This is the seventh day of The Dirty Country: Corruption in Australia. Read the full series here.
The challenge of identifying workable solutions preoccupies Crikey readers responding to our corruption series, with political donations a particular issue.
As Richard Holden points out in his piece today on how the High Court thinks about restrictions on political communications, an outright ban on donations will never get off the ground in Australia. But the jurisprudence does allow room for restrictions that could reduce, if not end, the role of donations in influence-peddling.
The obvious reform is greater transparency, including much lower reporting thresholds, fewer exemptions and real-time reporting.
Another useful addition would be a requirement for political parties to report all fundraising events, who attended and how much was raised, providing greater insight into the bipartisan practice of offering donors private access to decision-makers.
One reader suggested voters strike against parties that accepted donations, but another, Rick Duley, proposed that donations be limited to party members donating around $1000 a year to their local candidate, forcing parties to devote greater effort to engaging electors.
Parties are driven to seek donations by the high costs of television, outdoor and newspaper advertising during election campaigns. Although an increase in public funding — coupled with donation and campaign spending limits — could help parties to rely less on private funds, another solution is to require media outlets to provide a limited amount of free advertising to political parties, reducing the cost of campaigning.
Given how well looked after the major media companies are, and the huge regulatory benefits and funding they receive from government, such a requirement would only be a fair exchange.
Like Duley, Don Latter sees a solution to corruption in more, and more grassroots, democracy. Rather than a panel of unelected experts, he suggests a randomly selected panel of citizens to oversee how government funding is allocated — starting at a local level and then escalating if it proves effective.
The irony of this approach is that a randomly chosen community representative group would be charged with doing what elected and paid politicians failed to do — represent the genuine interests of the community — and inserting a buffer of community input between professional politicians and decisions about resources allocations.
It’s also in line with what might be called the “randomisation of decision-makers” idea put forward by Cameron Murray, designed to short-circuit the tendency of the political class to serve the interests of their peers.
When we held the Crikey Talks webinar last week, perhaps the most commonly asked question was what can people actually do about pervasive corruption. Many of the problems come back to a gulf between political professionals and voters. Politics is now a career and a profession in itself for many politicians, and becoming more so. Like any profession, it has developed its own rules and concepts of what is appropriate and ethical, even if those concepts appear counterintuitive, or even incomprehensible, to outsiders.
Things look different from inside politics: you have to raise funds; you have to consult with stakeholders; you have to make decisions about allocating resources; the views of business leaders and corporate luminaries and trade union officials surely carry more weight than average citizens; you have to keep influential people and media companies onside; you have to reward those who backed you.
The only way for outsiders to address that is to become insiders, to engage and participate more. That may not necessarily be within established political parties, but with local community bodies or interest groups that seek to counteract the push to skew decision-making away from the public interest towards private interests — to reclaim politics from the political class.
No set of rules and regulations and restructuring of incentives will ever defeat corruption. But the more people in the room, the harder it is for vested interests to use that room to their advantage.
Involving more of the common citizenry in an effort to counter the bias of the political class sounds like a good idea on the surface, but anyone who’s joined the local fete committee will know too well, they just end up being miniature versions of the pro league!
Problem number one is, who are the people most likely to put their hand up to join the citizens’ committee? not the shrinking violets or the disinterested, it’s the power brokers (or doers as they will often call themselves), whether it’s the sincere and motivated person with a good heart and a social conscience, or the big head who runs the local car dealership and has tickets on himself as next town mayor.
And you go from one town committee to the next – it’s the same core of people in all of them! Every committee i’ve ever been on, has stacks of people who are random idea generators but light on useful skill sets for the task at hand. A newbie well acquainted at getting sponsors or fixing diesel generators, is lucky not to get torn to shreds in the rush for the fresh meat.
So human nature suggests that a small minority are motivated to get involved, and the ones that are keen, aren’t necessarily the most useful…and the ones that are both keen and useful, need to have a good heart and a good mind, to produce good results. If you get all three…then you’ve struck gold. But it’s rare, as it it is in the big league.
You could randomly pick people to join, as their civic duty, but that’d be about as popular as handing out vaccines at a Qanon meeting. And if people aren’t interested and motivated, they’re unlikely to make considered decisions, and are likely to be easily swayed by anyone who sounds kind of like they know what they’re talking about.
So i reckon the solution has to lie in the regulation and policing of the big league pollies. Lots of the ideas listed in the article are worth a shot, eg greater transparency, accountability – and donor limits that are strictly monitored by someone with a Doug Cameron-like ferocity and dedication to no shenanigans.
out of interest, are there any democratic countries that don’t allow political donations?
Agree, fundamental weakness in Australian democracy is the passivity and/or subservience of voters tolerating corruption and/or distracted by dog whistling on socio-cultural issues. The following is a concern if adopted, forget about democracy with parties and MPs representing citizens interests:
‘“randomisation of decision-makers” idea put forward by Cameron Murray, designed to short-circuit the tendency of the political class to serve the interests of their peers‘
Another interpretation sounds like a cleverly crafted ‘libertarian’ tactic, borrowed from the Soviets that can lead to autocracy pretending to be democratic e.g. parties, unions, NGOs etc. being bypassed and becoming anodyne?
Message is, do not upset the status quo and the top people or expect change, but create another layer of the electoral or ‘democracy’ framework that does not change the status quo while appearing to?
It’s a sub-optimal and even possibly backdoor way to both mask corruption and nobble electoral democracy by gaming representation for powerful interests e.g. through astroturfing, media reinforcing themes etc..
Branch stacking gave us Scovid, and they’re at it again in SA with the Pentecostal cult having a go at the electorate of Barker with pastor of Sutherland at the helm.
Rob Norman – Pastor – Southland Pentecostal Church
Simon Birmingham – SA Liberal Senator
Tony Pasin – Liberal Member for Barker
Professor Marion Maddox – Macquarie University
The South Australian branch of the Liberal Party is negotiating the tricky terrain where religion and politics intersect.
The party’s State Executive has kicked out around 100 new members and has sought a please explain from 400 other new applicants.
It’s in response to what’s been described as a recruitment drive by conservatives at South Australian churches.
It’s created a factional feud and the federal Liberals have also been drawn in….ABC
SA Libs had better be careful or they will anger the Prime Minister for NSW
The most effective change would be –
This should allow candidates to be free of the power of the party over them and also minimise the effect of vested interests.
A donation is a bribe. Simple. Zero bribes. Simple.
100%. The way to remove the entrenched corruption is to ban political donations. Also ban lobbyists. No one should have better access to politicians than the average citizen has.
The only effective way to finance election advertising by Political parties, is to have public funding, and also for major media outlets to provide social service, with free advertising space and perhaps much reduced cost advertising space.
All private financing, is always open for manipulation, opening loop holes and corrupting even the ‘incorruptible’ managers of private financing. Most privatizations of public services in Australia have been infested with problems, ineffective and lower quality public services and corruptions of many sorts, since taking that road by conservative economic thinking.
Corrupting Public financing carries heavier Court penalties, even jail in many cases, and is policed by professional people, who are specifically employed for that job, and only that job.
Furthermore, it is the most ethical way to go about election matters. Afterall, in elections we decide who rules society, not a private bank.
The argument that in Oz, politically we will never get through public funding for advertising by Political parties, is similar to saying once upon a time, that we will never have public pensions, or Medicare. Well, try taking pensions off now, or even Medicare.
Never say never, just do and argue for the right thing to do!!
i just did a bit of a google, checking out what other democracies do re.donations, and…no suprises….australia is way behind many of them in terms of checks and balances.
here’s some paragraphs from “the Conversation” site, about how other countries do it :-
New Zealand… limits expenditure by parties and third parties. Its electoral commission is responsible for party broadcasting allocation (free time and money for paid advertising).
Canada has extensive regulation, banning corporate and union donations, imposing caps on individual donations and limits on candidate, party and third-party expenditure – that is, expenditure by groups other than candidates or political parties during an election campaign.
The United Kingdom has limits on expenditure by political parties and third parties. Paid advertising in electronic media isn’t allowed at all.
Thanks for the info, particularly on Canada and the United Kingdom. Do you have information on the 3rd party expenditure regulations in Canada or a web reference? I have always thought this was the most difficult hole to plug and haven’t heard of an effective way to deal with this issue. It is the most porous and easily evaded of the compliance barriers in my view.
Rod that info i grabbed was all from the one website, i am sure i will find more and when i do, i will post 🙂
I don’t believe in donations from large conglomerates because they can spread them out under different company names. There should be a set amount that each party is allowed to have in donations, not this free for all so big donors get the big favours done – in particular fossil fuel companies.
The other thing that needs to stop is lying about the other side at election time and yet giving out no policies of their own. I had a gutful of that Liberal/Morrison tactic last time, which was the worst I have ever seen it in any country I have lived in. There used to be ethics in politics, honesty was something to be proud of, and stating ones policies was expected by the voters, not this disgusting lies and smears, especially, again, by the Liberals using the public purse before calling the election to keep from spending their own money that they go through like it’s melting ice cream so that they’re nearly always broke. That is our money they are using, if it’s not illegal it should be, and the worst recent example; the jet and eight staff flying around Europe to get Cormann into a job he is totally unsuited for using OUR money, not theirs, after he had left politics.
The LNP’s tactic (with NewsCorp and legacy media) is a commonly used by nativist conservative or white Christian nationalist regimes elsewhere, with ‘consolidated’ and supportive media i.e. borderline dictatorships and/or autocratic states.
Formally it’s known as ‘oppositionism’ whereby socio-cultural issues of the centre right through left are platformed to be highlighted, denigrated and negative perceptions of the same reinforced; the latter -ve moves voters at elections.
By the time elections come many are easily ‘triggered’ to vote the right way against good policies.