So, interfering in policy is the not preserve of the self-interested wealthy but also the altruistic wealthy, from the AFR:
Wotif.com’s millionaire founder and prominent philanthropist Graeme Wood is helping to bankroll an Aboriginal group fighting big coal projects in central Queensland worth more than $20 billion.
Mr Wood, an environmental campaigner and financial backer ofThe Guardian website in Australia, helped set up a company to represent the Wangan and Jagalingou families’ opposition to the development of Queensland’s Galilee Basin. He has also offered ongoing financial support.
Adani and GVK Hancock’s mega-mines in the Galilee Basin are being held up in the courts by a tiny pressure group, Coast and Country, which has links to the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Representative Council.
Am I outraged? Nah. Does that make me hypocrite given my opposition to the Twiggy Forrest campaign? Nah.
As hedge John Hempton wrote a few years ago:
Indeed American style money politics in Australia is far more insidious than in the US because our billionaires are far less diverse. A diversity in billionaires (and in the way they make their money) gives us a diversity of billionaire opinion. You can get the Koch Brothers and George Soros in one system – and to some extent their opinions (and the money with which they foist them onto the rest of us) offset each other. The balance is preserved.
Here we risk no balance.
It’s proven to be impossible to keep these big money bullies out of policy-making so having a few right-thinking ones is essential. Dick Smith and Frank Lowy are others. Moreover, the Galilee coal projects are an economic bad joke, offering next to no return by investing wantonly in oversupplied markets at the expense of future growth markets like tourism. The leading candidate in the Adani project is clearly itself a creature of political favours not a market-driven operation so for another wealthy man to push it back is fine with me. I just wish he was a billionaire!
The touchstone in each debate is the national interest no matter who is funding what.
