What influence do corporations have over politics in Australia? It’s impossible to say for sure, particularly because companies don’t disclose very much about their political expenditure, according to the Australia Institute.
The left-wing think tank hired experts to look into corporate influence peddling, and found big Australian businesses lag behind their counterparts in the US when it comes to political expenditure transparency.
“I was surprised to see how few companies disclose their payments to trade associations,” Australia Institute democracy and accountability program director Bill Browne told Crikey.
“These lobby groups have extraordinary influence over the political debate, they’re widely featured in the media and in commentary, and yet we have a very incomplete picture of who funds them, how much they get funded, and what they spend that money on.”
A new report from the think tank, based on research by corporate governance firm ISS ESG, analysed political expenditure policies and disclosures from 75 of Australia’s largest ASX-listed companies.
It found only a third of the companies had made complete disclosures of their payments to political parties and candidates. Three-quarters of all the firms had made no disclosures at all of payments to trade associations. ISS ESG made a comparison with equivalent businesses in the US and found the Australian companies were well behind when it came to transparency.
“We’ve seen the outsized influence that vested interests have had on our political debate when governments have tried to be ambitious and pursue public policy goals, whether it’s in the gambling space, or fossil fuels, or taxation,” Browne said.
“We’ve seen the ability of corporations to push back very effectively, and sometimes that means that we get a worse outcome. So it’s important for a democracy that everyone has an equal voice and equal influence, and when corporations cannot just influence the political debate, but do so behind the scenes and without consequences, that has a distorting effect on our democracy as a whole.”
So how could the researchers reach those conclusions, if the data is so lacking?
“Australia has some requirements for donors to disclose some forms of political payments — the threshold federally is very high, it’s about $15,000 [in the previous financial year] before a donation has to be disclosed,” Browne explained.
“So we only get hints as to what exactly is going on. But those hints are enough to provide some information.
“Another way that we learn about some of the expenditure and planned expenditure of corporations is through reporting in the press — so around the campaign against the mining tax for example, we know how much the trade associations were supposedly planning to spend, because that was reported in the media.
“We’re building this picture out of partial disclosures, a mix of voluntary and compulsory disclosures, and other reporting.”
The disclosure threshold for federal political donations was raised by the Howard government in 2006, from $1,500 to $10,000. Since then the threshold has increased according to the consumer price index – donations made in the current financial year must only be disclosed if they exceed $16,300.
Browne said he believed the threshold for disclosing political donations should be lowered, and that companies should do more to be transparent about their political operations.
“One of the elements of this report is prompting shareholders to play a more active role in scrutinising the companies that they invest in, asking more of them, [which would act as] a spur to companies to disclose more,” he said.
The report, titled “The hidden political expenditure of Australian corporations”, will be released today.
The ability of corporations to intefere in the political and legal decision making process makes an absolute mockery of democracy. The ability of corporations to commit widespread large scale criminal activity and the directors of those corporations to completely avoid criminal charges let alone prosecution is a scandalous example of how insidious corporate influence has undermined integrity in our political and judicial systems. It is much more than political donations , it is the corruption of the public service via outsourcing and commercialization of government services. The 1200+ parliamentary passes issued to anonymous individuals allows highly paid professionally trained, corporate seducers and influencers, complete unfettered access to the parliament buildings and the offices of ministers and staff and we the public cannot be told who they work for or what their reason for being there is. All we know is that these professional lobbyists are not there representing the interests of voters. How the banking executives exposed in the banking royal commission as presiding over hundreds of millions of dollars of money laundering transactions escaped having charges being laid is a classic example of the corruption that exist in our political,regulatory, judicial and law enforcement agencies due undoubtedly to corporate influence. Our countrty is more like a 2 party corporate fascist state.
“2 party”? Their main difference is that their spruikers wear different coloured ties on TV. They dance the same dance to the same tune. Anyone would think that the public don’t pay MPs, and that they have to get by on “donations”, or starve.
Thank you, Oneman, let us have a Royal Commission into the Dark Side of Politics, corporation influences. I think Rex Fitzpatrick should head it.
How about a legal obligation for lobby groups to disclose their sources of funding. That should also extend to think-tanks, and to their hired media pundits.
Also a symptom of how hollowed out the MSM has become locally, and used to serve the interests of power, especially for the LNP, think tanks, peak business groups etc. versus doing real and ongoing investigative journalism
Dark Money is less contentious than Dark Matter.
Let’s have a conversation between the half-dozen of us who care, about considering whether to pass a motion proposing a feasibility study into closing the stable door, now that the horse has been gone for a couple of decades.