Blowback
You know what they say: If you play with fire, you’re bound to get burned. Labor senator Nick Bolkus has some questions to answer about donations made to his campaign by Dante Tan, the “Christopher Skase of the Phillipines”.
Bolkus is accused of accepting a donation of $9880 without declaring it to the Electoral Commission. This is a serious claim, and needs to be investigated thoroughly (it’s hard to believe the guy spent that much on raffle tickets).
Still, the accusations against Philip Ruddock (and Ross Cameron) are far more serious. Whatever Bolkus might have done wrong, he did not accept money in exchange for a visa. And new allegations against the Liberals suggest that they accepted undeclared donations from Tan, too.
This whole debacle demonstrates that campaign finance reform is urgently needed. Australians need to know that any donations made to their political representatives are open, transparent and with no strings attached.
It corrupts the political process.
Jusy observe the US.
Its a good reason to turf Bolkus and bring in some talent into the Senate for the ALP. I know that is a radical suggestion but it might just work!
I don’t think either of them has in fact done anything wrong - but they have behaved in a way that makes it easy to paint it that way. With Bolkus he directly accepted a donation which is in breach of ALP fundraising guidelines. This makes it easy to imply that he, the potential decision maker, was aware of the donation. I can’t imagine it was a donation in anticipation of a favourable immigration outcome should the ALP win the election. It’s easy to convince people who are already skeptical of the party that something dishonest has occurred because they are all too willing to believe that they would do wrong in the first place.
With the Liberal donation, it was made in accordance with Liberal Party donation guidelines which are pretty similar to the ALP ones. The fundraiser should be unaware of cases before the minister lest they seek them out for donations. The minister should not be aware of the fundraisers activities lest they inadvertedly favour a donor.
An additional difference is that the Liberal donation was registered before the deadline (although some time after it was recieved) whereas Bolkus missed the deadline, which is really a technical difference.
At least no one’s invoking the Lawrence mantra [applied among other things to the ‘overlooked’ $5,000] i.e., “I forgot.”