BY SUE BOLAND
SYDNEY — One Nation NSW upper house member David Oldfield and One Nation's former national director David Ettridge (no longer a One Nation member) have given the NSW Labor and federal Coalition governments an excuse to place further restrictions on the registration of new political parties.
Ettridge, with the help of his old friend Oldfield, recently sought federal electoral registration for two new parties, the No GST Party and the No Nuclear Waste Party.
Ettridge is totally up-front about how he intends to run his new parties. The No GST Party's registration form states: "As a single issue party, it's recognised that the need for intellectual involvement by members is limited, as the required intellectual contributions and substance of the party will be sought from appropriately qualified professionals".
The new parties will have three-person executives consisting of Ettridge and two others. All candidates will be appointed by the executive. There will be no branches, and the membership will be limited to a maximum of 800.
Ettridge was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald (September 9), as saying that this party structure was intended to avoid the problems experienced by One Nation, which attracted a membership of "whingers and moaners".
The fact that neither of the two parties has the required 500 members was not a barrier to registering them. A party can be exempt from this provision if it has a sitting federal or state parliamentarian as one of its members. With Oldfield being a NSW parliamentarian, the No GST Party and the No Nuclear Waste Party were able to avoid demonstrating to the Australian Electoral Commission that they each had 500 members.
The Labor Party, the Democrats and the National Party reacted to Ettridge and Oldfield's actions by calling for federal electoral laws to be reformed. This means that they are likely to point to Ettridge's and Oldfield's new front parties as a justification for placing further restrictions on the right of people to register new political parties.
The proliferation of small parties at the last NSW state election was the excuse used by Premier Bob Carr's Labor government to amend electoral laws to make it extremely difficult for new parties to gain registration.
Under the Carr government's amendments to the electoral laws, all parties seeking registration have to pay $2000 and submit signed membership forms from 750 members in the state (who cannot be members of any other registered party). Parties will have to prove they fulfil these requirements every year to keep their electoral registration and have to be registered for 12 months before contesting elections.
By voting to support this legislation, the NSW Greens parliamentarians gave Carr the numbers he needed. The Greens justified their position by arguing that it would discourage right-wing front parties.
However, this onerous legislation will impact most severely on left and progressive parties while leaving parliamentarians' right to register new parties untouched.
Perhaps the Greens didn't raise the latter issue at the time because they want to retain this right for their own parliamentarians. When the Australian Greens first registered with the Australian Electoral Commission, they didn't have to prove that they had 500 members because they had Greens state parliamentarians in Tasmania.
While Ettridge's frankness about his view of party members may shock, it's not markedly different from how the Liberal, Labor and National parties and the Democrats view their members. All four treat their members primarily as polling booth fodder, and none of them allow their members to direct how their parliamentarians vote in parliament.
Liberal and Labor have also resorted to setting up front parties or standing stooge independents in the past, but they are usually clever enough to ensure that it is difficult to trace the links.
It doesn't matter how many restrictions are placed on the registration of new political parties. It won't stop the setting up of front parties by far-right groups or by the major parties because they always have access to more money and more resources than the left.
The best antidote to right-wing front parties is to remove restrictions on the registration of new parties altogether, allowing anyone to register a new political party. No list of members should be provided to the electoral commission and no fees should be paid.
Instead, the electoral commission should be charged with responsibility to provide all voters with a special bulletin that includes statements from all parties and candidates, outlining their views and indicating where they will direct their preferences. This information should also be available in the polling booth on election day.
The electoral act should also allow for free space to be allocated to all candidates and parties to state their point of view on TV and radio and in the newspapers. Restrictions should also be placed on the amount of paid advertising that parties can use.
Such measures, combined with on-the-street campaigns, would soon sort out which new parties are genuine and which are fake.