An Australian National Audit Office review of the Electoral Commission’s political donation process has revealed the contempt with which political parties and many donors hold our most important transparency requirement, and prompted a brawl between the auditors and the agency charged with overseeing Australia’s political process.
The audit shows that, over a four-year period, more than a fifth of annual donation returns were late, and around 17% of post-election returns were also lodged by political parties, associated entities and donors later than required under legislation, in a number of cases around four months late.
However, the Electoral Commission has point-blank rejected the ANAO’s recommendation that the Commission make stronger use of its enforcement powers via a graduated approach. The auditors concluded that the AEC was too light-touch in its response to repeated breaches of legislation by political parties, with Labor state and territory branches appearing to be a particular problem.
Across five years of compliance reviews examined by the ANAO, four political parties have been involved in three compliance reviews where repeated non-compliance was found, Australian Greens (South Australia), the Australian Labor Party (Northern Territory) Branch, the Australian Labor Party (Tasmanian Branch) and the Australian Labor Party (Victorian Branch). In each case, the AEC directed the entity to lodge an amendment to correct the non-compliance and did not take any further action.
Only in two cases during the audit period had the Commission successfully pursued breaches through court action.
However, the Commission, charging that the ANAO has made “serious inaccuracies”, says it has no interest in fully using its powers and that doing so consumes too much of its staffing and resources. In any event, the Commission says, that’s not what parliament wants:
The ANAO seems to have misinterpreted parliament’s intent on this issue. The AEC’s view, supported by data, is that the AEC has successfully achieved disclosure through consultation and education. The proposition the AEC should be more heavy-handed in its approach to enforcement is rejected, as prosecutorial action for amendments and other administrative mistakes would be disproportionate.
The AEC believes the ANAO’s misunderstanding of the intent of the legislation exaggerates the nature of the recommendations and the perceived risk to electoral integrity.
In other circumstances, this is what would be called industry capture, where a regulator ends up being controlled by, or overly mindful of, the interests of the sector it is supposedly policing.
Despite evidence that parties, entities and donors routinely breach the law around disclosure, the Commission prefers consultation and education in the belief that parliament — which is the industry being regulated — would prefer it that way.
But the ANAO also points out that the Commission isn’t just failing to use its enforcement powers, it is failing to properly monitor those it is charged with regulating.
Of the 168 reviews that were planned to have been conducted over the five year period examined by the ANAO, 58 (35%) have not been completed. While completion rates have improved in the last two years this is due to the AEC significantly reducing the number of planned reviews, narrowing the scope of planned reviews, and reducing the value of the transactions being tested. There has also been a marked decline in the number of full reviews that are being conducted on large entities with disclosure obligations.
The AEC responds to that by saying it doesn’t have to undertake compliance reviews and it has “sparse resources” to devote to them if it perceive there is no systemic issue to be pursued.
A more succinct way of saying that is that, ultimately, the AEC can only regulate political parties as far as politicians empower it and fund it to do so. And at the federal level, that’s not far at all.
The ANAO can audit only the compliance (and the breaches) of the law as it exists.
Present laws are designed for a very minimal level of electoral integrity. The ANAO is reduced to box-ticking whether the political party branch returns are present, correct and on time. (And they are not, and the consequences of failure are rarely applied. Why bother?)
Those laws do not attempt to secure transparency. Identifying donors to political parties does nothing to reveal the other half of the transaction… in exchange for precisely what?
The donors so identified are the ones we are allowed by the parties to know. The Bag Men are not part of this process at all.
Federal ICAC with teeth, anybody?
The whole area of Political Donations needs to be investigated, with any subsequent Recommendations from any Independent Inquiries immediately acted upon.
This is not a partisan issue, ALL Political Parties Rort not just Donations, but also anything to do with Electoral funding, with one of the big issues there being incumbent Governments using Taxpayer Funds for Electoral Advertising.
It is no wonder that our Political System is warped and the Public are just taken for fools.
The Australian way of ‘sorting out’ its pervasive corruption is to send in a Commission to investigate, and then to attempt to ignore any recommendations. Or worse, to have interested parties carry out the investigation. And the People are treated with contempt. However, a great many people do actually understand what is going on and sooner or later they will makes moves to remove the two-faced, double-speaking politicians whose prime purpose is to feather the beds of the rich and squeeze every possible dollar out of the working people. Covid has shone a light on our hopeless ‘fair weather’ economic system that cannot cope with any sort of crisis. Each time the people have to bail out industry, landing us in impossible debt. No (publicly-funded) Commission will sort that one out!