Howard, Gunns, political donations: our system is broken

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.