Fossil fuel companies and climate denialists have pumped at least $57 million into Australian politics in the last twenty years using our lax political donation laws, and the figure is likely significantly higher.
The Australian Electoral Commission’s recently overhauled register of donation disclosures now allows compilation of donations data back to 1998-99, although data for 2018-19, which covers last year’s election, won’t be available until February.
The available data is only a subset of financial contributions made to political parties: under Commonwealth law, financial contributions made in exchange for goods or services — such as a seat at a table to lobby a minister at a party fundraiser — do not need to be disclosed by donors.
And in 2005, the Howard government moved to hide millions of dollars in corporate donations from public view by dramatically increasing the threshold for reporting donations to $10,000; it is now $14,000.
Moreover, donations are not cumulative; a donor could conceivably give $14,000 to every state and territory branch of a major party without reporting what would total over $100,000 in contributions.
The largest fossil fuel donor has been coal miner Clive Palmer: while once a major donor to the Queensland LNP, Palmer’s real role as a major political funder of denialism came with the establishment of his own Palmer United Party (PUP, now the United Australia Party).
The AEC’s records show Palmer’s companies, including Queensland Nickel, pumped over $36 million into the PUP (though it should be acknowledged that PUP has scrupulously reported every donation, no matter how small).
Palmer, who continues to push the development of mammoth coal mines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin via Waratah Coal, rejects climate science and claims climate change is 97% natural, and his senators collaborated with the Abbott government to shut down Australia’s carbon pricing system in 2014.
After the failure of PUP, Palmer spent tens of millions campaigning against Labor at the last election, details of which will only be available when the 2018-19 data is released.
Other fossil fuel interests and climate denialists have handed over $21 million to the major parties since 1998, with over $16 million of that directed to the Liberal, Liberal National and National parties. Those donors include energy companies, coal mining companies, gas companies and mining industry peak bodies, but exclude non-coal resource companies, such as the dozens of iron ore mining companies that heavily donated to the Coalition in the wake of the Rudd government’s proposed mining tax.
Those donors include energy companies, coal mining companies, gas companies and mining industry peak bodies, but exclude non-coal resource companies, such as the dozens of iron ore mining companies that heavily donated to the Coalition in the wake of the Rudd government’s proposed mining tax.
Donations aren’t the only mechanism by which fossil fuel companies influence policymaking. Let’s take a closer look at the gas company Santos, one of Australia’s biggest emissions producers via its extensive natural gas operations.
Santos is also the biggest fossil fuel political donor after Palmer, handing $2.48 million in disclosed donations to the major parties (Santos also discloses all donations, even those below the disclosure threshold). It also has strong political links at the highest levels.
Brad Burke, a key Malcolm Turnbull staffer while both in opposition and during the prime ministership, is a former Santos executive now with Shell. Santos has employed SAS Group, run by former Howard government minister Larry Anthony and bipartisan lobbying firm Bespoke Approach (which itself has employed former Santos executives) as well as former Labor minister Craig Emerson as a consultant.
The Australia Institute has identified a number of senior political staff and former public servants employed by LNG companies in Queensland, home of Santos’ massive Gladstone LNG project. They include Mitch Grayson, a former journalist who shuttled between then-premier Campbell Newman’s office and Santos.
In NSW, similarly, staff have moved between Santos and the premier’s office.
Santos is by no means unusual in this regard: other fossil fuel companies and mining companies similarly employ former staffers and politicians, either directly or as lobbyists.
A study by the Grattan Institute showed that the mining sector is one of the country’s dominant political donors and in Queensland, where greater transparency requirements provide a better guide to lobbying and contacts between corporations and ministers, mining and energy companies are the most active lobbyists of government.
At the Commonwealth level, there’s no equivalent to the Queensland meeting diary requirements, so no similar analysis can be made of what’s happening in the ministerial wing of Parliament House in Canberra.
Unusually, however, Santos enjoyed the rare privilege of having government ministers lobby for it, when then-prime minister Tony Abbott and a number of his ministers lined up to attack Australian National University for divesting in the company in 2014.
Taken together, these suggest less an effort by fossil fuel companies to influence policymaking than a wholesale co-option of the policymaking process, in which key staff move between fossil fuel corporations, premiers’ offices and the PMO; former ministers lobby for fossil fuel interests and current ministers conduct PR for companies while accepting millions in donations.
Call it the carbon-industrial complex, a seamless union of corporate interest and policymaking that has left Australia on the edge of a climate nightmare.
It is even worse than you say:
please publicize this everywhere!
https://www.greenpeace.org.au/news/greenpeace-exposes-murky-influence-network-that-entrenches-coals-power-over-liberal-and-national-parties/
What’s new? America has their Gun Lobby. Australians can’t understand why the US does not change their gun laws despite the devastating consequences which are getting worse every day. We have the equivalent in the fossil fuel industry . That industry not only kills humans, it kills humans, animals, livelihoods, eco systems and our water supply. How good is that! Australia has the best best lobbyist system in the world !
The Australian Electoral Commission is making some very puzzling determinations including that payments to attend fundraising dinners to lobby guest politicians are not ‘donations’ that are required to be reported under the electoral Act. This defies commonsense and needs close examination by someone skilled in tax and electoral law.
The mention in this article of such undeclared donations (corporate leaders pay thousands of dollars for meal worth much less ) is particularly concerning as it smacks of the self interested trickery of the Howard Costello government when its draft GST legislation counted political parties as ‘charities’ for the purposes of GST. This gave political parties access to the same GST concessions (ie the proceeds were not subject to GST) as the Country Women’s Association running a cake stall or the RSPCA receiving payments from the Paws Walk. The loophole was a technical one arising from defining a charity based on a particular section of the income tax act which defined non income tax paying entities, and included charities, community associations and similar not for profits and also political parties.
The Australia Jnstitute published a study at the time and the Treasurer was forced to respond but perhaps his response was to create another loophole?. I cannot see why it is beyond the capabilities of the electoral commission to deem the first $100 of a political party fundraising dinner to be simply a payment for goods and services and the rest of the payment to be a donation. Mischief Managed!
And by the way why is Crikey following the crowd in ignoring the significant role of our food and agricultural export industries in creating greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental harms. Protecting this sacred cow and mythology of Australia as ‘the food basket of Asia’ has left Australian farm businesses highly exposed to climate change impacts both due to drought, water wars, and fire as well as from consumers adjusting away from high emission meat and dairy products. The Lancet Commission on PlanetaryHealth identified the food industry as an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and it is estimated that around 30% of global emissions are from the food system. As in mining we may not generate much harm domestically but because of our our important role in global markets we are a key contributor especially in the case of dairy along with New Zealand and including especially processed dairy products like cheese and and nutritionally unnecessary (even potentially harmful) products such as the heavily marketed ‘toddler milk ’.
https://internationalbreastfeedingjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13006-019-0243-8
We are not doing our family farmers any favours by ignoring the elephant in the room of Australian carbon emissions policies – it simply fends off the day when the treasured budget surplus is handed over to subsidise them out of trouble, if that day has not already come so tragically in the parched Irrigated dairying areas of the MDB or in the south east coast of Australia this past few months .
We don’t have “parliament” anymore.
In it’s place is “Upper and Lower Houses of Ill-repute” – selling favours to the highest bidder and “bugger the boss” (voters).
Such has been the commercial cost of party advertising – to gain government.
And how do you calculate the monetary value of bought influence of one of the biggest “donors” – US Citizen Murdoch – on behalf of his mining pets?
By-passing the money.
Simply donating in-kind positive PR for one side of politics (meddling in our electoral process)?
The cost of such “advertising” on the open market (where those other $$$$$ donations are spent).
In a market where Labor and other parties have to spend (including in Murdoch’s ‘Little Shoppes of Horrors’) – to counter that 24/7 donated stream of +ve PR for his Limited News Party?
“A is for Australia.
D – the division fed by the
Arseholes at
News – working for the
I that is Murdoch’s only care.”
Welcome back Crikey. Like our Prime Minister (Scotty from Marketing? Smoko?) you were absent when you were needed. Other non-MSM media soldiered on through the fire summer and you might consider how you could stagger your staff holidays through the year so you can be on deck when reporting and comment is needed as it has been during this fire summer. If Bernard had been on duty he might have had time to notice the difference between back burning, which means burning back against an established bushfire to try to stop its advance, and prescribed burning or hazard reduction which means removing or reducing fuel outside the fire season to limit the destructive effect of bushfires when they occur. Note that back burning is itself a hazardous procedure that sometimes gets out of control and can cost property and even lives. Nobody wants to have to do it. And in this fire summer we are seeing the limitations of hazard reduction/prescribed burning where fuel reduction has had little effect in hot, tinder-dry conditions. Fires have been leaping through the tops of trees and propagating themselves through flying embers. And now some people are talking about reducing fire hazards by more forest clearing, the very process that has demonstrably contributed to the reduction in rainfall and drying out of the land!