporate money. Well, I can say from the Nationals’ perspective that is not the case. Yes, we have supporters, and we have corporate supporters too, but predominantly our elections are run and supported by locals, by local small businesses and by some medium businesses. As I said, they are people who support the ideals of our party, and they should be able to continue to do that. They are considerably constrained in doing that by the laws that were brought in, as I said, by the former Premier after the 2018 election, and those laws were clearly flawed. They were thrown out by the High Court, and my concern is that this legislation will go the same way. It is setting up an unfair situation where the Labor Party gets its dues from the unions, literally, and the rest of us are constrained by these new laws.

There is one aspect that I will give credit to. It is relatively minor, but it has been a considerable issue, and that is the issue that the Liberals and Nationals run joint upper house tickets in three of the regions in Victoria, and on the public funding that comes to the parties from that, we actually had to take the Victorian Electoral Commission to court to get access to our share of it. We had an agreement with the Liberal Party as part of the coalition arrangements, and the VEC said, ‘No, we can only pay it under the act to the Liberal Party.’ Naturally we had an arrangement and it was agreed. That public funding was delivered to us, but we actually had to go to court to have that upheld. I believe new section 228(4) in this bill does address that, so that if there are joint parties, whoever they might be, running on a joint ticket, they can provide correspondence to the VEC indicating an agreed share of public funding as a share of the vote that is received and that will be delivered to those parties. That is the one good thing in this legislation that the Nationals will certainly be happy to see addressed.

I think the government will be standing here today – and we have already heard it from the member for Preston – talking to us about integrity and telling us this is about ensuring the integrity of elections, when we have seen one of the least ethical governments in our history. With the issues that we have seen in recent years, in particular with the Big Build, where a blind eye has been turned, it is absolutely hypocritical for the government to now be standing here and lecturing us on integrity, particularly in a circumstance where the High Court judgement was on 15 April and we are now on 3 June and this is being rushed through in a day without proper scrutiny and anyone having the opportunity to address this. We will oppose this legislation, and I think the High Court may well do so as well.

Sitting suspended 1:00 pm until 2:02 pm.

Business interrupted under standing orders.