Hockey Hocked - Federal Government "WIDE OPEN FOR BUSINESS" !

"Work Till You Drop" Hockey     ...

Treasurer Joe Hockey is offering privileged access to a select group including business people and industry lobbyists in return for tens of thousands of dollars in donations to the Liberal Party via a secretive fund-raising body whose activities are not fully disclosed to election funding authorities.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption is probing Liberal fund-raising bodies such as the Millennium Forum and questioning their influence on political favours in NSW.
Mr Hockey offers access to one of the country's highest political offices in return for annual payments.

The donors are members of the North Sydney Forum, a campaign fundraising body run by Mr Hockey's North Sydney Federal Electoral Conference (FEC). In return for annual fees of up to $22,000, members are rewarded with "VIP" meetings with Mr Hockey, often in private boardrooms.

The North Sydney FEC officials who run the forum – which is an incorporated entity of the Liberal Party – say its membership lists and therefore the identities of its donors are "confidential". Mr Hockey also says details of who he is meeting and what is discussed are confidential.

What little public information is available reveals members of the forum include National Australia Bank as well as the influential Financial Services Council, whose chief executive is former NSW Liberal leader John Brogden.

The FSC's members, including financial advice and funds management firms, stand to benefit from the changes to the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) laws being considered by the federal government, which would involve a winding back of consumer protections introduced by Labor.

The National Australia Bank would also benefit from the changes.

The chairman of the North Sydney Forum is John Hart, who is also the chief executive of Restaurant and Catering Australia – a hospitality industry lobby group whose members stand to benefit from a government-ordered Productivity Commission review of the Fair Work Act that is expected to examine the issue of penalty rates.

On Monday, Mr Abbott was asked if he was comfortable with Mr Hockey's fundraising activities during an interview with Channel Nine.

Mr Abbott responded by saying while he had not read the article, "all political parties have to raise money".

"Typically, you raise money by having events where senior members of the party go and obviously they meet people at these events," he said.

"The alternative to fund-raising in this time-honoured way, is taxpayer funding."

Mr Abbott said that in the context of a "very tough" budget, the idea that taxpayers should fund political parties was "very, very odd".

When asked if there should be a federal ICAC, Mr Abbott said that he thought that Canberra had a "pretty clean polity".

"The thing is that we’re going to keep the lobbyists out [of politics]. And the problem that ICAC is exposing is a problem of lobbying, essentially its influence peddling . . . and we’re going to make sure that that has no place whatsoever federally."

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