Is Labor’s anger at the crossbench for its “Fair and Transparent Elections Bill” real or confected? The bill, which would require real-time disclosure of political donations over $1,000 and cap donations at $1.5 million, has apparently enraged Special Minister of State Don Farrell. According to Nine newspapers, Farrell is “furious at the teals’ stunt” (the crossbench group includes Andrew Wilkie, the Greens, Jacqui Lambie and Lidia Thorpe, but we’ll stick to the teal angle for now). That’s according to “a senior government source, speaking anonymously” — let’s call them Fon Darrell.
Hypocrisy is the charge from Labor at the teals. “They agree with banning big money, just not theirs,” Farrell said.
Perhaps Farrell really is furious — not because the teals want to protect their ability to fundraise off groups like Climate 200, but because the crossbench actually has a political financing bill, whereas he doesn’t.
Labor was elected in May 2022 on a platform of imposing real-time reporting of donations above $1000 — something that multiple states now have. Farrell said at the time he wanted the reforms in place ahead of the next election. But nearly two years later, there’s no bill. First Farrell fobbed the issue off to the joint standing committee on electoral matters. It released an interim report last June backing real-time reporting for donations above $1,000, but Farrell decided he needed the final report, not the interim report. The final report came out in November. Four months later, you guessed it, still no bill.
When the interim report emerged backing the $1,000 threshold, Farrell said he “supported the proposal”, which was gracious given it was actually the policy Labor took to the election. “All of those things are perfectly capable of being dealt with in our first term,” Farrell assured us at the time. That garnered headlines in the corporate media like “Labor poised to cap donations” and “Major overhaul looms to keep big money out of politics“.
As it turned out, Labor was poised to sit on its backside and do nothing. In October, Farrell said there’d be a bill late in 2023 or early in 2024. Nothing happened until a week ago, when the government briefed Nine journalists that it planned to bring forward a bill at some unspecified point. That produced more headlines like “Big money to be taken out of politics in radical electoral overhaul“, despite similar headlines promising similar overhauls in the past never leading anywhere. Interestingly, the same outlet was describing the crossbench’s bill today as a “stunt”.
Importantly, Labor is now briefing journalists that, contrary to what Farrell has repeatedly said over the past two years, no changes will be in place before the next election — meaning we’ll have to wait up to 18 months to see who is trying to buy influence and access ahead of the 2025 ballot.
Farrell has insisted he wants to pursue the reforms in a bipartisan manner — a bizarre position that effectively gives the Coalition a veto over what Labor promised voters it would do at the last election. And the Coalition are the most malignant parties of all when it comes to political donations. Virtually every other political party, from Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson through to Labor and the Greens, now disclose all donations above $1,000, or in some cases all donations, regardless of the $15,000+ disclosure threshold. The Coalition continues to hide behind John Howard’s debauching of the political donation disclosure laws to evade scrutiny — and they’re the people Farrell wants to do a deal with.
There will be fights over political donation and spending caps. The crossbench, probably rightly, suspects that Labor wants to make a deal with the Liberals to undermine the capacity of independents to finance their campaigns and target winnable seats. The imposition of caps on third parties is a vexed issue, and Labor will try to avoid any limitation on its heavy dependence on trade union funding, which gives relatively small organisations enormous access to and influence over Labor and its policies. But there is universal agreement — apart from the miscreants of the Coalition — that real-time disclosure of even small donations is both practical and useful transparency.
There’s no reason why Labor has sat on its hands for nearly two years rather than undertaking that simple reform. Rather than railing at the crossbench for finally doing what Labor hasn’t, maybe Farrell should do his job.
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It’s actually a bit more than just handing the Coalition a veto. See also the government’s new decision to only pursue religious discrimination if it’s bipartisan, along with the bipartisan de-fanging of the federal integrity commision and Chalmers’ apparent intention to replace the stacked ATT with a body that will be equally stackable. There’s plenty more. This is all about the major parties circling the wagons as they get more nervous about the growing popularity of independents and minor parties. Preserving their divinely ordained duopoly on power is the one thing they agree on absolutely. They are forming a Grand Coalition, although they will not say so, so that they will stay in power for as long as the combined votes of Coalition and Labor have a majority in the lower house, and that combined power will fend off any chance of the cross bench using a balance of power, and they will sabotage the other parties and independents in any way they can, because, well, that’s democracy, or something.
Labor fans rail at the Greens for occasionally voting in the same way as the Coalition, but Albanese’s ALP’s chronic jumping into bed with said Coalition is apparently A-OK. The Shit-Lite Party hates actual progressives who make it look bad rather than the Trump clones on the Opposition benches.
Yes. I can see a point where Labor and the Coalition could combine forces to overthrow the Greens and Independents should they combine forces, win enough votes in the face of increasing and undeniable environmental catastrophe, and actually come to power. The Laborals/Low-alition (?) will of course have support from nearly all sectors of the media in this endeavor, and future voting will be restricted to property owners and ‘responsible’ citizens. (The latter have subscriptions to The Oz, and The Fin).
I have never known a Government so afraid of governing. Most of us did not see this coming. Albo will go down in history as a nothing PM when he could made a mark simply by undoing LNP’s policies.
Blair’s government in the UK was if anything worse; despite a huge majority in 1997 and a country crying out for a change from the Thatcher / Major years, Blair chose instead to change even less than his very modest manifesto promised, and generally to continue as before. No wonder Thatcher was so pleased with him.
Sorry, but if you didn’t see it coming you weren’t paying attention. A couple of grandiose statements, but no policies in the lead up to the election – and the few there were were limp-do nothing ones.
Compared to Shorten, Albo clearly lacked courage to do anything and instead relied totally on the devolvement of the Coalition.
I saw it coming. I remember being overseas when I heard they’d lost the 2019 election, and thinking “Sh*t, that’s it. They’ll never attempt anything bold ever again.”
Meh.
More likely, the ALP is giving the Coalition an opportunity to show bipartisan support for policies that everyone outside of the LNP supports. Then in the absence of bipartisan support they can point to it as a difference between the ALP and Coalition in a climate where the crossbenchers are keen to say there is no difference between the two (and most of the comments on this post…huh).
Given their religious bill failed because the Coalition couldn’t reconcile it’s soon-to-lose-their-seats-to-Teals members’ concerns with the side of the partyroom that thought appointing not-yet-defrocked Peter Hollingworth as GG was a good idea, it is incredibly likely that both examples are actually a bad faith performance of attempted bipartisanship on the pathway of political differentiation.
Labor and Coalition 95% the same. Independents are leading change.
And most of the similarities never highlighted by the media.
Only the occasional big differences such as Robodebt. Then Labor make up for it by not protecting whistle blowers.
When is Labor going to come down to earth and realize that they’re not actually the centre of the universe and gosh, the whole of Australia isn’t aligned with their purely self interested goal of being re-elected forever?
Labor being petulant about the Greens and the cross-bench is arrogant and pathetic. They might well have the support of the opposition in this onslaught but we can hope that outside the Canberra bubble, the people at large are less at one with their self serving nonsense.
I thought that they’d gotten over their “we won the election, so do as we tell you, peasants” attitude toward the cross-bench, but apparently not. Fingers crossed for a minority Labor government in 2025.
People here act as if the Greens are some silent majority when in fact it is less than 15% of voters. Time to face facts that the Australian public is highly conservative and poised to flip back to the LNP given the opportunity – hence the softly softly approach.
Actually, the Australian public isn’t highly conservative; it’s just that it’s gullible enough for the legacy media operators, who are highly conservative, to retain significant influence.
If you look at political compass results, the Greens are nearer the centre than the ALP, and much, much closer to the Australian public than the LNP.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/aus2022
https://australia.isidewith.com/ideologies/
Australian voters generally can’t tell the difference between being conservative and being masochistically stupid.
People here act as if the NATIONALS are some silent majority when in fact it is less than 15% of voters. Time to face facts that the Australian public are sick of the party hacks thrown up by branch stacking and union influence. How is it that the independents are light years ahead of the Party Mediocracy in every department?
Hence the big 2 wanting to get together on this matter.
This is the danger. If we urge people people to punish Labor at the next election the “dumb as anything” electorate will take that to mean vote LNP. We need to urge people to not vote for a major party. And not vote for the various fruitloop groups either. This means the greens, the teals or other moderate independant.
By “dumb as anything” electorate, are you talking about the ones who watch Sky news? and believe every word they say.
If we could have proportional voting they’d have ~22 seats – more then the nats have.
Juice Media rather brutally expose how the LabLibs conspire to keep the two-party system firmly in place here: https://www.thejuicemedia.com/5478-2/. Funny how it’s the Greens who are accused of conspiring with the Libs against Labor, when it’s actually Labor and Liberals in bed with each other more often than not.
Why don’t the ‘majors’ just form a grand coalition and stop pretending to give a flying for anything other than being in office?
In Nederlands now the largest party with a record vote has been kept out of office by the also-rans who have played musical chairs since WWII.
Similarly in Ireland – 4 years ago Sinn Fein won the most seats but FF/FG (either side of the post indendence Civil War) combined to prevent the Shinners forming a government as per the democratically expressed wish of the populace.
Odd, little bit.
It’s not the politicians who make these decisions, it’s the parties. When it comes to fundraising it’s the unelected democracy-killers behind the scenery that take the bribes aka donations from corporations, then make sure that said corporations are kept happy. No matter what you vote for, if it’s either of the tag-team duopoly you will be disappointed. Unless you are voting FOR climate disasters, rorts, foul deeds, social division and the rest of the garbage that passes for democracy in this country. The entire system is sick and needs a complete overhaul. And that’s being polite.
Couldn’t have said it better!
Sadly neither the LNP nor the ALP have any intellectual giants. Why people bother joining these corrupt political parties is beyond me. Any political movement that thinks neoliberalism is the answer should be consigned to the dustbin of history. I have not heard anything inspiring coming from the ALP and LNP. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Both parties are good at being supremely patronising. Albo is arguably the most patronising PM after Scott Morrison.
Really? Isn’t that the attraction? These parties enjoy a duopoly on power and small memberships, and their relationships with the corporate world provide wonderful further careers to those who rise to ministerial positions, so joining offers all sorts of interesting opportunities to those who are self-serving or fanatical or both. And those who simply want to be ordinary members without any ambition of getting elected still get the enjoyment of being in a small club of like-minded lunatics, playing all those factional games, and they get to terrorise the candidates at pre-selection; such fun!
“These parties enjoy a duopoly on power and small memberships”
Of only we could refer them to the ACCC, like we can with commercial duopolies.
Thankyou.
A “Coal’s and Wallies” political duopoly possessed more of intellectual rigor mortis than intellectual rigour – in the thrall of a cashed-up donor minority of share-holders in the nation’s interest.