It is worth remembering that the pressure on ANZ, by vocal clients, changed their attitude to involvement in Gunn’s business. A number of phonecalls or emails to a super fund, asking if they invest in that environmentally unfriendly company, might similarly do the trick.

Finally, if you have superannuation there is a fair chance that you have a beneficial interest in Gunn’s. Sadly for most investing institutions ethics is someone else’s department.

Most super funds give you plenty of choice about where your funds are invested, down to individual stock picking. If you don’t like (or don’t know) where the standard balanced fund is invested, then change it. It can be done online, and is executed within 24 hours.

Thus the concern with BB being bailed out by any one is the POTENTIAL for influence in subsequent decisions.

It doesn’t matter (ethically) what Dick Smith has said in the past or is saying now, it’s the fact that sometime down the track he might get into deep doodoos and say to BB ‘well, when you were in trouble, I helped you…”

The law doesn’t say ‘a bankrupt can serve in Parliament as long as he is recognised to have complete integrity’.

The donations from ‘business figures’ to politicians designed to purchase influence for private gain are the ones that Brown rightfully draws attention to.

The donation from Dick Smith to Brown is not designed to procure influence over Brown or favour for Smith’s business interests. Brown is therefore not a hypocrite on this matter.

Smith’s motivation is to protect Parliamentarians in their role of raising matters of genuine public concern.

From the article linked in the original post:

Mr Smith said he was not prepared to see an elected parliamentarian turfed from office because of an unpaid bill arising from a case motivated by a “genuine” concern. “Even though I’m a capitalist, I think he does have an important role in parliament,” Mr Smith said.

Lefty @9

Howard’s actions in this matter are typically sordid, abusing the law for partisan purpose as in the waterfront affair and, vomitously, the ‘Australians For Honest Politics’ sleaze fund (leg work done by Tony Abbott) to destroy Pauline Hanson. That reprehensible man, Howard, has thus abused the law twice (Hanson and Brown) as a vehicle to attack his personal political foes.

This country is a far better place without Howard.

He is a thorough hypocrite.

And people were telling me on the Queensland privatisation threads how wonderful it is to have such enterprises owned by the Government, because then they are subject to democratic control and can be made to behave ethically …

How naïve can you get?

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

-Benito Mussolini

I wonder where this leaves all those people earning below minimum wage in the libertard “utopia” when their employer starts jerking them around?