Pressure builds for crack-down on political lobbyists and donations

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By Leith van Onselen

Political donations, and the propensity for lobbyists to effectively pay for policy favours, is becoming a hot political issue.

Ever since ABC’s Four Corners aired its report in May, entitled Money and Influence, which examined Australia’s opaque system of campaign finance and political donations, we have seen a procession of media reports emerge about how Chinese interests are paying for political influence via donations, thus skewing policy making in their favour.

Over the weekend, Fairfax published a report on the huge number of lobbyists working behind the scenes influencing the nation’s decision makers, most of whom were unregistered:

While there are currently 540 individual lobbyists on the register across 239 firms, servicing more than 1600 clients, such figures vastly underestimate the scale of the influence industry.

Due to the wide exemptions, it covers at most a third of the total lobbying effort targeting the hill, Australian National University Professor John Warhurst argues.

“If (the purpose) is to give a broad picture of the amount of lobbying and who’s lobbying on what and for whom, then it has to include a wider range of lobbyists,” Professor Warhurst says.

“Otherwise you’ve got a lobbying register that only covers a third of all the lobbyists in the country.”

In the absence of a more accurate public record, the best indicator may be the 1497 “sponsored passes” to Parliament House carparks that were on issue in May last year, passes largely used by lobbyists.

Passes which outnumber the individuals on the register almost three to one.

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Cross-bench senator, Nick Xenophon, has now called for a review of the federal lobbying register set-up in 2008 under the Rudd Government, as well as a code of conduct:

“It is well overdue, but it needs to be done in a credible way, and I think it should be part of a broader review, of the influence that industry, unions, all lobbyists and money has on politics in Australia,” he said…

And Labor has today stepped-up pressure over foreign political donations to improve transparency and disclosure:

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“When Mr Turnbull meets business leaders overseas, he has the opportunity to make it clear donations from foreign interests should not be given to Australian political parties,” Mr Shorten said.

“It’s beyond time that Mr Turnbull joined with me in repairing a broken system.”

Mr Shorten said Labor’s push for donation reform at the last election – which included dropping the disclosure threshold from an indexed $13,000 to a fixed $1000 and a new ban on so-called donation splitting – stood in contrast to Mr Turnbull’s reported donations to the Coalition’s campaign of more than $1 million.

More than 110 countries, including the US, UK and Canada, have bans on donations to political parties from foreign interests.

In addition to a ban on foreign donations, Labor wants to ban the receipt of anonymous donations above $50, link public funding for candidates for political office to campaign expenditure and see new offences and increased penalties created for abuses of donation disclosures.

Mr Shorten will call on Parliament’s joint standing committee on electoral matters to consider real-time disclosure of political donations, a long-held policy position of the Greens.

Hopefully we will soon get some action in these areas. Australians deserve to know who is behind the scenes bending the political system and public policy in their favour.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.