The Turnbull government should rewrite its foreign donations bill to narrow the definition of political expenditure and make it less likely to harm advocacy by civil society groups, the electoral committee has recommended.

In a unanimous report released on Monday, the joint standing committee on electoral matters sought to preserve the consensus to ban foreign political donations by calling on the government to strip out more contentious elements of the electoral funding and disclosure bill.

GetUp characterised the report as a major backdown and argued the bill is unworkable but the Liberal senator Linda Reynolds, the chairwoman of the committee, told Guardian Australia it could be passed with adoption of mostly minor changes.

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In the majority report, the Coalition and Labor members recommended political expenditure should be defined as spending “to influence voters to take specific action as voters, so as not to capture non-political issue advocacy”.

The changes would allow higher reporting requirements to be imposed on campaigning groups such as GetUp while making it less likely they will capture charities and not-for-profits campaigning on issues such as increasing foreign aid or protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

It recommended dumping new proposed categories of third-party campaigners and political campaigners in favour of a new register for groups attempting to influence voters.

Joining the register could be done voluntarily but would be mandatory for organisations with significant political expenditure, which the report suggests would be the $13,500 threshold that triggers the requirement to submit a return to the Australian Electoral Commission.

The committee recommended the requirement for organisations to seek statutory declarations from political donors be reconsidered.

It also wants the government to reconsider changes to the definition of “associated entity”, which could see campaigning organisations classified as related to political parties merely if they agree on policy matters.

In a minority report, the Greens senator Lee Rhiannon took a harder line that the bill may infringe the freedom of political communication and recommended that issues-based advocacy should be explicitly exempted from the definition of political expenditure.

The GetUp national director, Paul Oosting, said the report was an acknowledgement the bill was unworkable and noted the report did not explicitly recommend passage of the bill.

He said it was encouraging the committee had endorsed concerns about the requirement for statutory declarations and the political campaigner category but “even if all the committee’s recommendations were adopted ... it still wouldn’t fix everything that’s wrong with the bill”.

“Charities and civil society groups would still face new barriers to speaking up for the communities they represent.”

Oosting called for the government to withdraw the bill and rewrite it from scratch after wider consultation.

The chief executive of the Australian Council for International Development Marc Purcell said the recommendations were “positive and constructive, but they raise more questions” and echoed the call for the bill to be withdrawn.

Reynolds said Australia was one of only a few western democracies that still allow “foreign interference” in the form of foreign donations and it was a “significant result” the committee had agreed to change this.

Reynolds refuted that the report is a major rewrite of the bill, telling Guardian Australia it made “minor administrative changes” to clarify the application of reporting requirements to charities.

“The committee agrees in-principal to the passage of this bill,” she said in the chair’s foreword to the report.

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Reynolds said the proposed new definition of political expenditure was “absolutely” clear. The intention is that policy-based issue advocacy will not be affected but “those that then take it into the polling booth” will be captured by higher requirements, she said.



The special minister of state, Mathias Cormann, has already acknowledged the government will need to amend the bill to win Senate support but has ruled out completely exempting charities from the foreign donation ban and political expenditure reporting requirements.

On Monday Cormann welcomed cross-party support for the “core proposition” of applying the foreign donation ban to all political expenditure, “including political expenditure incurred by charities”. He said the government would now consider proposed changes.

Labor has declared it would not support changes that would silence charities and not-for-profits.

Labor’s charities spokesman, Andrew Leigh, said “we’ve stood up for our democracy and protected civil society, especially our charities” but done so in a way that did not “throw the baby out with the bath water” by rejecting a foreign donation ban.

In the majority report the committee also asked the government to reduce penalties for failing to meet reporting requirements.

The committee was satisfied the bill should retain changes to public funding of elections which limit the amount political parties can claim to the amount actually spent, preventing them profiting from public funding. The Greens rejected this aspect of the bill.