Corruption is on the rise in Australia.
In 2020, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index showed Australia, once comfortably in the top 10 least corrupt nations, now equal 11th having lost eight points since 2012.
Anti-bribery group TRACE has Australia at 12th, well adrift of New Zealand, on its bribery risk matrix. Australia is lower still on the Basel Institute of Governance anti-money laundering list.
The declines in Australia’s rankings are understandable given the litany of scandals in politics and business in recent years. In the corporate world, two of the big four banks have admitted breaching money-laundering laws, and the country’s largest and most influential gambling company is accused of money laundering and links with organised crime.
But more serious is the extent of political scandal and corruption. The largest state is led by a woman who had a long-term relationship with a disgraced MP, who turned a blind eye to his moneymaking schemes, and who publicly defends pork-barrelling.
The second largest state is governed by a party that extensively misused taxpayer resources in internal party conflict, including by ministers.
The federal government refuses to establish an integrity body and has cut funding to the national audit body, has a number of ministers with major integrity concerns, openly misuses taxpayer funds for partisan purposes and to reward friends, has handed windfall sums to political donors, and has systematically stacked its administrative appeals court with political allies and friends.
While some of these scandals — such as the gross overpayment for land by the federal government to a political donor and Gladys Berejiklian’s former partner’s corruption — are under investigation, and the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Crown have all undergone, or will undergo, regulatory processes in relation to money laundering, many scandals are neither under investigation nor have incurred consequences for the perpetrators.
While Australia’s laws around what is termed “hard” or “black corruption” are sufficient to get it into the top 20, if no longer the top 10, of least-corrupt countries, the real problem is around “soft” or “grey” corruption.
As Australian academic and corruption researcher Tim Prenzler has argued, while poorly defined:
… the term ‘grey corruption’ appears to have utility in political discourse in describing areas of minor corruption and/or unethical but legally ambiguous practice such as gift giving, favouritism and undue influence, conflicts of interest, excessive expenditures and deceit in political discourse …
Grey corruption undermines democracy and the effective management of public resources in the public interest, but it occurs largely as a result of opportunities related to inadequate definitions of offences and/or inadequate detection of breaches and enforcement of rules.
Former US politician and ethics advocate Bill Schluter refers to soft corruption as “unethical transgressions carried out in the quest for political power or personal benefit, achieving results that work against the public interest”.
Transparency International defines “political corruption” as “manipulation of policies, institutions and rules of procedure in the allocation of resources and financing by political decision makers, who abuse their position to sustain their power, status and wealth”.
This definition covers what we will examine in this series: the misallocation of resources through pork-barrelling and gifts to friends; the manipulation of policies via political donations, secret lobbying and revolving doors; the peddling of influence to achieve regulatory outcomes, and the distortion of institutions, rules and processes to maintain a veil of secrecy over corruption.
Most of the behaviour covered is perfectly legal. And many of the processes in relation to which such behaviour occurs can be implemented ethically. As Schluter notes, soft corruption is:
… the exploitation of such political and governmental activities as campaign finance, lobbying, patronage, and the electoral process. Engaging in these processes is not, per se, engaging in soft corruption. They are necessary functions of government that can be performed honestly, fairly, and with integrity … It is only when individuals manipulate government functions for reasons of greed, personal advancement, or political advantage that soft corruption occurs.
Australia’s growing problem of soft corruption necessitates a rethinking of integrity issues that moves away from our traditional focus on hard corruption and strict, black-letter definitions of corrupt conduct towards a focus on the manipulation of legitimate public resources, institutions and processes for private benefit.
This shift in turn requires us to see much of what is accepted as standard politics in Australia as soft corruption — private interests manipulating political and policy processes for their own benefit at the expense of the public interest.
Much of this series will focus on looking anew at behaviour in public life through the prism of soft corruption: that trading donations for access to policymakers lacks integrity and undermines public trust and good policy outcomes; that directing funding to projects of low public benefit is an abuse of taxpayer money; that secret meetings between decision makers and representatives of private interests lack probity and facilitate corruption; that developers influencing zoning decisions inflict a significant cost on the public and taxpayers.
All these behaviours are legal, but all are corrupt — and often the public is given very little insight into them due to a lack of transparency throughout government.
Not merely is corruption growing in Australia — this series will show that it’s far more corrupt than most Australians believe.
The root of the problem is money.
Take the money out of politics and the dirt will clean itself up.
We already partly fund political parties with taxpayer money…. why not go all the way and fully fund political parties 100% and ban political donations.
This is one of the few times that a lack of a bill of rights could work very well in Australia.
Unlike in the US where political donations are considered a form of freedom of speech- we do not face the same constitutional hurdle.
Sure, there is an implied constitutional right to political communication here, but that would be easily sidestepped by adequate legislative drafting.
In fact it already has been.
Queensland already bans property developers from donating to politics in recognition of the corruption it creates.
My question is- why stop there?
The corruption caused by banks, unions, mining donations etc etc is no different to property developers.
Take the money out of politics, and all of a sudden the public interest will be given its due consideration… as opposed to the current state of affairs where what is best for the country and its people is a distant afterthought to those who make the decisions- a voice drowned out by their donors screaming in their ears.
Yes this is in practice a pipedream- but it is not impossible.
Our country would be better in every conceivable way if our politicians of all persuasions were relieved of the pressure to ‘pay back’ their donor masters.
Let’s make the media 100% Australian owned, and make political advertising part of the requirements for a licence.
Rupert became a seppo for this, let’s make him choose.
As much as I support the goal of Australian media requiring 100% Australian ownership, news is more and more delivered digitally. So, that ship has sailed. You can access the any and all media online…you name it, it’s there.
That is probably why Lachy the Hairy Apparent IS an Australian passport holder.
Thus he cannot ‘own’ the US based corpse which is why certain assets & entities are incorporated in this country.
His corpus may be here but his heart (if any)?
Do we even want to know where such a wretched thing would be kept?
Various myths recount malignant types who store their heart separately from their evil doing body – it never ends well.
Some aspects of soft corruption are dealt with there. One of the major aspects of potential soft, perhaps in some cases even hard, corruption is the prospect of well remunerated employment after political retirement with a corporation that might have benefited from your services as a Minister. We all know of several examples where this could be suspected if we didn’t know the individuals concerned were honourable. There would be many much less well known. How can this be minimised?
Thanks Rais, I think that form of soft corruption is quite easy to tackle.
The private sector have the answer and use it regularly- a simple non-compete style clause in a politicians employment would do the trick.
When you sign up to be an elected official, you also agree to an exclusion period of ~12months or so where you cannot work with or for a company you had dealings with while in elected office.
Not a perfect solution, but it works well enough in the business world for discouraging blatant mutual ‘back scratching’ arrangements.
I believe it’s already in use in some political jurisdictions too.
12 months gardening leave paid for with plump sign-on bonus? I reckon 3-5 years (or one term equivalent) should be minimum to avoid any perceived conflict of interest.
Private sector standards should be a distant second consiration when weighing up public interest post political career. The interests of 20+ million citizens v one individual/company.
I think so too. If I wanted to employ someone fresh out of Parliament it would be easy enough to give them a job for a year with a shell company registered in Bermuda before signing them up to my actual firm. Three to five years’ break would just about do the trick in most cases, though not all of course.
But the donors could achieve the same thing by, for instance, Lucrative directorship for say a wife or son. I am sure that a creative mind many methods.Corruption can never be eradicated in society as long as humans live in a society..
Yes, you’re never going to stamp it out entirely….but it’s about setting up disincentives that eliminate widespread/systemic rorting and the most severely harmful instances.
You’re always going to have hoon drivers on the road, doesn’t mean that speed limits and fines don’t work.
They work well enough as disincentives to discourage widespread speeding and limit high speed crashes to being rare occurances (relative to the number of car trips per day).
That is right. Humans will always look for a way to cheat. But we can make it difficult.
That is true, but we all know where to start.
1) make it a rule that no one competing for a government contract is able to give money to any administrative officer or government official or political party..and that includes ‘scholarships’.
Simplistic, I’m afraid. If only it were money, then we’d stand a chance of dealing with it.
Power, ego, approbation from peers, revenge, aggrandisement – all beat money. Money may be a bit of it. And money can buy some of these, but looking only as far as money will never get you to the root of the problem.
I think we can start with money. We haven’t even started there.
Prior to taking government, the wife of the opposition leader walked into Sussan’s in Bourke Street mall and was given the run of the shop, allowed to take whatever she wanted: $600 worth later, she had a psychological debt to the owner.
This kind of gift giving sets the stage. It is a known psychological truth that a person will feel owed to someone if the other gives them something: as small as a $600 bottle of wine, or only a $10 bottle for that matter.
It is bizarre that we allow political parties the use of psychologists to manipulate the electorate, but we don’t use them for cleaning up our system.
It’s endemic in the Anglo/Murdoch world of Trump and Johnson and our Cons feel they can get away with it, particularly if the fall guys are the progressive Victorians who are apparently beyond redemption.
Union corruption – now that’s a different matter entirely………. right Rupert ?
There is something really wrong in Victoria and it has to be either corruption or living too long without money (.70 cent GST?) Why do progressives just blindly ‘love Dan?’
I don’t understand it. Like he can do no wrong, as blind as Murdoch is to Morrison gov that is for sure.
The systems in Vic don’t exist…
The police, for one, just cheat… e.g. use a lawyer (Underworld war) or texting criminals to turn themselves in (Bourke st massacre) and making money by doing dodgy breathalysing (TAC scam).
And we know the government allows the police to decide what jobs they take or don’t take (Graham Ashton: “no thanks” to quarantine).
Didn’t the Labor party use the Police to withhold their crime statistics too?
Corruption is everywhere. Yes, Victoria is used as a fall guy for Murdoch press, but that doesn’t mean Victoria is clean. Far from it.
Why do Cons fall for the Sky Noise After Dark cabal and their disingenuous pretence of being rational and balanced.Peta Credlin’s husband is the Liberal(?) Party’s Campaign Director and the rest of the laughingstock are simply up for the coin.
Ethel, unfortunately the police unions own the government of the day in every state. NSW is no different, having waged Laura Norder election campaigns for 30 years the end result is that no Minister will say boo to the police. They are among the least efficient organisations in Australia, and like our equally bereft spy agencies just put their hand out whenever a bit more empire building is due.
The stench of a million dead fish still wafts across the land. Your obsession with ‘progressives’ is sad. You sound like an American Trump supporter as Australians have historically NEVER used that term. Have a look at the federal LNP if you think Victoria is bad. Take off your ‘anti progressive glasses’ & see reality.
I would say that Victorians approve of Dan Andrews’ government for at least two reasons. Firstly, it would be hard not to look good in comparison to the last shower. Secondly, as Andrews gleefully said after the last election, “We get things done!” People like that.
This looks like it will be an excellent series, but it will not be read by the “quiet Australian”. Such is the insularity and nihilism–caused by the constant corruption associated with corporatism as a political/cultural system–and the refusal of the mainstream media to deal with it as a systemic problem, that most of the public simply respond by saying “They’re all corrupt” and then it leaves their consciousness.
The point is that much of the voting public expect politicians at all three levels to be corrupt, that that is part of the game. They also assume that nothing can be done about it, because nothing is done about it. Moreover, the commercial television stations focus more on crime against the person and not on white collar crime–with which corruption is so strongly associated–and express outrage at this, therefore deflecting any attention away from large scale corruption.
I am unsure how this can be turned around given the apathy and insularity of so many voters.
Sad but oh so true.
Which take us down to Joseph de Maistre’s quote:
“Every country has the government it deserves” or/and
“In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve”
ditto
I perceive that you are philosopher, Sir,-
As are so few and far between, as it were!
Yet, why is it that so many are unable to see
That it is corruption’s brought us prosperity,-
To our homes, to our shores, & family’s lives;-
And ignorance also graces our leader’s wives?
For, and why, should we henceforth not hope,
While the average man is made such a dope,
That a wife, perchance, may have more wisdom
Since democracy arises from what’s most common?
Labor is mostly paper bag level corruption – pathetic as it may be. Whereas, the LNP have industrialized corruption in this country to a level probably not seen in 200 years.
Yes. The coalition have always been prepared to smash conventions in a way Labor never have.
Since Rum Corps days perhaps?
That one phrase “working against the public interest ” sums up the direction this government has taken with gusto.