Angry scenes at donations inquiry committee hearing

By Tim Lake

There were angry exchanges at the public hearing of the Select Committee on Electoral and Political Party Funding in Parliament last week, with one speaker describing the committee as an attempt to stifle public debate.
Manly local government councillor Brad Pederson called the move to set up the committee a ‘cynical exercise in issues management”, while pro-Callan Park campaigner Dr Jean Lennane clashed with a committee member, Labor MLC Amanda Fazio, over mental health services in NSW.
About 40 people attended the public hearing of the committee on April 4, which has been set up to examine the issue of donations to political parties.
Mr Pederson said donations were simply bribes by another name.
He called for a national summit to tackle the problem, saying that if only one state banned donations, money could easily be funnelled through other states. 
Mr Pederson said the committee could be seen as an attempt to muzzle debate and called for Greens MP Lee Rhiannon – who had been instrumental in getting the committee established – to be immediately appointed to it.
However, committee chair Fed Nile said Ms Rhiannon had appeared before the committee and spoken extensively to them on the issues. The Greens have since called for a Royal Commission into recent major government planning decisions.
Dr Jean Lennane said the preservation of Callan Park mental hospital at Rozelle had been an uphill battle for years simply because vested interests wanted the valuable land for redevelopment.
She also linked the neglected condition of many NSW hospitals with a government fixation instead on using the land they occupied for other things.
At Callan Park Hospital, she said, the attitude seemed to be that a ‘dead patient’ was ‘the best economic outcome’ and the reason why patients in the complex had been moved.
Hospital CEOs, mostly now on temporary contracts, were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs, Dr Lennane said.
Ms Amanda Fazio responded by saying Callan Park’s patients would be housed in a new facility at Concord Hospital, which Dr Lennane called ‘a constant lie’ by the Government because the Concord facility was inadequate.
Speaker Derek Rescei said his experience in underdeveloped countries was that donations determined who got government tenders; that delays in granting tenders were created so favoured tenderers would donate even more to induce a decision; and that this often resulted in unsafe work in the resulting projects.
He said Australia by comparison was a ‘relative haven’, but strong action was needed to prevent a decline.
Most other speakers supported some limits on election spending and private donations, especially from big corporations.
Many were concerned a total freeze in favour of complete public funding of election campaigns would crush emerging smaller candidates and parties who may not qualify for dollar support.
One speaker said total transparency, while desirable before elections, would not on its own address the problem of undue influence. At present donations prevented any politician from being able to claim total impartiality, they said.