From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM. Tens of millions of dollars in dark donations to political parties have renewed calls for election funding reform. The major parties received over one hundred and forty million dollars in twenty twenty three to twenty four, with close to half of that undisclosed, and even the donations we do know about are only just now being reported, in some cases
eighteen months after they were made. The Albanezi 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 Sekham on Australia's biggest political donors and the
roadblocks to reform. It's Wednesday, February five. 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.
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 looked for Gina Reinhart for example. So Gina Reinhart's Hancock prospecting gave around five hundred thousand dollars 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 and cozying up to her.
And at the end of last week, Peter Dutton squeezed in a trip to Western Australia for Gina ryan Hart's birthday.
Party, notably flying across the country from Canberra to West in Australia on the eve of a vital by election, I might add, so he could attend her birthday party for one hour before flying all the way back again.
Maybe Dutton's just a mega fan of Guy Sebastian, who's sang the national anthem at Gena's party.
More recently, of course, we've seen Reinhardt come back from meetings with Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mary Lago advocating that the 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.
Peter Darton has appointed Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians just into sorry Nampagina price to a new government efficiency folio with cutting the fat and the fat cats.
Interestingly, Anthony Pratt, another of our billionaires, showed up on the register. He's another one who spent New Year at Mara Lago with Donald Trump and with Scott Morrison and with Gina Reinhardt.
Actually, at one point taps Pratt's shoulder in a warm way.
Trump's son Don Jor was just behind them. You can see that at some point in the foot edge.
Well, it turns out that Pratt has dropped a million dollars into the Labor Party.
Right, okay, So what do we know Mike about the relationship between Anthony Pratt and Anthony ABENEZI.
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 what the Labor government looked to be when the Pratt donations were made. So some sharp observers have noted that just a few weeks after that pledge, Anthony Albanezi attended a private function organized by Pratt at his home in Melbourne, with Katie Perry providing the entertainment.
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 life performance by Katie Perry.
But it's not just Pratt either. There 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 Sports Bet donated eighty eight thousand dollars to Labor, Tap Corp donated sixty five hundred dollars,
and Responsible Wagering so called gave sixty six thousand. It's just an interesting juxtaposition I think of 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 sixty four million dollars each.
But there is one big difference, so my dad, which is that the Conservatives don't declare donations below the compulsory threshold of sixteen thousand, three hundred, which must say who gave you the money, So roughly a third of their donors go undeclared. Labor declares had a one thousand dollars threshold, so ninety percent of their donors are declared.
Okay, well that's the two major parties then, but what about the rest of the political class. What about the independence?
Well, Climate two hundred, which funds the campaigns of a lot of the independence received five point nine million dollars in donations. Founder of Climate two hundred, Simon Homes are called kicked in three hundred thousand dollars in the twenty three to twenty four financial years, So that's what about two percent of the total funds. Climate two hundred in turn donated to various of the community independents. Zoe Daniels and Monique Ryan got over just one hundred grand each.
Daniels and Ryan, of course, of the two that are expected to have the toughest fights to hold the seats, that they were at the last election. Climate two hundred is also expected to donate to kick money into the campaigns of about thirty community independence this year. So yeah, they got a lot of money and they declared it all which is interesting. If you put in fifty bucks to Climate two hundred, they say where it came from.
Similar thing with the Greens, they did quite well. There's a longtime Greens donor, a professional poker player called Duncan Turpey. He gave nine hundred thousand to the Greens and he gave another three hundred thousand to Climate two hundred. There was one big absence from the register this year though, and that was Clive Palmer. I mean, this is the bloke who spent one hundred and twenty odd million dollars at the last election and only got one seat and
got a candidate elected in one seat. Interestingly, he has since deregistered his United Australian Party. He did that in twenty twenty two. 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 they've been a string of them now are less concerned about winning seats than they are with defeating the Labor Party, And Mike, the.
Thing I think is really important here is that 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 reforms.
Right absolutely, that seems like a worthy reform and it would not be a hard problem to fix.
So why hasn't that happened? That's after the break, So, Mike, there's been a lot of discussion around Albaneze'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, 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 almost seventeen thousand dollars down to one thousand. 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 ninety million dollars by political parties right, which is fairly healthy, but only eight hundred thousand non individual campaigns. So if you're an independent running your individual campaign, you've got a limit of eight hundred thousand. Meanwhile, the major parties can spend ninety 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 said at twenty thousand dollars 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 seven hundred thousand dollars could be kicked into the pockets of the Labor Party. And in fact, Dohn Farrell has been pretty open about the intention of this package.
There was one instance last year where Farrell told the story about being approached by Simon Holmes, a court who complained to him that the changes would lock out independent challenges and Farrell reportedly replied, well, that's the fucking point.
So this brings us back to the last setting 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 pete it out in the Senate and now it's coming back.
Right okay, So tell me what is Don Farrell proposing. What can he do well?
In those final frenzied days of the last sitting, Labor got support from the cross Bench 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 cross Bench on the topic of electoral reform and see if they could
get something together that would be broadly acceptable. This was a condition imposed by Senator David Pocock, who along with West Australian Independent Kate Cheney, have been sort of the point people for the Independence 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 Albanesi 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 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 cross Bench 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.
Right, So very little consultation or negotiation so far.
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 miners are being left out in the coal 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 donors.
Right 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 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 independence was in the single digits. At the last election twenty twenty two, 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 we'll see a continuation of that trend away from the majors, possibly to the extent where neither of the big 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 quey 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, Mike.
Thank you for your time, Thank you for yours. Also in the news today, the new South Wales Transport Minister Joe Halen has resigned from her position following revelations about the use of a taxpayer funded ministeri or 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 thirteen hour, four hundred and forty six kilometer drive from Sydney to a holiday house on the Central Coast and then a Hunter Valley winery and back. Joe Halen, 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 Judaicye hefty tariffs come into effect on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China. President Trump confirmed he agreed to the pause after Mexican President Claudia Schinbaum committed to sending ten thousand National Guard troops to the US Mexico border. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See you tomorrow.