To Give and to Receive: The Australian Government's Proposed Electoral Finance Reforms

Abstract

In December 2008, the federal government released its Electoral Reform Green Paper: Donations, Funding and Expenditure (‘Green Paper’) proposing a variety of reforms to Australia’s current federal election funding and financial disclosure systems.

This article canvasses some of the arguments which have been raised in favour of and against two areas of electoral reform proposed in the Green Paper: restrictions on private donations to political parties or candidates and restrictions on spending in electoral campaigns.

In so doing, the article considers the question of restrictions on donations to political parties or candidates, whether corporate donations should be treated differently from individual donations, and foreign donations accepted at all, whether imposing caps on electoral campaign spending would help to control campaign costs and inequalities between candidates and parties or, alternatively, restrict a candidate’s right to freedom of political expression and supporters’ rights to hear such expression, the problem of ‘incumbency advantage’, whether a distinction should be drawn between limits on donations and limits on campaign expenditure, and other issues which arise in relation to the federal government’s proposed restrictions on private donations and campaign spending under Australian electoral law.