Howard, Gunns, political donations: our system is broken

The Ausralian federalist system under John Howard appears to be irrevocably broken. Governments can stay within the letter of the law while violating the basic principles of democratic representation.

A lightning review of the pulp mill process makes the point.

We’ve had a Premier and a businessman doing a deal in a restaurant that places a private sector pulp mill onto the top of the government’s priority list. Before any evaluation, or even complete description, of the proposal we’ve had both state and federal Labor and Liberal parties support the proposal. All of the local governments in the region proposed for the mill also endorsed the proposal, again without any details. Many in the community wonder why such unqualified support was given so quickly.

In the course of all of this, the project proponent was given the job of defining all of the impacts on communities and other industries, notwithstanding their obvious conflict of interest and their lack of expertise in many areas (e.g. fishing, tourism, agriculture).

The mill proponents were given over $10 million in subsidies to prepare their case, and the state government spent more millions on subsidising a pro-mill marketing campaign and a pulp mill taskforce.

Community groups were refused any help from their own government, and were also denied political representation as both major parties supported the proposal.

When the relatively independent Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC) was about the declare the proponent critically non-compliant with its requirements, the state government immediately moved to create a new process in which approval was delivered by an overseas pulp mill supplier. The commonwealth accepted the new process and conducted a review on a small percentage of the total impacts (less than 5 per cent).

Now, with the mill still having to prove itself at the federal level, we’ve had the Prime Minister stating that there is no reason to rule out accepting donations from Gunns. "Obviously it’s a matter for the party organisation as to where they take money, but just because a company has been involved in the news is not a reason not to accept donations", he said. (Howard happy to take money from Gunns)

Yes, it’s legal but it defies everything that we know about trying to make impartial decisions.

The Prime Minister is saying that it’s fine for the proponent to give money to his party at a time when their business proposal is being reviewed by his government. This is entirely within the letter of the law in Australia but destroys any hope of impartiality from our governments.

While the law may say that a cash donation does not represent influence, all common sense and past experience tells us otherwise.

One real problem with this situation is that it totally tips the balance in favour of existing large industries, (particularly those in receipt of subsidies who can then direct some of the subsidy into their favoured political parties to keep the subsidies rolling) thus biasing our political system in favour of old industries. The trouble is we are facing novel problems such as drought, fuel price increases and globalised diseases (e.g. equine influenza).

When we need to act to address novel situations, we often need independent and impartial analysis. What our system actually delivers is more of the same courtesy of a party and campaign donation system that hides donations from scrutiny and allows companies with a particular interest to distort any hope of impartiality with cash payments.

Until and unless we correct this bias, we are likely to be facing a very uncertain future because most decision making will be about priorities that have been effectively purchased through campaign donations.

With this in mind, we might ask how can we expect rational climate change responses when the fossil fuel industry is controlling party coffers, when the logging industry is buying favours through cash donations and when the car industry is keeping governments fixated on the automobile? It’s been argued that the reason we have a single wheat "desk" (Australian Wheat Board) is due to AWB donations to the National party.

Another critical problem is how we can get these distortions changed. It’s pretty obvious that the public would be fighting the major parties all the way to get a change to this system. Party funding is already available from the taxpayer, perhaps that funding could be increased so that we can remove this distorting party donation system from Australia’s methods of governance.

Failure to correct this systemic problem can only mire us further into corrupted decision making, public distrust of government and repeated failures to organise to deal with new classes of threat whenever those threats are spin-offs of existing large business.