The 12-point accountability plan put by the Australian Democrats this week has much to commend it. The plan seeks to make politicians, political parties, bureaucrats and corporations more accountable and to make information more accessible.
The proposals are welcome in the light of recent rort allegations within the major parties and in the light of the Howard Government’s disillusioning performance in outdoing the Hawke-Keating Government when it comes to appointing mates and political allies to key statutory appointments and when it comes to conflicts of interest and abuse of entitlements. Unfortunately, the proposals suffer from a Catch-22. The very people they are directed at are the very people who will have to pass them into law.
Among the proposals were for greater internal democracy in political parties. Branch-stacking by parties has been rife for decades. And when Labor moved to stop it by requiring branch members to be enrolled on the electoral roll in the electorate, the stacking did not end. Rather people falsely enrolled in the electorate so they could still stack the branch.
The Democrats want merit-based appointments to statutory boards and courts. Perhaps a way to achieve this is to require parliamentary approval for major appointments with a committee doing the preliminary vetting.
The Democrats proposals for a parliamentary commissioner to oversee standards and the ministerial code of conduct and to tighten up on those entitlements have merit. The mere presence of a parliamentary commissioner would improve conduct because transgressors would realise they had a greater chance of being caught.
Alas, the proposal to force ministers to answer questions is hopelessly optimistic. Ministers will have to be judged in the long-term by the answers they provide in the Parliament.
Increased out-sourcing by government in the past decade has meant that increased amounts of information that were once in the public domain have now been kept secret under the screen of commercial in confidence. Or worse, as in the case of the recent inquiry into out-sourcing, submissions were kept confidential under the excuse of needing quick and fearless submissions. The excuse is twaddle. Public administration should be done in public. Those that trade with the Government and received taxpayers money must expect information, at least about financial matters, to be made public once the competitive tendering process has ended. Otherwise, they should not put in a bid. The public interest in seeing how taxpayers money is spent is greater than the commercial confidence of contracting parties.
On corporations, the Democrats called for greater rights for minority shareholders. Indeed, there would be merit in changing the present winner-takes-all system of electing boards of directors. It is primitive corporate governance. Why not have a proportional system of voting for boards. That way minority shareholders would get a greater say and greater access to information.
Whether any of these sensible proposals ever see the light of day is another matter. There are usually only two brief opportunities for these sort of democratisation-accountability proposals to get enacted. The first is just after a new Government is elected having promised accountability and cleanliness in Government and the minor party embarrasses the winning party by introducing legislation from the winning party’s election platform. The opportunity with the election of the Howard Government is now well passed. It has its own misdeeds to cover up and mates to protect. The second opportunity is when a minor party, holding the balance, extracts a promise from a desperate government for clean-government legislation as a condition of it staying in power. Usually, a major party can be relied on doing anything rather than be tipped out of power.
The disillusion with the major parties gets stronger each election, though electoral systems have, at least till now, left them over-represented. Unless they clean up their acts along the lines of some of these Democrat proposals they may find the prospect of being in minority and forced into it becomes reality.