TRANSCRIPT - INTERVIEW WITH PETER GLEESON, SKY NEWS (14 January 2019)

Subjects: Foreign political donations ban

PETER GLEESON: Here is what he had to say.

ALEX HAWKE: Yeah thanks Peter, and the Government acted late last year to ban foreign politicaldonations into our Australian system. We’ve seen around the world, evidence that foreign political actors are increasingly seeking to influence the outcome of elections. All around the world you can see money pouring in to different countries in an attempt to change the polity, to influence policy, to vary the outcome of an election against the democratic will of those countries, so the Morrison Government has banned all foreign political donations for the purpose of electoral expenditure from 1 January this year. So you’ve got a lot of measures in this Bill, and we’ve done a lot of work to ensure that only Australians will decide who the elected Governments are in Australia and foreign actors won’t be able to pour money in to the coffers of political parties, and also associated entities and other political actors, whether they be charities, or those who seek to spend money on political campaigning in Australia.

PETER GLEESON: Alex, one of the targets of this particular legislation of course is GetUp, now, GetUp pride themselves on their so called independence, but we all know that they are very much a wholly owned subsidiary of the Labor Party, and The Greens, and just before the January 1 deadline, they received a $95 000 donation from a foreign company, and it was to look at climate research in this country. Can you take us through that, and explain to us exactly how this legislation will stop those sorts of donations coming in?

ALEX HAWKE: Well, this is an important question, and what we have seen in recent years is the rise of third party organisations, sometimes on the basis of being charitable, or having an environmental purpose, actually spending a lot of money to influence the outcomes of elections. There is nothing wrong with that inherently where they’re transparent, where they’re up front with what they’re doing, where they tell people honestly “hey look, we’re working for a political party, or for a political outcome”. When they’re under the guise of a charity, or a charitable purpose, and then they’re trying to influence an election, there’s been a problem with the transparency about how money is spent. So what this law will do, organisations that spend over $500 000 will be required to comply with all sections of the Act – that is, they’ll have to report, they’ll have to be transparent about where their funding comes from, they won’t be able to take foreign political donations for the purposes of political expenditure in elections and therefore they’ll have to account for every dollar. If they say it’s for a charitable purpose for the environment, it’ll have to be spent on the environment and not in the Australian political system. So, many people do talk about GetUp. That’s because GetUp is integrally involved in elections, almost every election cycle. You go back to the Wentworth by-election, the recent Wentworth by-election here in Sydney, GetUp was a main actor in that election. They were doing a lot of electoral work in that election, and again, their right to do so, but if you’re going to be a political actor, you have to comply with the requirements of the political system just like a political party, or other political actors. These laws will help ensure that anyone spending money for political purposes will have to be transparent and accountable to the Australian people.

PETER GLEESON: Alex, as a senior member of the Coalition Government, do you get frustrated when you see the combined efforts, for example, of GetUp, throw in the Unions and the way in which they throw money willy-nilly at Labor Party campaigns, and we saw it in Longman. I mean, I know Trevor Ruthenberg had a few issues with his medals and so forth, and that didn’t help him, and we know that was a very desperately fought by-election. But, I’ve got to say on the ground up there, I was up there a number of times, the Labor Party outspent the Coalition at least 10 to 1 in that particular by-election. Do you get frustrated when you see what I sort of call a conglomerate where they pull together, and GetUp is one of the primary movers, one of the primary shapeshifters in the way in which these elections are conducted?

ALEX HAWKE: Well that’s right, and we’ve seen Unions have a disproportionate influence over the Labor Party, and you can imagine under Bill Shorten if he’s elected the Unions will have the major influence on Australian politics and Government, even though their private sector membership is now, I think, less than 10 percent, when you take the public sector unions out. So, we’ve got less than 10 percent of the work force in a Union, and they’ll have the main say about who are the Government Ministers, what Bill Shorten’s policy is, and what the Labor Party’s policy is if Labor forms a Government. That’s a huge and disproportionate influence on our system and it’s all because of the money that they generate from their membership fees and from super boards, and all the things that they do as unions now, they’re really big businesses, and so they don’t pay tax in Australia. There are a lot of questions about that. We have to make sure that if they are like a big business, well they should also be governed like a big business and this Government has done a lot of work in trying to make sure that the governance of unions is up to scratch with big corporations and that the civil and criminal penalties that are available to people who do the wrong thing in unions apply. These are the things that I think people in the Australian polity should be concerned about. Not about fair and free contests about money and ideas, but where any small group has a disproportionate influence on the system. We have to take action, we’ve banned foreign donations, we want to see good governance of unions to make sure that they’re properly governed in line with the big corporations they’ve become like and we want to make sure that actors have a transparent regime that applies to everybody in the political system.

PETER GLEESON: So where are you actually at in relation to taxation and the crackdown on these organisations when it comes to their taxation take? Are you looking at that?

ALEX HAWKE: Well, these are big questions. In the long-term, absolutely, we’d have to see more done on it. At the moment, the Government is focussing around superannuation reforms. The Union Movement has had a big say in relation to what happens to superannuation, and now, you know, we are talking about trillions of dollars. We have to make sure there’s proper arrangements and proper governance there as well for the future. You have default superannuation that the Labor Party and the Unions were keen to bring in, and funnels money directly into the unions, and where you don’t have proper corporate governance, you don’t have proper arrangements inside unions themselves, you’ve really got to look and question about it. So, the Coalition is constantly seeking to improve governance in these big corporate-like entities that are now modern unions, and we want to see better results from them.

PETER GLEESON: Just before we go to a break, Alex, we saw GetUp recently put out a press release calling on people to nominate the right-wing MPs that they’d like GetUp to target leading into the next Federal Election. I mean, as I said earlier in my interview, they have often said that they are very much an independent organisation, which is sort of taking the Australian public for mugs to be quite frank. I mean, that must be a real concern for the Coalition, when you’ve got this organisation who clearly are very, very well-resourced, very well-funded, and as I say, they form this extraordinary alliance with the Labor Party and The Greens, and here they are openly canvassing people to give them their opinion on which right-wing MPs they should target.

ALEX HAWKE: Well, you’re exactly right Peter, and this is one of the key examples of how GetUp trying to pretend to people that they’re not involved in politics. I mean, you don’t see them saying “could you identify the most extreme left-wing politicians in Australia we need to get rid of?” If they’re against extremes, they should be against all extremes. They certainly have questions to answer if they’re pretending to be independent about which political party they’re benefiting constantly with their constant attacks on Liberal Party MPs and you will see, it’s not just the few that they’re trying to focus on there, they’ve got billboards in electorates around the country already, only Liberal Party electorates, you know, attacking members of the Liberal Coalition parties. So, it’s very hard to see that they meet the criteria of being independent, their own criteria, and that when they tell the Australian people to “give us money, because we are just an issue advocacy organisation”, I think people need to really think carefully about giving money to GetUp, or giving support to GetUp on the basis that they’re independent, or that they’re not political activists – they are obviously when you look at their activities, heavily involved in politics, heavily involved one way, and it really needs to be incumbent on them now to justify their claim that they are independent.

PETER GLEESON: Alex Hawke, thank you for joining us tonight.

[ENDS]