Turnbull’s cowardly cancellation of a Parliamentary sitting week leaves him out of time on promised political donation reform.
When it comes to reforming political donation laws, Labor has always been the party of action. The Hawke Government set a disclosure threshold for political donations of $1500 and introduced public funding, reducing political parties’ reliance on donations.
The Liberal Party has always worked to unwind these reforms. The Howard Government raised the threshold to $10,000 in 2006 and indexed it to the Consumer Price Index, which has seen the threshold blow out to $13,500.
On November 28, 2016 we introduced legislation to the Parliament to prohibit foreign political donations and drop the threshold for donation disclosure to $1000.
But by the time the House of Representatives next sits, it will be more than a year since Labor introduced our donation reforms.
Political donation reform is one of the many important things Parliament could be considering this week, along with protecting penalty rates and making banks more accountable.
It is inexcusable that Turnbull has time for exclusive dinners with foreign donors to the LNP but not for action on political donation reform.
The conservatives pretend they will follow Labor’s lead and ban foreign donations but they are clearly not serious about it.
If they were, Turnbull would’ve turned up to Canberra next week to consider Labor’s reforms along with all of the other important issues Australians rightly expect their Parliament to be working on.