Prime Minister Tony Abbott is out with a sweeping policy reform package to donations, from Domainfax:
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has outlined a sweeping plan for reform of Australia’s political donations system that would ban payments from unions, companies and overseas donors.
…While opposition leader in May 2013, Mr Abbott backed out on a donation reform deal struck with then-prime minister Julia Gillard after an internal party and public backlash.
That deal would have handed political parties and elected MPs more public funding but also, crucially, reduced the disclosure thresholds for anonymous donations from $12,000 to $5000.
But in the wake of the Dastyari scandal, Mr Abbott said: “I think it is time to look at donations reform again.
” We need to look long and hard at restricting donations to real people on the electoral roll. To that end, there should be no union donations, company donations or foreign donations, ” he said.
” Obviously we don’t want influence buying, we don’t want subversion of our system. The best way to ensure the system is straight and clean is full transparency. The best way to have transparency is to have real-time disclosure, or near-to-real-time disclosure.”
Mr Abbott encouraged people “to donate to the Liberals, or the party of their choice – that’s a good thing – and if they want to do it substantially that’s great, as long as there is that transparency”.
While the cat’s away and all of that. Looks like one way or another this will get done.
Meanwhile, at The Australian the heat swings onto Bob Carr and his Yuhu Group funded China think thank:
The Australia China Relations Institute at UTS was established in 2014 with a $1.8 million donation from property developer Huang Xiangmo, whose Yuhu Group also settled a $40,000 legal claim for Labor senator Sam Dastyari.
Following Senator Dastyari’s resignation, one senior Labor source told The Australian Labor’s former foreign minister was responsible for pushing an aggressive pro-China position with Labor MPs in NSW, particularly within the party’s Right faction: “Sam was just the monkey — the organ-grinder is Bob Carr.”
Swinburne University’s John Fitzgerald, a China expert who is a former director of the Ford Foundation in Beijing, said…“The creation of a China centre committed to spinning positive stories about China at a university previously punished for non-compliance sends a clear message to the sector, and to China that impartial academic research based on free and open critical inquiry is not necessary, perhaps even not wise, for a university planning to deepen its engagements with China,” Professor Fitzgerald said.
…Another prominent Australian China academic who did not want to be named said the UTS institute was “too close” to the Chinese embassy and was operating as a “propaganda arm” for the Chinese Communist Party.
The entity should be removed by UTS or be refashioned as an exclusive second track diplomacy operation with no ‘research’ capability.
