Zali Steggall has been a target of the Liberal Party ever since she dared topple Tony Abbott, in the 2019 election, in the seat of Warringah.
So, it now seems there has been a political hit on Steggall over electoral donations she received from the KInghorn Family Trust which had donated $100,000 to Steggall’s campaign. This donation was in one cheque but represented pledges of $12,500 each on behalf of eight members of the family trust.
The eight separate donations at $12,500 fell below the disclosure threshold but the AEC quite correctly noted that the payment by a single cheque exceeded the threshold and required further disclosure: this disclosure was corrected by Steggall in February 2021.
The threshold for donations requiring disclosure at that time was $13,800 since then it has been increased by indexation to $14,500. The system at the federal level was running quite well with a disclosure threshold of just $1500 until 2006 when John Howard decided that was too low and increased it to “more than $10,000” with annual indexation : that’s when the rot set in and neither party has been prepared to address the growing problem since.
This practice of donation splitting, when payments are divided into smaller amounts so that large payments can be kept under the disclosure threshold, has been widely adopted by all political parties and is still quite common and legal. Where Steggall came undone was that the established political parties are alert to the need to keep the individual donations under the threshold ; that’s why they are calling Steggall’s blunder a rookie mistake.
So, in effect nothing illegal has occurred and when the oversight was brought to the independent member for Warringah’s attention, it was corrected.
Does it warrant a media hit? I don’t think so but there is no doubt that the whole of the regulatory system governing political donations badly needs to be overhauled. When you consider that just $17.9 million worth of individual donations were declared for the 2020 – 2021 year compared with the almost $177 million received by parties you would be forgiven if you thought that the disclosure regime was better described as a non-disclosure scheme.
Personally, Steggall’s oversight doesn’t concern me but I am far more concerned that our former Attorney General, Christian Porter, was able to receive and conceal an anonymous donation said to be in the order of a million dollars. In Porter’s case he threw a legal doona over the donation by calling it the proceeds of a blind trust and thus he could not reveal either the source of the funds or the donor – all legal according to him, wink wink, nudge nudge !
Not to mention the potential for disruption to our democracy, not from overseas interests as Peter Dutton would have us believe, but closer to home in the form of Clive Frederick Palmer who spent $60 million in the lead up to the 2019 election without much of a return on his money. But he threatens to spend even more this time around and may well be able to insert one or more of his stooges into the senate: that’s what ASIO are worried about and we should be too.
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