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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

The Morrison government is contemplating new laws which could see charities held responsible for minor legal breaches by their members and supporters.

The sector says the changes are an attempt to stifle protest, while lawyers are warning they could be unconstitutional.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe on why the government is targeting charities, and what the changes could mean.

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RUBY:

Mike, you've been looking into some fairly drastic potential changes to the way that charities can operate and what they'll be allowed to do. But before we get into those changes, can you tell me why the government would want to change the way that charities operate in the first place?

MIKE:

Well, there are some charities in particular that the government particularly dislikes.

And those tend to be the environmental ones and in particular the activist ones.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Taking action on climate change is important, but people have got to show I think a bit of consideration to others…”

MIKE:

You know, people like Greenpeace and Lock the Gate.

In fact, Lock the Gate is a very good example because Lock the Gate, in a way. Its activities divide the conservative base because they're there helping farmers resist fossil fuel miners. Okay, two big constituencies for the government. And they're doing it in a very activist way.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“There is no place for economic sabotage dressed up as activism.”

MIKE:

So, you know, the government particularly wants to stop their advocacy on policies like fossil fuel mining.

Archival tape -- Peter Dutton:

“I think frankly they do their cause more harm than good so I think it's right that the police will interact with them today, hopefully a lot of them are arrested.”

MIKE:

That said, though, the conservative side of politics has spent years making life hard for charities in general with varying degrees of success. John Howard did it when he was Prime Minister, tying funding to charities to their ability to or inability to publicly advocate against government policy.

And now this is, the latest in a long line of attempts to basically get them to shut up and it's really, really drastic. It's got pretty much everyone in the charitable sector and all the legal services that I spoke to, both scared and furious.

RUBY:

OK, so what is this plan then, Mike? What is the government proposing to do here?

MIKE:

Well, It's a proposal to change the way that charities are regulated by the Australian Charities and Not for Profits Commission, which was a body set up by the previous Labor government to register and oversee, you know, the financial reporting and all the rest of it to do with the charitable sector.

And essentially, what's going to happen under the proposed changes is that organisations could be held accountable for summary offences, that is very minor legal breaches committed by their members or and this is crucial even their supporters or even people who have nothing whatsoever to do with the charity, if it happens to be that the charity is somehow involved in an event that goes wrong.

Furthermore, they could be held responsible for how other groups use their reports or their materials or subject to sanction, only on the suspicion that they are quote likely, unquote, to commit a breach because a similar group has done so.

So, I mean, it's incredibly wide in its scope. And the potential consequences of this are very large. You know, the charities could lose their charitable status, you know, with its consequent preferential tax treatment. They could have their board of directors suspended or be shut down.

RUBY:

Right, ok so what you’re saying Mike is that a charity could be held responsible if a person commits a crime - even if that person actually isn’t affiliated with that charity at all and hasn’t even committed the crime yet, is that right? What sort of offences are we talking about here?

MIKE:

Well to explain it further, they offer various hypothetical examples. For one, supporters might attend a rally wearing the branding of a particular charity, you know, St Vinnies or something. And if they're asked to move on by the police and they don't move on, well, that's a summary offence. And that would provide an opportunity for the commissioner of the ACNC to review that charity status.

Take another example that's been put to me by a range of charities. There's a rally at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, you know, perhaps related to deaths in custody or something, at which a representative of charity is a speaker. Now, if some of those in attendance subsequently block the entrance to Old Parliament House, which is a summary offence, again, the charity could be subject to judgement by the ACNC commissioner, as it might, if a member of its staff simply tweeted in support of the action.

And it wouldn't matter either if the charity or its staff or volunteers or supporters were actually charged by police with one of these minor summary offences. If they did something that the ACNC deems could be dealt with as a summary offence, they would be vulnerable to actions. So you can see why the heads of charities are both angry and worried about the potential consequences.

And this is, I think, driven home by one of the submissions made in response to this effort, and that came from one of Australia's law firms, Arnold Bloch Leibler. And it's a summary of these harsh new sanctions against charities that displeased the government.

They said was, and I'm quoting here, unjustified, ultra vires, that is beyond the government's legal power, unconstitutional would have an unquantifiable negative impact on the sector, would add administrative burden to all charities, did not address any uncertainty in legislation and was, quote, fundamentally inconsistent with our democratic system of government.

That's pretty heavy stuff.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Mike, we’ve been talking about these proposed changes to the way the charity sector is regulated. But I want to ask you more about the regulator itself, the ACNC. Who are they, and what do they make of these proposed new powers?

MIKE:

Well, when Tony Abbott was elected in 2013, he set out three key priorities, one of them was to abolish the ACNC.

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“The Gillard government set up the first charities watchdog to bring some accountability to the sector, but the Abbott government is determined to axe it.”

MIKE:

And, you know, if you've got three big things you're going to do for the country, why on earth is abolishing the ACNC one of them?

Archival tape -- Tony Abbott:

“Mr Deputy Speaker, while some regulation is necessary and nearly all regulations originally had some point, we are now suffering from regulatory overkill.”

MIKE:

But it was and the government tried and failed to secure enough votes in the Senate to abolish the ACNC. So it survived.

But in 2017, when its inaugural commissioner, Susan Pascoe, who was very widely respected when she stepped down, she was replaced by Gary Johns.

Now, Gary Johns is a former Labor MP, but he took a very sharp ideological turn in his post politics life. He joined the far right think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, and he became a vocal critic of charities.

And I was talking to Casey Chambers, executive director of Anglicare Australia, one of the big church related charities,

And Chambers says she has no doubt that the Prime Minister's office is ultimately behind the latest effort and thinks and is hopeful that Johns, who's pretty hard line on these things, will go after a few of the charities they really don't like.

RUBY:

And as you mentioned before, the charities they, the government, really don’t like are largely these environmental charities...

MIKE:

Yeah that's right. David Crosbie, who's the CEO of the Community Council for Australia, thinks that what's behind the proposed changes is essentially frustration on the part of the government and the mining sector and other supporters of the government, that the legal system is actually too inclined to tolerate minor offences committed in pursuit of causes. And he said he actually said this to the Prime Minister's office. You know, that your issue, he said, is that the states aren't charging anyone. And because that's not happening, it makes it really hard for the government to establish a pattern of unlawful behaviour or supporting unlawful behaviour, such as might allow them to take action against charities. And this, of course, is why it proposes to hand the ACNC, these very wide powers, to go after charities.

The intent is not just to prevent or punish minor acts of illegality by a relative handful of activists associated with a small minority, a very small minority of charitable organisations.

The intent is to deter the entire sector from advocating for politically inconvenient causes. And should the changes go through, the expectation in the sector is that action would be taken against a few of the more activist organisations as a warning to the rest to back off in their public act activism.

RUBY:

Mm ok, so what you're saying, Mike, is there has been this kind of long term attempt to weaken the charity sector through the regulator, and that has only ramped up under the current Morrison government. And people are saying to you that this is not something that's being done by chance. This is a deliberate attempt to make charities less likely to speak or to act in ways that the government doesn't like and that's not only on environmental issues, but that's across the board.

MIKE:

Yep, that's right, all of them are worried, including the big religious ones like St Vinnies and Anglicare and so on, even though some of them have been quietly pulled aside and told, don't worry, we won't use it against you. You know, the implication being that, you know, they will only use this sledgehammer to crack the walnut of environment charities, but the fact is they could. As Casey Chambers says, they could.

Archival tape -- Casey Chambers:

“We've had a number of people in government say, just don't worry about this. We're not here to capture you. But it could do. And so I do think that, you know, there's no point in us as a sector, allowing them to hive off the environmental charities.”

MIKE:

And the government is banking on that knowledge, being enough to shut them all up, to stop them advocating on subjects like the environment and refugees and homelessness and poverty and inequality, all those things that the civil society sector cares about that the government doesn't really want to talk about.

Archival tape -- Casey Chambers:

“You know, we are seeing that there's an attack on democracy we're seeing on the purpose of charities. And yeah, on really, sort of that social fabric.”

MIKE:

But it was a conversation with the Reverend Tim Costello, the former CEO of World Vision, that really brought home to me just how extreme these laws are.

RUBY:

Mm what did Tim Costello say about all of this?

MIKE:

Well, he related an anecdote that went all the way back to 2013, at the G20 summit in St Petersburg in Russia.

Archival tape -- Tim Costello:

“I was leading what's called the C20, the Civil Society 20, at the G20 that was in Russia when Putin had the presidency.”

MIKE:

And Costello as head of the C20 secured a meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Archival tape -- Tim Costello:

“We had a televised meeting with him actually and he was trying to shut down Russian charities saying they were being political...”

MIKE:

Putin at the time was trying to shut down, indeed had shut down Russian charities. And so Costello was using his audience with the Russian leader to try to get him to change his mind.

Archival tape -- Tim Costello:

“I said to him, I’d been briefed you only have one word in Russian for, two words in English - the word policy and the word political.”

MIKE:

Tim said look, you only have one word in Russian for two words in English. And those two words are politics and policy. But there's a distinction.

Archival tape -- Tim Costello:

“Charities will always criticise policy and advocate that doesn’t mean that they are being political the sense that they are trying to undermine your system.”

MIKE:

At the end of their conversation, Putin said he would consider reviewing his decision, but he never did.

Archival tape -- Tim Costello:

“I thought I had a win, Russian charities thought they had a win, that Putin had seen the distinction but in the end Putin was Putin.”

MIKE:

The distinction between policy and politics was lost on him as far as he was concerned. You know, critics are enemies and must be silenced.

And the point of Costello's anecdote, of course, was that the current federal government appears to have a similar approach to civil society critics, that somehow advocacy, particularly where it involves an element of protest or civil disobedience, is seen as a, as he put it, a political danger to the whole order.

Archival tape -- Tim Costello:

“I think this goes to the overreach of the government in trying to shut down the voice of charities by increasing the powers of the Australian National Charities Commission is all about. The overreach of this suggested regulation by the government to silence charities I think is very chilling and very scary for democracy.”

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time today.

MIKE:

My pleasure.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

Victorian health officials have announced four new cases of Covid-19 in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

All of the cases are close family contacts who live in two different households. The source of the infection remains unknown.

The Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton it was likely further cases would emerge, and encouraged all those with symptoms to get tested.

And Samoa has been plunged into a constitutional crisis, as the party expected to form a new government for the first time in almost four decades was blocked from entering Parliament yesterday morning.

The FAST party was prevented from electing the country’s first female Prime MInister by police as it tried to enter Parliament.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

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