Other news:

• Antony Green tells you everything you need to know about all this double dissolution talk.

• Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald reports the Liberal contest to replace Brendan Nelson in Bradfield could develop into a contest between two big conservative guns: The Australian’s opinion page editor Tom Switzer, and John Howard’s legendary former chief-of-staff Arthur Sinodinos.

• The Federation Press will publish a self-explanatory volume entitled Australia: The State of Democracy, edited by Marian Sawer, Norman Abjorensen and Phil Larkin of the Democratic Audit of Australia, on June 15.

• Brian Costar of Swinburne University of Technology reviews the implications of the Victorian Ombudsman’s recent report into Brimbank City Council and the related internal matters of the Victorian ALP.

• The Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee has published the final report of its Inquiry Into Political Donations and Disclosure, which I won’t claim to have read at this stage.

• Two electoral events in Western Australian tomorrow: the daylight saving referendum, which you can discuss here, and the Fremantle by-election, which you can discuss and read about in very great detail here.

• The government’s second go at the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill passed the House of Representatives yesterday. Daryl Melham, Labor’s member for Banks and chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, had some harsh words during the debate for Family First Senator Steve Fielding, who joined with the Coalition to reject the earlier version of the bill in the Senate last week.

• The redistribution of Tasmanian electorates (which uniquely applies to both federal and state elections) has been finalised, with only minor amendments to the boundaries as originally proposed. These have very slightly weakened Labor’s position in both Braddon and Franklin. More from Antony Green.

• The Electoral Commissioner has determined quotas for Queensland and New South Wales, the first stage in the redistributions that will give a new seat to the first at the expense of the second.

• Silly Steve Fielding joined with the Coalition on Wednesday to vote down government electoral reforms that would tie public funding for election candidates to their electoral expenditure, lower the threshold for disclosure of donations to $1000 from $10,000 (which the Howard government used its Senate majority to jack it up to), ban foreign donations and anonymous donations of over $50, and require parties to disclose donations every six months rather than annually. The sticking point is Fielding’s insistence that the government also arbitrarily cap public funding to political parties at $10 million. The bill was reintroduced to the House yesterday.

• Submissions have been published in response to the federal government’s green paper on donations, funding and expenditure.

• Responding to mounting speculation she will take on Don Randall in Canning at the next federal election, senior Gallop/Carpenter government minister Alannah MacTiernan tells The West Australian: “It’s something that I’d consider but it’s far too early. The election is a long way away and it’s not something a decision can be made on until early next year.”

• The South Australian Liberals have picked a new candidate for the state seat of Mawson to replace former Kingston MHR Kym Richardson, who was charged in December with attempting to pervert the course of justice by impersonating a police officer. Matthew Donovan, described by the local Southern Times Messenger newspaper as a “self-employed importer and property developer”, won preselection ahead of Heidi Harris, adviser to Shadow Transport Minister Duncan McFetridge and unsuccessful candidate for federal preselection in Mayo; Heidi Greaves, public servant, former Onkaparinga councillor and unsuccessful candidate for Elder; and Alana Sparrow, Housing Industry Association lawyer and former media adviser to Richardson.

• The Daily Telegraph reports that NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell “will hire a team of constitutional lawyers to explore recall provisions to end fixed four-year terms for incompetent governments”. This would involve provisions for the Governor to “sack a corrupt or useless government” if called on to do so by public petitions, presumably in a fashion similar to that which brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to power in California. UPDATE: More from a skeptical Imre Salusinszky at The Australian.

• Chris Back this week took his place in the Senate, filling the vacancy created by the departure of Western Australian Liberal Chris Ellison.

The excitement of the past few days has quickly overloaded Tuesday’s thread, while adding real interest to the next set of opinion polls. Unless ACNielsen and Galaxy have something planned over the weekend, the next ones up are the regular Monday double of weekly Essential Research and fortnightly Newspoll. John Hewson tells Crikey he’s expecting an election later this year, presumably a double dissolution:

You’d have to think that the odds are narrowing on the possibility of an early election, towards the end of this year. At best, the Rudd Government’s second stimulatory package will just buy some time – simply delay the inevitable. As long as the global recession continues to deepen and, as a consequence, China’s growth continues to stall, the best Rudd can hope for is to hold up consumer spending by the cash handouts sufficient to avoid a technical recession – namely, two consecutive quarters of negative growth … Moreover, the ETS is to be introduced next year with all the scaremongering opportunities that carries for the major polluters. So why not go the people for a “mandate” to continue with the strategy, especially now that Turnbull has so clearly nailed his colours to the mast, becoming such a fixed target, from both outside and within?

Of course, there’s much here that might be contested, not to mention the lack of a double dissolution trigger at this stage. In brief:

• Possum dissects the electoral impact of the stimulus package here and here.

• Antony Green analyses the finalised federal redistribution boundaries for Western Australia.

• The Senate has amended legislation abolishing tax deductible political donations, which will instead be limited to donations from individuals rather than companies. Deductions applied for donations of up to $100 from individuals before the Howard government’s 2006 “reforms” jacked it up to $1500 and extended it to companies. The legislation as amended maintains the $1500 threshold.

• The silly season endeth – Kerry O’Brien and Lateline are back, and parliaments federal, Victorian and South Australian resume today.

• The Australian Workers Union has released a comprehensive survey of workers’ attitudes to the global financial crisis, derived from 1016 interviews conducted by Auspoll. The headline finding is that 40 per cent fear losing their jobs in the next year.

• Parties’ disclosures of receipts, expenditure and debts are available for perusal at the Australian Electoral Commission, at least so far as donations of over $10,500 are concerned. Siobhain Ryan and Imre Salusinszky of The Australian and Bernard Keane of Crikey sift through the evidence; the latter also opens fire on the Coalition over its obstruction of legislation reversing the 2005 disclosure threshold hike. Keane notes that one travesty can’t be pinned on the previous government: that we have had to wait until February 2009 to find out what went on at an election held in November 2007. Anyone who imagines this has something to do with logistics should consider the practice in New York City, where donations have to be declared before election day and “made public immediately on a searchable, online database”.

• Antony Green returns from a fortnight in the wilderness (literally) with a belated post-mortem on the Liberals’ defeat in South Australia’s Frome by-election. As I suspected, independent Geoff Brock owes his win to a peculiarity of the state’s electoral system that saves ballot papers with incomplete preferences by assigning them the preferences officially lodged by their favoured candidate. Without this provision, 258 ballots that were thus admitted the day after polling day would have been informal, leaving Brock 38 votes behind Labor at the second last count rather than 30 votes ahead. Another issue has been brought to my attention by Kevin Bonham, who points to the fact that a certain number of Liberal voters harmed their candidate’s chances by voting Liberal rather than Labor. If 31 such voters had tactically switched to Labor, Brock would have been excluded and the distribution of his preferences would have given victory to Liberal candidate Terry Boylan. Public choice theorists call this flaw in preferential voting “non-monotonicity”, which is elaborated upon here (although Bonham reckons “some of their worked examples are wrong”).

• Antony also gets in early with a preview of Western Australia’s May 18 daylight saving referendum, which combines customary psephological insight with a keen eye for the state’s lifestyle peculiarities.

• Former Labor MLA Kathryn Hay will run as an independent for the Tasmanian upper house division of Windermere (extending from the outskirts of Launceston north to the proposed site of Gunns’ Bell Bay pulp mill), challenging independent incumbent Ivan Dean at the poll likely to be held on May 2. Peter Tucker at Tasmanian Politics reports that one of the the other two seats up for election, the Devonport-based division of Mersey, looms as a clash between Latrobe mayor Mike Gaffney and Devonport mayor Lyn Laycock. Mersey is being vacated by retiring independent Norma Jamieson.

• Staying in Tasmania, a recount has confirmed that the last remaining Labor candidate in Franklin from the 2006 election, Daniel Hulme, will assume the lower house seat vacated by former Tourism Minister Paula Wriedt.

• Mining magnate and former National Party director Clive Palmer is making himself visible as the Queensland state election approaches, having been profiled last week on The 7.30 Report and in a cover story for The Weekend Australian Magazine. The latest salvo in Palmer’s charm offensive is a demand of $1 million in damages for defamation from Anna Bligh, who said there was “something just not right about one billionaire owning their own political party” (the annual financial disclosures discussed previously list $600,000 in donations from Palmer to the Liberal and National parties). Sean Parnell’s Weekend Australian piece describes Palmer as a “notorious litigant”, who “once listed it as a hobby in his Who’s Who entry”. Palmer’s 18-year-old son Michael has been preselected as the Liberal National Party candidate for the safe Labor seat of Nudgee.

• Rick Wallace of The Australian reports that Nationals-turned-Liberal Senator Julian McGauran will face a number of challengers in his bid for one of the two safe seats on the Victorian Senate ticket, with other incumbent Michael Ronaldson “widely expected to claim top spot”. The field includes prominent Peter Costello supporter Ross Fox, barrister Caroline Kenny and solicitor Cate Dealehr. Other names mentioned by Andrew Landeryou’s VexNews are Terry Barnes, a “former Tony Abbott adviser”, and Owen Lysaght, who ran as an independent in Chisholm in 2004.

• “Carlton’s lone classical liberal”, Andrew Norton, weighs in on Liberal hyperbole over third party political campaigns. New Mayo MP Jamie Briggs reckons these to be a “cancer in our democracy” due to the efforts of GetUp! and the ACTU at the last election. Briggs argues that “Australians are entitled to know who is behind the campaigns, how much is being spent and where the money is coming from”, evidently having failed to notice that such groups are indeed required to provide annual disclosure of receipts, expenditure and debts. However, in an interesting discussion at Larvatus Prodeo, Norton also argues that lowering the donation disclosure threshold from $10,000 to $1000 (as proposed by a bill currently before a Senate committee due to report on June 30) could theoretically catch independent political blogs in a “massive compliance net” thanks to a loose definition of “persons or organisations expressing views by any means on candidates or election issues”. Elsewhere, The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen tugs at the heart strings by complaining the disclosure amendments are designed to cut donations to the Liberal Party (from which you can readily infer why the Howard government used its Senate majority to jack the threshold up from $1500 to $10,000 in the first place). More substantially, she argues that “the nature of third-party campaigns in Australia is such that if we ban or cap donations (except by individuals) and allow third-party campaigns by unions to continue unabated, the political field is skewed against one side: the conservatives” – particularly in light of government plans to scrap tax deductibility of party donations while maintaining it for union dues and levies.

• “Dotcom millionaire” Evan Thornley has made himself popular in Labor circles by pulling the plug on his political career on the eve of his anticipated promotion to the Victorian state cabinet. The talk around Thornley was that he viewed his state political career as a stepping stone to federal politics via Simon Crean’s seat of Hotham, beyond which his ambitions were apparently without limit. His entirely unheralded decision to “pursue opportunities outside of political life” has inevitably fuelled all manner of speculation, most of it involving his financial wellbeing. It has also created a vacancy for his upper house seat for the Southern Metropolitan region. The Age reports that the new upper house system instituted at the last election “has created an anomaly for Labor, as party rules do not specify how preselection for an upper house vacancy should be conducted”:

Party sources said the anomoly was expected to be tackled by rule makers in May 2009 before preselections began in earnest for the 2010 election. But Mr Thornley’s shock departure – which sources from both major factions of Victorian Labor described as the most bizarre incident they had ever witnessed in politics – could force the anomaly to be dealt with sooner. While some within Labor believe the rules offer no guidance over preselection, others say the spirit of preselection processes in the lower house should also be adopted for the upper house. Under that scenario, Mr Thornley’s replacement in the Southern Metropolitan electorate would be decided 50:50 by a ballot of ALP branch members and a central selection panel. Many expect Labor’s national executive to ultimately choose his replacement but all agreed it was too early to speculate on the names of likely candidates.

A commenter at Andrew Landeryou’s VexNews writes:

The Left were promised Thornley’s spot but they agreed not to insist as Thornley was then non aligned. Thornley then joined Labor Unity. They left will claim they are entitled to fill Thornley’s vacancy. Labor Unity will most likely want it and there will be an internal facional brawl like Kororoit. Then Mr Dearricott’s non-aligned group will claim their right to the vacancy. A strong tip tonight is that (former Brimbank mayor) Natalie Suleyman is a favourite for the position.

Another hopeful is said to be Dick Gross, former Municipal Association of Victoria president and Port Phillip councillor defeated in recent elections in a “resident revolt over his support for the St Kilda triangle development”. There is also the question of the political future of Theo Theophanous, charged on Christmas Eve with rape. An end to Theophanous’s political career would create another upper house vacancy in Northern Metropolitan. In lieu of Evan Thornley, Theophanous’s position as Industry and Trade Minister has been filled by Martin Pakula, previously best known for his failed preselection bid against Simon Crean in Hotham ahead of the last federal election.

• Michelle Grattan of The Age reports that the Victorian Liberals are “set to reluctantly give the Nationals the number two spot on a joint Senate ticket for the 2010 election”. This would continue an agreement initiated after the 1987 double dissolution election giving the Nationals the unwinnable fourth and safe second seats at alternating elections. The party’s seat in the Senate has been held since 1993 by Julian McGauran, who quit the party for the Liberals in January 2006. One possible explanation for the move was that he did not expect the Liberals would continue with the existing joint ticket arrangement, which as Grattan explains is widely opposed within the party. It had long been thought that the Nationals had been able to negotiate the joint ticket partly because the McGauran family helped delivered it preferences from the Democratic Labor Party, whom they had assisted in legal action to prevent its deregistration. The Nationals’ apparent success in keeping the arrangement going might suggest otherwise. However, another possibility is that McGauran thought his prospects of winning Liberal preselection less unlikely than those of keeping his place with the Nationals. McGauran had an uncomfortably narrow preselection win ahead of the 2004 election over Darren Chester, now the member for Gippsland, and his family’s clout might have been further weakened since by brother Peter’s departure from politics.

• Labor’s Mark Dreyfus, chairman of the House of Representatives Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, says he hopes the government will “soon” announce a non-binding plebiscite to test opinion on a republic before the federal election.

• Robert Taylor of The West Australian has an interesting overview of the new entrants to the WA state parliament.

UPDATE (3/1/09): Malcolm Mackerras reviews the Queensland state redistribution and offers his prediction for the election to be held some time this year, namely an 11 seat Labor majority from an even split on two-party preferred.

Disclosure. State and territory party branches, associated entities (which include fundraising entities, affiliated trade unions and businesses with corporate party membership) and third parties (individuals or organisations that incur “political expenditure”, such as Your Rights at Work and GetUp!) are currently required to lodge annual returns disclosing details of campaign-related receipts, expenditure and debts. The Political Donations Bill currently before the Senate proposes to change reporting from annual to six monthly, but even this seems a bit lax. Voters would presumably want some idea of funding arrangements before they vote rather than after, and the practice in other countries shows how this could be done. In Britain, reporting is required weekly during election campaigns and quarterly at other times; in the United States, expenditures are disclosed daily during campaigns and donations monthly. This is made possible by mandatory electronic record keeping which is not required at this stage in Australia. Queensland’s and New Zealand’s practice of requiring disclosure of large donations within 10 or 14 days also sounds promising. Another issue is that itemised disclosure only applies to donations, which amounts to only a quarter of private funding – the rest coming from fundraising, investments and debt. Australia also uniquely requires “double disclosure” by both donors and recipients, which might be thought more trouble than it’s worth.

Funding. Australia is unusual in that it has neither caps on donations or bans on donations from particular sources. Canada allows donations only from private individuals; the United States does not allow donations from corporations, banks, unions and federal government contractors. Public funding arrangements such as our own are common internationally, but New Zealand interestingly uses measures of public support other than votes, including party membership, number of MPs and poll results in the lead-up to elections. This allows broadcasting time to be allocated ostensibly on the basis of current support, so that the system is “less vulnerable to criticisms of favouring major parties in comparison with minor parties and independent candidates”.

Expenditure. Expenditure caps apply in Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with compensations of free air time provided in the latter two cases. They also existed here until 1980, when they were abolished on the basis that they “constrained campaigns” and were too hard to enforce. The US allows parties and candidates to agree to limit expenditure in exchange for public funding, which it settled for when set caps were ruled unconstitutional. Given that election campaigning is increasingly unconstrained by the formal campaign period, expenditure caps work best where there are fixed terms.

In other news, we’re probably entering a Yuletide opinion poll drought, but there’s plenty else going down:

• Antony Green’s dissection of the Queensland state redistribution has been published by the Queensland Parliamentary Library.

• The campaign for South Australia’s Frome by-election (the state’s first since 1994) is slowly coming to the boil – read all about it here.

• More action than you can poke a stick at from the good people at Democratic Audit of Australia.

• I missed an opinion poll last Saturday: Westpoll in The West Australian has the state’s new Liberal government leading 55-45, from a sample of 400. This sounds maybe a bit generous to Labor from primary votes of Liberal 45 per cent, Labor 34 per cent, Nationals 5 per cent and Greens 9 per cent. Labor’s Eric Ripper, viewed by all as a post-defeat stop-gap leader, has plunged seven points as preferred premier to 12 per cent, and even trails Colin Barnett 30 per cent to 26 per cent among Labor voters.

• The unstoppable Ben Raue at the Tally Room plays the dangerous game of anticipating prospects for the looming federal New South Wales redistribution that will reduce the state from 49 seats to 48. So for that matter does Malcolm Mackerras in Crikey:

Early this year I was quoted in The Australian as saying that the name Throsby would disappear. The Illawarra media quickly picked up on this and I heard Jennie George say on ABC radio that I was engaging in “pure speculation”. She is quite right, of course. Although the loss of a NSW seat has always been assured, it is pure speculation to say which one it will be.

Nevertheless my proposition actually is that the south coast seats of Gilmore (Joanna Gash, Liberal) and Throsby (Jenny George, Labor) will be merged into a seat bearing the name of Gilmore. Such a seat would, in practice, be reasonably safe for Labor so really it would be Gash to lose her seat. As to why the name Gilmore would be preferred to the name Throsby the explanation is simple. Dame Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) was a woman whereas Charles Throsby (1777-1828) was a man.

We have the precedent of 2006 to know that the MP who is the actual victim of a redistribution is not necessarily the one whose seat disappears. In 2006 and 2007 Peter Andren was the true victim but the name of his seat, Calare, was retained. That he died shortly before the 2007 general election is not the point. His seat of Calare became so hopeless for him he announced that he would stand for the Senate. Consequently there is no reason why Joanna Gash may not be the real victim in 2009 even though the name of her seat is retained.

If this is the way the commissioners decide to do it then the flow-on effect would be interesting to watch. My belief is that Batemans Bay (presently in Gilmore) would be restored to Eden-Monaro, in which division it voted in 2001 and 2004. Then the Tumut and Tumbarumba shires (presently in Eden-Monaro) would be restored to Farrer, in which division they voted in 2001 and 2004. Consequently it would be possible to retain all the rural seats by moving them into more urban areas. Bearing in mind that in 2006 the NSW commissioners abolished a rural seat but made the remaining seats more rural it would seem to me logical that in 2009 they would retain all the rural seats but make some of them less rural.