Politics
Political donations – the dark side of Australian democracy
As media discussion about next year’s election starts to arise, the Australian Electoral Commission has released data on donations made in 2022-23. It wasn’t an election year, but by June 2023 the Voice campaign was ramping up, and by then it was becoming apparent that Dutton was determined to make the campaign a partisan one about damaging the government’s credibility, rather than about the merits of the proposed Constitutional change.
The AEC’s returns, in a series of spreadsheets, are not particularly user-friendly. Even if we could assemble and sort all the pivot tables to make sense of them, we would be at best in the twilight rather than out of the dark, because donations less than $16 300 don’t have to be disclosed, and the source of much funding is obscure, untraceable to any individual, company, lobby group or trade union.
Much funding is laundered through intermediate entities. For example the Cormack Foundation and Vapold between them donated $6.2 million to the Liberal Party. Another entity that appears in the returns is the far-right outfit Advance Australia, which received $2.4 million, the source of most of which is not disclosed.
The Guardian’s Sarah Bashfold Canales and Nick Evershed have pulled together some of the AEC’s data to reveal the major donors and recipients: Australian political donations: here’s who gave the most in 2022-23. Kate Griffiths and Elizabeth Baldwin of the Grattan Institute have done a more general analysis, in an effort to trace which industries or other interest groups are buying most influence: Labor is in power - but the Coalition still attracts the most money. It is not possible to confirm that’s there’s a causal relationship between donations and favours, but is notable that consultants and the gambling industry have been significant political donors.
Also, even though the Coalition has always received more money than Labor, many companies give money to the two main parties, often in equal amounts. This suggests that corporations are seeking to advance their specific interests, rather than donating out of sentiment or class interest. It also suggests that the businesspeople may wish to support the “Westminster” two-party system, which is easier to influence than a multi-party democracy.
The Australia Institute has commented on electoral funding – Real-time disclosures should replace yearly political donation data dump – in the general framework of its Democracy Agenda. Its main recommendations for reform, which include but go beyond the recommendations made by a parliamentary committee last year, are:
- Lower the donation disclosure threshold.
- Introduce real-time donation disclosure requirements for political parties and candidates.
- Consider amending the definition of “gift” to ensure it meets community expectations of transparency in political donations.
- Make ministerial diaries public so the connection, if one exists, between political contributions and political access is revealed.
- Legislate truth in political advertising laws.
- Increase funding for the ABC and SBS.
- Further cut contracts with external suppliers and consulting firms.
- Publish consultants’ reports paid for with public money.
Its full Democracy Agenda covers other reforms to improve our democracy, including a stronger integrity commission and reforms to parliamentary processes.
The ABC’s Linton Besser has written We've been stuck in a cycle of political donation scandals for too long — but don't hold your breath for significant reform. I suspect that if he weren’t constrained by the ABC’s guidelines on political comment, he would have written “Labor: get a bloody move on”. The longer a government delays reform, the more opportunities do the usual suspects have to convince the government to go easy on reform.
Crispin Hull on his webpage writes about our donation system being intrinsically corrupting. Political donations are rarely directly transactional, but they rely on the notion that gifts create implicit obligations. But if donations are restricted to those made by individuals, even if there is a reasonably high cap on those donations, it is hard for any individual to buy influence in the way a corporation or trade union can.
Closing the gaps in closing the gap
We may be accustomed to regular “Closing the Gap” reports by the Productivity Commission. These are about our generally slow progress towards overcoming “the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people so that their life outcomes are equal to all Australians”.
The Commission has now released the Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, commissioned by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg just before the Coalition government lost office.
Its main finding is that governments have not prioritized the agreement’s reforms. It finds shortcomings in all four areas of the agreement – establishing formal partnerships and shared decision-making, building the community-controlled sector, transforming government organizations, and sharing access to data and information at a regional level.
The last two of these shortcomings need some explanation.
On transforming government organizations, the Commission states:
We are yet to identify a government organisation that has articulated a clear vision for what transformation looks like, adopted a strategy to achieve that vision, and tracked the impact of actions within the organisation (and in the services that it funds) toward that vision.
On data, the Commission refers to the need to establish and respect “indigenous data sovereignty”. This goes beyond the usual, and generally satisfied requirement to disaggregate government statistical and census data by aboriginality. Rather it is about the epistemology of data itself.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be able to use data to achieve their priorities they require more than just “access” to existing data held by governments. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people also need to be able to determine what data they need and how data about them is collected, accessed and used. In particular, they need leadership over the narrative used to frame this data. This is the basic intent of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), which is the right of Indigenous people to exercise ownership over Indigenous data
Had this report been published two or three years ago, it would surely have added weight to the constitutional proposal for a Voice (not that any argument or evidence would have swayed the No campaign because it never had any intention to engage in a serious argument for or against the issues in the proposal). Regarding initiatives related to the Uluru Statement, the Commission remarks positively on “a legislated Indigenous Voice to Parliament in South Australia, the establishment of the First People’s Assembly of Victoria and legislated Treaty and Truth-telling processes in Victoria and Queensland”.