Left: The Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains; Above: The vestibule of the New South Wales Parliament.
community's loud and clear demand for real change in this area. This Bill affected a ban on
political donations from all those organizations other than individuals, including: corporations, industrial organizations, peak industry groups, religious institutions and community organizations – in other words, third-party interest groups. It does this by making it unlawful for a political donation to be made or received if the donor is not an individual who is on an electoral roll for Commonwealth, state or local government elections. The Bill also linked the electoral communication expenditure of political parties with that of their affiliates to ensure that the effectiveness and fairness of campaign finance rules are not undermined. These reforms are a reasonable, measured and fair way
to inject more transparency and accessibility into the state's political processes. It invests the power to donate solely in those who have the power to vote, those with the greatest stake in the system.
Getting around the former limitations The changes provide for the aggregation of electoral communication expenditure of parties and their affiliated organizations. Under the Election Funding, Expenditure and Disclosures Act, "electoral communication expenditure" comprises a subset of electoral expenditure that relates to certain campaign expenses, including advertising, accommodation and staffing costs. The Act caps the electoral communication expenditure that parties are entitled to incur in the lead-up to an
election at both a state and electorate level. It is unlawful for a party to breach the caps. Unfortunately, these party
expenditures were not affected by the expenditure of organizations that are affiliated with a political party. This led to organizations intimately involved in the governance of a political party, sometimes even with office bearers in common, campaigning on behalf of a party with no corresponding offset to the party's own ability to spend. The government believed that
this was an unfair loophole that undermined the integrity of the whole scheme. The government’s amendments to the principal Act closed this loophole by combining the electoral communication expenditure of affiliates with the expenditure of political parties for the purpose of determining
whether a party has exceeded the applicable expenditure cap. It does this by aggregating the expenditure of a political party with that of its affiliated organizations. Under the Act, an "affiliated organization" is defined to be a body that under the rules of the party can appoint delegates to the party's governing body and/or has a role in the pre-selection of candidates for that party. An affiliated organization may be incorporated or unincorporated in recognition of the fact that a traditional corporate structure may not always be adopted by organizations that affiliate with political parties. The new law provides that even
if a political party spends less than or equal to its applicable expenditure caps, its expenditure will be treated as exceeding those caps if the combined party and