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Ingram blasts secret political donations

By Craig Ingram - 3rd February 2004 - Back to News

"The recently released funding and disclosure returns from the Australian Electoral Commission, and today’s revelations in The Australian that the National Party is under investigation for its habit of masking massive donations, highlights the problems with a political system totally dependent on political donations without adequate accountability measures," the Independent Member for Gippsland East, Craig Ingram, said today.

"It’s time to fix the money dependence and transparency issues that surround political donations whilst some voters still trust some politicians.

"The donations disclosed this week were made back in July 2002 in the lead up to the 2002 state election.

"This is well past the immediate memory of the state’s voters and highlights just one of the problems with the current system.

"I have been endeavouring to change the disclosure and accountability mechanisms for political parties, but the political parties are so dependent on political donations that they refuse to see the risks in the current unethical practices.

"The associated entities provisions allow millions of untraceable dollars to be donated to political parties without any public scrutiny.

"If individuals and companies do not want their support for a political party or candidate publicly known, then we should question why and what strings are attached to that support.

"All parties are equally to blame for supporting a system that promotes deception and at the worst could allow corruption and hide donations from organisations in exchange for policy legislative or political bias.

"The current disclosure laws are a joke and its no wonder the public is sceptical about the honesty of some of their elected representatives.

The State Parliament has had two opportunities to address this untenable situation in the past three years, but the parties have voted together in a rare showing of grubby bi-partisanship to avoid any scrutiny of these associated entities.

"The question needs to be asked why?" Mr Ingram concluded.

Source: http://gippsland.com/

Published by: news@gippsland.com