CHRISTOPER Pyne, of all people, put forward an excellent proposal to help clean up Australian politics.
“I don’t believe that the trade-union movement or corporate Australia should be able to donate to political parties,” Pyne, the Education Minister, told the ABC last Sunday: “I think only individuals should be able to donate to political parties.”
He proposed, also, that donations no longer be tax deductible.
The last bit is easy. It could be done in next week’s Budget.
The rest, sadly, is more difficult. I say “sadly” because Australians are sick of the corrupting influence of union donations to the Labor Party and corporate donations to the Liberal Party, as well as the back-door donations through expensive ministerial-access lunches and dinners
These people do not give money for the fun of it or to improve Australia’s democratic processes. They do it to get policy and spending decisions in their favour – usually against the public interest. And by and large they succeed.
Labor, under Julia Gillard especially, delivered the union movement changes in industrial-relations law that favoured unions out of all proportion to their membership levels.
And now this government is lining up a myriad of financial measures that business favours.
But it is going to take a legal genius to draft a law that does not run foul of the implied freedom of political communication in the Constitution.
Former NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, to his credit, had a crack at it and failed. His law prohibiting corporate donations was struck down by the High Court just before Christmas last year, and so did not get very wide attention.
Unions NSW challenged the law and the High Court agreed that the prohibition impinged upon the freedom of political communication in an unjustifiable way.
Since the 1990s the court has recognised the implied freedom. It has said that the Constitution sets out a form of representative democracy. That democracy can only function if voters are informed. Voters can only be informed if there is a free flow of information.
That logic is fine, but the logic in the NSW case seems to stretch a long bow. Why, pray tell, does a corporation have to give money to a political party for the corporation to disseminate political ideas, arguments, opinions and information.
Preventing corporations from giving money to a political party does not prevent the free flow of information one jot. Big corporations have websites that go out to millions of Australians and they can send whatever political message out they want.
In one of the political-communication cases, Justice (later Chief Justice) Gerard Brennan spoke of the need for there to be a free flow of political communication in order that electors can form judgments.
Well, how can electors form judgments unless they not only have the information, opinion and arguments but also know where that information, opinion and arguments are coming from?
In the NSW case, the court seems to have concentrated far too much on the flow of information and not enough on the reason for it – namely, the good working of representative democracy.
Indeed, there is a good argument that corporate and union donations to political parties has undermined that good working, not improved it.
The insidious influence on corporate donations should be obvious. They are hiding behind the façade of a political party or a public-action committee, or political lobby organisation masquerading as a “think-tank”.
Voters do not know whether candidates are saying something out of belief or because they got a fist full of dollars from a corporation with a self-serving agenda. Voters do not know if a political party is saying something because it has done the research and thinks it is best policy or because a corporation or union has given it lots of money to pursue that policy.
And it is no good saying that these objections can be overcome by disclosure, when disclosure constitutes a parliamentary or electoral-commission file that few read or have easy access to.
Freedom of political communication requires transparency and openness, otherwise it is not free and cannot be relied upon. Corporate donations are inimical, not helpful, to voters coming to an informed opinion – the bedrock of democracy.
All we need now is for that legal genius to translate this into legislation that prohibits donations by unions and corporations.
Failing that, at the very least we should force all corporations (including unions) to disclose their donations on their websites – and in a way that makes it easy and obvious to find.
DOT DOT DOT
SUBMISSIONS (which closed last week) to the Senate inquiry into the Abbott Government’s Bill to abolish the Not-for-Profit and Charities Commission are overwhelmingly against the Bill.
The charities themselves are against the Bill. They like a single, national body where potential donors can check to see if the body they are giving to is dodgy or fair dinkum.
As it happens, I was chair of Barnardos the children’s charity for five years. The costly, time-wasting processes of complying with every state, territory and federal charity regulation detracted from the work at hand.
As it happens, I am on the board of a new charity and was given the task of registering it. The web-based application process was straight-forward but comprehensive nonetheless.
The commission’s staff were helpful and co-operative.
You have to be suspicious when the preponderance of opinion among the very people being regulated support that regulation, yet the government seems pig-headedly determined to ignore them.
I strongly suspect that those few charities which do not want regulation and have the Prime Minister’s ear have something to hide or to fear.
In 2011 Australians gave $2.2 billion to charity. That will shrink if Australians lose trust in the sector.
As one charity submitted to the Senate inquiry: “For the first time, people can view on a single website platform information and data on all registered charities in Australia. This is a very important component in building the Australian community’s trust in the work and use of funds in the charities and not-for-profits sector.”
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 10 May 2014.