Electoral Finance Reform Proposals

Two significant announcements from Simon Power. The first is that the three electoral agencies are being merged into one agency, which will be fully independent of the Government.

I’ve long advocated that, and it is great to see a Government finally doing it.

The Electoral Commission and the Chief Electoral Officer will merge by 1 October 2010 and the Chief Registrar of Electors will merge in after the 2011 election.

I presume the Commissioners will be appointed by Parliament. At present they are a mixture of appointment by the Minister and ex-officio the Secretary of Justice.

Simon Power has also released a proposal document, after the earlier discussion document, on electoral finance reform.

I’ll blog in more detail on the proposal document later, but I’m really pleased to see that in relatively contentious areas such as length of regulated period, broad casting allocations, they have proposed two or three options so that one can have a more useful debate (as in between options) as oppossed to clean slate discussion in the discussion document.

Really the process has been near flawless so far, and very inclusive. Total opposite to what the last Government did.

Submissions will be open until 30 October 2009.