Senator MURRAY (12:53 PM) —As Senator Faulkner said, the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Representation in the House of Representatives) Bill 2004 finally gets it right. As a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, I am pleased that the government has accepted all three unanimous recommendations of the committee which has four political parties sitting on it. It is welcome and reflects well on the positive contribution of our committee processes.

The initial proposal put to the committee was to examine whether or not there should be an automatic guarantee of two seats in the House of Representatives for both the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. The committee did not accept that proposal, and chose instead to look at the statistical issues with respect to the tried, tested and accepted distribution formula that is already in place in the Electoral Act and which has widespread support. The committee wished to test whether or not the vagaries of statistical measurements, their timing, the closeness of the figures, the margin of error and the problems of estimating the population in the Northern Territory in particular should be given more consideration and more weight than they had been. In effect, that is what happened. The consequence will be that the second Northern Territory House of Representatives seat will be retained. That is the consequence; it was not the necessary effect of the changes being made, because those changes do not guarantee a seat to the Northern Territory. It should be recognised that a seat could be lost in the Northern Territory in the future.

The committee was wise not to adopt the view that the Northern Territory should be guaranteed two seats. It was also wise not to be trapped in the parallel argument that the ACT was entitled, therefore, to be guaranteed three seats. It is clear that the population estimates for the Northern Territory and the ACT are less reliable than the estimates for the states, principally because of the difficulty associated with deriving an accurate estimate from a smaller population. This is an important issue when considering cases such as the Northern Territory, as it lost a seat on an estimated shortfall of 295 people. This is well within the margin of error surrounding its population estimate. The report recommendations do not disturb the basis on which state and territory redistributions are assessed, but they do require certainty as to the periodic ABS figures to be used and the error of margin.

To save committee time, I will now talk briefly about the issue of political donations in respect of the Democrats amendment that I will be moving in the committee stage on the voices. I signal that if the chamber accepts it, I propose to simply move it and not debate it, unless people wish to do so. In our supplementary remarks in the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters' report into the 2001 federal election, we recommended, amongst other things, that donations from overseas entities should be banned outright. One of the main reasons for banning foreign donations is the fact that donations to political parties and candidates by foreign individuals and organisations can be used as a means of avoiding disclosure requirements. While the recipients of such donations must still disclose details of the donor if the donation exceeds the disclosure threshold, the donor is not under such an obligation and there is no way to ensure that the donor was the real source of the money.

The committee report responded to Labor concerns on donations to political parties from overseas. In its submission, Labor said it may be a mechanism to hide the source of donations and that the law was difficult to enforce because of foreign domicile. Unlike a number of other countries, foreign donations are not banned in any Australian jurisdiction. The committee, in my view, essentially fudged the issue by asking the AEC only to keep a watching brief. While the issue of foreign donations has been less contentious in Australia than in some other countries, there is real concern over the issue. In its 1996 election report, the AEC found that federal disclosure laws were inadequate to ensure full disclosure of the true source of donations received from overseas—the problem being that if the overseas based person or organisation who makes a donation to a political party was not the original source of those funds, there would be neither a legally enforceable trail of disclosure back to the true donor nor would there be any penalty provisions enforceable against persons or organisations who are domiciled overseas.

The AEC then recommended that donations received from outside Australia be prohibited altogether, but recognised that it still did nothing to resolve the problem of trying to track down and prosecute donors who are overseas. In our supplementary remarks, we were at pains to stress that it is neither necessary nor desirable to prevent individual Australians who are living overseas from donating to Australian political parties or candidates. Just a note: the word `foreign' in our amendment is not to be found in the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The definition we have used is taken from the statute book under the Antarctic Treaty Act.

The Democrats have a considerable agenda of changes we are seeking to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The opportunity to move some or all of our proposed amendments could be presented when bills to amend the act are before the Senate. On Monday, I tested the knowledge of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters as to whether these bills were due to come in. They did not know. However, I was pleased to discover that two bills have been listed in the House of Representatives today: the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Access to Electoral Roll and Other Measures) Bill 2004 and the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Enrolment Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2004. The reason this is before you now is that the Democrats are concerned that, even with the prospect of the bills being introduced into the House, they may not make the legislative list for debate this financial year. There is a view that the June sittings may be the last before an election is called and so, because we think this is a discrete and urgent and relatively simple issue to make a determination on, we have sought to amend the act prior to the election. However, we recognise the importance of acknowledging the way in which this particular format is developed, so we will be happy to take the amendment vote on the voices.