From Peter Hartcher:
The Australian politician who can best campaign to clean up Canberra will win the same enormous popular support that Trump tapped. Trump has shown the way. Which Australian politician will be the one to take up the opportunity?
To be fair, some politicians have made serious efforts to fix the system. Senator Nick Xenophon has used his position as part of the balance of power to force the government to introduce laws to protect and to compensate whistleblowers.
The Greens have spent the past five years campaigning for a federal anti-corruption body along the lines of the Independent Commission Against Corruption. They have legislation before the Parliament. The government is flatly opposed. Labor has always been flatly opposed but Bill Shorten has more recently said he has an open mind.
…The new populism afoot in the West shows a tremendous underlying frustration with “the establishment” and “the system”. Someone, one day, will unleash the same movement here. Will it be Pauline Hanson?
If Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten were truly smart, or truly public-minded, or both, they would return to Parliament in the New Year and declare a crusade to clean up politics.
Anyone serious about draining the swamp of Australian federal corruption and collusion will have these five items on their checklist, at a bare minimum:
1. Australia needs a federal anti-corruption body. Along the lines of the ICAC, but learning the lessons of the NSW experience. It needs the power to initiate investigations. It needs to be put beyond the reach of political interference, which means it must have statutory independence.
2. The federal parliament needs to create a code of conduct for MPs and senators, and it needs a parliamentary integrity commissioner to enforce it. The commissioner’s office could be modelled on the Parliamentary Budget Office, independent and properly resourced. It should screen all incoming members as well as monitoring existing ones.
3. A recent, unpublished review of the Finance Department, led by former Howard government minister Warwick Smith, recommends that the system of parliamentary entitlements should be taken out of the department and set up as a separate body.
4. Political funding needs wholesale reform: full and immediate – “real time” – disclosure and strict limits. The restrictions need to apply to third-party campaigning too – by companies and unions and others – or they will be bypassed.
5. Ministers’ contacts with lobbyists and any other favour-seeking or vested-interest outfits need to be disclosed immediately, together with the subjects of the meetings or phone calls. The Queensland system is the most rigorous and could be a good starting point.
The cause of cleaning up Canberra is an inevitable one. The only question is who will best do it, and whether the energy will be channelled constructively to fix our democracy or destructively to make it weaker.
Quite right. I will add three more:
6. All government employees must be banned from working for associated private sector interests for two year after leaving office.
7. Foreign donations must be banned outright.
8. All senior public servants must declare their asset holdings in the same way that politicians do.
This is not just about the next election, this is an existential threat to Australian democracy. The forces of corruption and soft power influence now emanating from other oligarchies and authoritarian regimes are unprecedented. If the Canberra swamp is not drained then they have a very real chance of determining the course of Australian history.
