Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform: Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters

This submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters responds to the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform) Bill 2017. Research Australia supports the Bill’s objectives but maintains that it would have a disproportionate and unintended impact on not-for-profit health and medical research organisations. Because health and medical research funding and related policy (such as charities regulation, the R&D Tax Incentive, visas, privacy and access to public data) are often issues before electors, routine activities such as responding to government consultations and parliamentary inquiries, or tweeting support for a Medical Research Future Fund announcement, could count as ‘political expenditure’. Organisations spending more than $13,500 a year would become ‘third party campaigners’, and all would need to track such expenditure continuously, which could deter them from contributing to public policy. The submission also notes that research grants from overseas bodies such as the US National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust meet the definition of a ‘gift’, bringing them under the foreign donation provisions, while political exchange programs are exempt. Research Australia recommends that the Committee consider the burden on the wider community and how mitigate it, and recommends that grants to charities for health and medical research purposes, which are not political expenditure and are spent as intended, be exempted from the definition of gift in the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.