Submissions to the Green Paper on Electoral Funding were made available from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet today (available at: http://www.pmc.gov.au/consultation/elect_reform/submissions.cfm )

The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice contributed a submission which can be downloaded from here: http://www.pmc.gov.au/consultation/elect_reform/pdfs/sub35.pdf

Our submission made four key points:

1. That Election Expenditure should be capped removing incentives for political parties and candidates to fundraise.
2. That there needs to be a centralisation of disclosure regimes and that the various state branches of a political party should be treated as one entity to provide a more realistic picture of the funding of political parties.
3. All donations to political parties must be banned with the possible exception of small donations from individuals to a maximum of $500 per financial year.
4. That the public funding of elections should continue to be made available but that:
   • there should be provisions for access to public funding for new political parties
   • that the money should be only made available for electoral expenditure and not an automatic entitlement

The rules of the system will help determine the type of politics that are engaged in.

It is our belief that with these changes there would be significant improvements to the transparency and accountability of political parties.

Because Australians currently have the ability to buy political influence, debate has been restricted in Australia and political parties have been able to ignore the concerns of their rank and file members. Why look to support from your members when you can just receive a handful of donations from large donors?

We believe that by making the above changes we would see a re engagement with the membership base of political parties which can only be good for democracy.