Probably one of the most laudable steps taken by the Rudd government has been the attention given by Senator John Faulkner as Special Minister of State to cleaning up the electoral system. Admittedly, this isn’t one of the funky and sexy issues the media likes to highlight, but the importance of the Green Paper on Electoral Reform is profound.
But while most Australians probably had other things on their mind, John Howard’s former Workplace Relations advisor and Alexander Downer’s replacement as Mayo MP, Jamie Briggs, found time on Boxing Day to denounce third party campaigns as a “a growing cancer in our democracy”.
Briggs named GetUp! and the ACTU’s Your Rights at Work campaign as examples of what he was talking about.
I don’t have any particular problem with disclosure of funding for third party campaigns, though I would object to caps on donations. But the hyperbole from Briggs (and no doubt his views are shared by Nick Minchin and others) is absurd and dangerous. Props to Andrew Norton for sounding the alarm. Norton refers to Briggs’ call for disclosure and observes:
He hasn’t even noticed that they already provide this information, with another report due early February 2009. Last year’s was really not that interesting, telling us a) that political campaigns cost money and that b) left-wing persons and organisations provide that money to left-wing campaigns.What GetUp! and the ACTU are doing in their campaigns is crystal clear from the campaigns themselves. They are in a very different situation to political parties, which may privately offer favours to donors.
Briggs’ attitude, plus conversations I have had with other Liberals, makes me worried about the Party’s response to the Rudd government’s green paper on election funding and regulation. I fear that they will agree to draconian restrictions on political freedoms in an attempt to control the left’s current political ascendancy. As with the Howard government in its later years, they are too concerned with short-term problems, and show too little interest in the systemic consequences of their actions.
Any expenditure cap is going to be arbitrary and would likely prevent large scale television campaigns which are going to be necessary on big issues like the Your Rights At Work campaign. Do these caps apply to other NGOs as well who may make a statement about political issues?
The electoral system definitely needs cleaning up but not in the way Briggs would like. Smaller electorates, proportional representation in Lower Houses, better public funding arrangements, etc. are the things we need to be looking at. We need to be working out how we can reform the electoral system to encourage people to get involved and play an active role in the political sphere rather than looking at how we can lock them out because we disagree with their ideas. The CDP, CEC, DLP, LDP, Family First, Pauline Hanson, One Nation, etc. all scare the crap out of me but they should be defeated at the polling booth in a fair election rather than frozen or litigated out of the political arena.
I wonder if Briggs realises that big business might one day want to run a campaign (say, against an ETS) and that an expenditure cap will harm them. Of course, they can always just donate straight to the Liberal Party. Disclosure of sources of revenue is no problem. Banning corporate/union/etc. donations may not be a problem. Capping individual donations may not be a problem. Capping expenditure is definitely a problem, though.
This sounds exactly like the bogus moral panic many U.S. Rightwingers have been in about the fundraising dominance of Obama/leftwing 527s.
Can’t the conservative side of Australian politics come up with their own rhetoric when spitting dummies over recent election loses? You’d never hear of an ALP apparatchik stealing whinge material from foreign parties.
The Right have taken a look at netroot politics. To their horror they recognise that they cannot emulate the Left’s successes in this new model of activism.
Best news I’ve read for years.
It’s a bit rich when you consider how the Libs watered disclosure laws down as soon as they got control of the Senate. It became possible to donate very large amounts before you had to disclose any of it. I wonder how much Exclusive Bretheren money was funneled to the Libs under their weak laws.
I just went to the Centre for Independent Studies website and couldn’t find anywhere where they disclose donors (corporate or otherwise).
The thing with the YRAW campaign was that it was literally a third party. That is, another major party was basically created. In my electorate we had over 300 volunteers on election day – and only a very small number were ALP members.
Cynical Tories would like us to believe that it was all union money that did it. But the fact is a genuine grassroots movement was created by people outraged at the crushing of a vital democratic institution – the union movement. The fact that a mini tidal wave of activism took place under the radar of the media is evidence of just what a lazy and unimaginative bunch our journos are.
Mark quoting Andrew Norton:
Isn’t that just all too sadly predictable, the overlooking of the actual facts in favour of scary scenario-painting? Let’s hope the media isn’t so lazy and unimaginative as to let Briggs get away with that, although my hopes are not high.
The real sting of M Grattan’s article was the last sentence:
“Third-party campaigning was increasing as Australians sought to cut through the spin from political parties.”
Given the Howard Government’s long history of disinformation, massive splurges on “public information” advertising, last-minute pork barrelling, and the extent to which the MSM, especially NewsLtd, was pro-Howard, 3rd party campaigning was just about the only way to cut through the spin. Liberals, therefore, have only themselves to blame for the rise of anti-Coalition 3rd party campaigns.
Follow up to #6:
After typing the above, I turned to Crikey.com, and today’s story Mainstream Media Came to the Party – Lateish on a police threat to arrest Nick Holmes a Court on terrorism charges, and the role of “new” media in exposing the story. It does provide a good example of Katz’s #3 “netroot politics”, and the way Obama’s campaign operated (and raised funds), resulting in what Nickws #2 calls “bogus moral panic many U.S. Rightwingers” – a euphamism for USA Republican & religious Right reaction, if ever I’ve heard one!
The old political/media paradigms have shifted, and here’s a Brave New networked, 3rd party campaigning political/media world out there. It’s about time C21 political/ media Luddites like Briggs learned to cope with it.
I still say that all the fine rhetoric of Faulkner, Gillard, Tanner and co – the cream-team – about more open, transparent and accountable government is being instantly undone by Stephen Conroy’s continued existence as a fellow Minister of theirs. In fact he’s made fools and liars out of all the leadership, including Kruddy.
The secretive fascist machinations of the Right-faction never sleep comrades.
I suppose one response to this story is the RWDBs are at it again. My worry is they might gain the support of the Rudd Government. For example, Get-up’s latest campaign against Rudd05′s Let’s Not Stop Global Warming Right Away campaign can be nothing if not annoying to Rudd’s apparatchniks. Governments tend to get a bit upset when they’re painted as bare-faced liars. This partly explains the Libs’ attitudes to third party campaigns. No surprises if Rudd starts to react the same way.
If my attitude is cynical its only because of the way governments tend to behave, especially if things aren’t going their way.
Putting aside what Briggs wants, if Labor’s proposed lowering of the threshold from $10,600 to $1,000 passes then large numbers of people and organisations – probably including LP, if it costs more than $1,000 a year to keep it going – risk being caught in a massive compliance net.Your expenditure and donors, if above $1,000, would have to be reported to the AEC.
This is a major obstacle to ordinary people getting involved in politics. The blogosphere should be far more interested in what is going on here – it’s as bad as Conroy’s internet censorship plans.
Why would blogs come under the purview of the AEC, Andrew?
Mark – Under the letter of the law, blogs like this one are persons or organisations expressing views by any means on candidates or election issues. The AEC guidelines narrow this to try to exclude media organisations by saying that expressing political views in opinion pages is incidental to their reporting. However, they say that ‘the publication of that same opinion piece in a journal or website whose objective is to see the election of a particular government, or to further a particular policy line, may well give rise to reportable expenditure.’
I think this would probably cover LP, and possibly my blog – though mine is less concerned with day-to-day politics than LP.
Under the current law, the $10,600 threshold would save you. But a $1,000 threshold may catch you. The Howard government was hoping to bury its enemies in bureaucracy. The Rudd government is threatening to bury its friends in bureaucracy.
Thanks Andrew, that’s appreciated.
We don’t rely on a donation model any more, but I agree that it’s a very concerning move.
Mark – It applies to expenditure as well as donations. So if you spend more than $1,000 a year you could be caught, even if there are no donations to be declared.
The reporting burden is quite absurd, because many of the people or groups who could be caught would have unsophisticated or non-existent accounting, and even those which do have staff looking after the finances (eg the CIS) do not have election issues as an organising concept and so no easy way of determining how much is spent.
There are also serious rule of law issues, as this requires annual disclosure. So the people whose declarations will be revealed next February (ie those spending more than $10,600) for their 2008 activities will be reporting on their spending on 2010 election issues -while we can guess some, there are lots of borderline calls to be made.
Sorry to brain-pick Andrew, but do you have any idea of the view of overseas donors? Some of the hits on our tip-jar are from the UK, and because of the conversion rate, it’s more that AUD$1000. This is incredibly shitty!
There is always a difference, of course, in this sort of arena between whether in theory blogs might come within the purview of the AEC, and whether anything would actually happen. And don’t forget we’re talking about a Green Paper, not draft legislation.
Not that that makes it ok of course!
In this day and age of Paypal, online credit and debit card payments and infinitely fungible tax-dodging opportunities offered by off-shore havens, yer pretty much doomed trying to track where the money comes from. But where is it going?
All registered political parties should have their full fiancees finances available online, updated regularly on pain of massive fines or eventual disenfranchisement.
It’s that simple. No one can run for public office, and therefore control of public finances, without disclosing to the satisfaction of the law and the curiosity of the punters how much money they really have. And how they’re spending it. Normal media and citizen blogger prurient interest should then chase down and/or fill in the blanks.
In short, pollies and political parties shouldn’t just declare donations once a year. They should publish financial reports at least once a quarter…like any other public company.
“fiancees” was supposed to have a strikethrough.
There is only one thing worse than explaining a failed gag and that is being a pollie publishing your quarterly accounts which show you took money from both Family First and the Eros Foundation.
One day this could be almost true.
“….if Labor’s proposed lowering of the threshold from $10,600 to $1,000 passes then large numbers of people and organisations – probably including LP, if it costs more than $1,000 a year to keep it going – risk being caught in a massive compliance net.Your expenditure and donors, if above $1,000, would have to be reported to the AEC.”
That sounds like complete rubbish to me Andrew. The AEC would be telling the government that it operates on a shoestring thanks very much, and does not have the capacity to monitor blogs all day and night. Really.
And do you really believe that Faulkner et al are interested in blog disclosure? That would go straight to free speech issues and provoke a huge barny nobody wants.
Both sides are trying to financially knobble the really big donors, the unions on one side, and the front corporations on the other. That’s where the real game is, and the discussion is getting interesting, elsewhere.
Mark – Unfortunately, I am not talking about the green paper, which in fact raises some concerns about the 3rd party issue. I am talking about legislatation already in the Parliament, which thankfully in a rare moment of sanity on this issue the Liberals shunted off to a Senate committee not due to report until 30 June 2009.
And while I agree with Mark and Grace that this is not aimed at bloggers, and that the AEC will do all it can not to have to monitor every political activist and group in the entire country, that’s not what the law says. It will end up being like carrying some drugs for personal use; illegal but rarely enforced. I say keep dumb laws off the statute books and don’t turn activism into a potential offence unless you fill in forms and spend your evenings with your accountant.
Scepticlawyer – The draft bill would make foreign donations illegal if ‘the donor’s main purpose in making the gift of foreign property was to enable the recipient to incur political expenditure’.
Combine this with Conroy’s internet censorship plans, and we should all feel nostalgic for the relatively liberal Howard years!
As with the Howard government in its later years, they are too concerned with short-term problems, and show too little interest in the systemic consequences of their actions.
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As with any government.
I don’t see why lowering the current legislation disclosure threshold back towards something like $1000 is such a problem. That’s around where it was until the Liberals whacked it up to $10 000 when they got control of the Senate. The Libs are just delaying the legislation as long as possible to give them as much chance as possible to rake in large anonymous donations – remembering that under the current law, a person could donate $9999 to each state and territory division of the Libs, and the same for the Nats, – so potentially around $100 000 or so – and not have to disclose any of it.
AFAIK the law didn’t catch blogs in the past when the disclosure level was lower. The issue was considered in a previous Electoral Matters Committee report on disclosure laws a few years ago – from memory John Quiggin put in a submission and might have even appeared as a witness. I don’t see why independent blogs such as this would suddenly come into play now if the disclosure level was lowered again.
IRT the Green Paper, I haven’t read the fine print of that enough to comment, but that’s why it’s a Green Paper – so people who are interested or concerned can comment.
It is true that whatever rules you put in place, someone will try to find a way around them – witness the USA, which has bans on foreign donations (I couldn’t donate to Obama’s campaign or even buy a t-shirt off them), donation limits, expensiture limits in some circumstances. But I am not convinced that compliance costs or the potential for loopholes means we should just go back to the bad old days of no disclosure and no constraints.
“the bad old days of no disclosure and no constraints.”
What made them so bad?
Not asking rhetorically or making a point, I’m just curious.
Further to my comment above, I had a quick look back to see if memory matched what I said re a previous inquiry and a Quiggin submission. It seems I was partly right – the Committee did examine blogs (although the report called them “bloggs”), but it was more in the context of the requirement to authorise political comment rather than disclosure of donations/funding.
However, I think the point is similar. It is usually clear if something is advertising, but there may sometimes be a grey area in what is campaign material rather than public comment. However, the fact there may be a small grey area doesn’t negate the fact that most blogs clearly are not political campaign sites.
A newspaper doesn’t have to disclose all of their income just because they run political advertisements or political commentary or letters to the editor (they used to have to disclose funding received for electoral advertisements), but don’t at the moment). Neither does a blog – unless it specifically got funding from a political party or an associated entity for the purposes of boosting a campaign.
More broadly, as with a number of other areas, the ability of the electoral law to cover the internet and other new technologies in the same way it dealt with old media often comes up against some difficulties, so it is worth keeping an eye unintended consequences.
For anyone interested, John Quiggin’s submissions to the Committee inquiry in question is at this page – subs 44 and 180. He also gave evidence before the Committee – the July 6 hearings on this page. The issue is covered briefly in Chapter 12 of the Committee’s report.
re Jarrah at #23
What made them so bad was that a political party could be funded anonymously by someone chanelling enormous amounts of money from potentially any source at all. I don’t think that’s a good situation, which is why most democracies amke some effort to have transparency on donations and funding.
Perhaps having lived through the Bjelke-Petersen era with its brown paper bag donations makes me biased, but I believe transparency in regards to significant funding sources is at least one way of maintaining some public faith in the democratic system. Which isn’t to say that some dodgy deals don’t still occur, but at least there some constraints and some scope for red flags to go off, giving people some idea where to look.
Andrew B – In the period you are referring to, there were no laws applying to the disclosure of political expenditure by organisations merely commenting on issues. That was the reason blogs weren’t caught, not the $1,000 threshold.
Andrew N,
I don’t see how the “legislation already in the Parliament” will catch blogs, as you suggest at comment #20.
In regards to this area, the main change the current legislation makes is to drop the disclosure threshold back to around where it was before (down from over $10 000 to just $1000 – it was $1500 previously). If it didn’t catch blogs before, it won’t now.
There was a greater obligation on media organisations prior to 2005 to do some reporting, but that aspect was removed and as far as I can see, isn’t being put back in the current legislation.
The Green Paper may be another matter – I will read it more closely with this issue in mind. It is bound to catch overt campaigns like GetUp! or Your Rights at Work or other third party advertising such as has been done by business or environment groups from time to time, but I very much doubt it is the intent of the government to catch general comment style blogs like LP or yours.
Of course, how the AEC decides it should interpret the precise wording of the law can be different to what is intended. It has happened before where changes were made for a specific purpose which ended up having a wider net then intended.
Alternatively, changes which had the intent of stopping a certain practice have also been interpreted by the AEC not to have that effect – witness the recent decision of the AEC to permit the Liberty and Democracy Party to change their registered name to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberals specifically changed the Act with an intent to stop this sort of thing – they had Liberals for Forests specifically in mind, but they objected to Liberal Democrats being registered for the same reasons (as did the Australian Democrats I believe). The AEC decided otherwise (although I imagine it may be possible the Libs will try to appeal this).
Anyway, its a long winded way of saying people should respond to the Green Paper with any concerns they have on this matter. I doubt politicians will be very aware of the possible consequences or give it much thought unless someone brings it their attention. Most of them will be like Mr Briggs and just look at what they think might be the short-term partisan advanatges and disadvantages. (although to give John Faulkner his due, I don’t think that is his primary motivation in this case).
Andrew B – We are slightly at cross-purposes. I am talking about an entirely new disclosure requirement that took effect in 2007, applying to *any* person or organisation spending money on an election issue, even when no election has been called. This is a separate matter from whether election-related materials need to be authorised. It applies even when no vote is being advocated.
The $10,600 threshold keeps most individuals and small campaigns free of the disclosure requirement. The $1,000 threshold would widen the net considerably.
I am not convinced that there is any justification for applying disclosure rules to issue campaigners. But even if there was some justification for large campaigns that might possibly swing significant numbers of voters, it is hard to see how $1,000 or even $10,600 could possibly be significant influences on the election.
Andrew N
I think we are talking about the same thing. Third parties have had disclosure requirements of various sorts for some time and certainly more will be caught if the disclosure threshold is $1000 rather than $10 000 +.
I agree the current definition of “political expenditure”, which includes expenditure on “public expression of views on an issue in an election by any means” reads like it would catch blogs (and plenty of other things).
But my point is that the way that wording of the law is currently administered, it is unlikely the AEC would consider general blogs to come under it (perhaps because political expenditure does not include “administration”). I don’t believe that is the intent of the current wording. However, if someone were to try to test in Court for some reason, who knows what the result would be.
The issue in my view boils down to what constitues electoral or political expenditure, and in this case “political” is defined in the narrow partisan electoral sense, not the wider “personal is political” sense. Where the threshold should be is secondary to the issue of who is required to disclose.
If you are going to have any sort of credible disclosure regime of electoral or political expenditure, you have to include third parties, otherwise you leave a loophole a mile wide.
…….
(FWIW, I don’t know if LP would spend $1000 a year on publishing, and whether the definition of “publishing” costs would include domain names, ISP fees etc. I would assume this would come under “administration”, so I’m not sure what direct expenditure they would have which could isolated as a cost of “public expression” of people’s views. I don’t really know how you could isolate the cost of this sort of expenditure.)
Andrew N:
I think you’re missing the point. It’s not solely about influences on the election, but also about influences on the representative. A donation by a third party of $10,000 to help get a candidate elected, whether directly to the campaign or to another third party campaign, might represent (for a major party in a winnable seat) between a tenth and a fifth of the campaign costs for that seat (not counting general party advertising etc). That’s going to be significant; if that candidate gets elected, s/he’s going to remember where that $10,000 came from, and be hoping for another $10,000 in three years time.
Alister – I agree that if regulate political parties you also need to regulate organisations that work for or against parties in an electoral context (one reason not to head too far down the regulatory route, but that’s another issue). However my concern here is with individuals and organisations who are commenting on – or even polling on, in the legislation – issues.
In many cases that commentary has few if any partisan implications. For example, the CIS pays me more than $1000 a year to comment on higher education issues. If that was deemed an election issue, it would arguably come within the Act and require disclosure, even though I never have and never would advocate a vote either way on this basis.
Andrews N and B (and anyone else)
Can you suggest ways that the legislation could be amended so that blogs and similar projects were clearly excluded so that we don’t have to rely on the AEC’s interpretation? I realise Andrew N would like many aspects abolished entirely, but surely we can all agree that it would be good to change the legislation so it can only have the intended effect, not occasionally and arbitrarily be applied to the cases raised.