Key details:
- The Albanese Government has announced the broad strokes of its plans to introduce:
- Donation caps (how much can be given to parties and candidates)
- Expenditure caps (how much parties and candidates can spend)
- Increase public funding (taxpayer money going to parties and candidates).
- Changes to electoral law often have perverse outcomes:
- Existing public funding models used in Australia already unfairly advantage sitting MPs and established parties over challengers and new entrants.
- Donation caps fail to prevent cash-for-access payments to ministers and shadow ministers.
- Spending caps allow major parties to concentrate their spending on target seats, in effect allowing them to outspend independent candidates in that seat.
- Existing donation caps in Victoria have already concentrated power among a small group of people.
- The Australia Institute has identified nine principles for fair political finance reform that should be satisfied before any changes are made.
- Australia Institute polling research finds that three in five Australians oppose public funding for political parties and candidates, and seven in 10 oppose increased public funding, but there are alternative funding models.
“The integrity of Australian elections is too important for the Albanese government’s proposed changes to be rushed through without scrutiny, including a thorough parliamentary inquiry,” said Bill Browne, Director of the Australia Institute’s Democracy & Accountability Program.
“Politicians voting together to give political parties more money will reduce trust in government unless the public is included in the process.
“The changes are not due to start until the election after next, around 2028, so why the unseemly haste to pass them in the last sitting weeks of the year?”
“When similar changes have been introduced at the state level, they have had perverse outcomes including giving political parties preferential treatment over independents; funding some parties excessively while not funding others at all; and allowing major parties to ‘pile in’ to target seats in defiance of spending caps.
“Major political parties run almost 200 candidates each federal election, many of whom have no chance of winning, so any ‘per candidate’ limit on donations or spending affects independent candidates far more than it does the parties.
“Better donation disclosure laws and truth in political advertising are tried and tested policies, and could be passed for this election, while changes that could make Australian elections less competitive are sent to a parliamentary inquiry. This would also allow parliament to consider public funding models that give voters control over how their money is distributed, like the democracy voucher system developed in the City of Seattle.”
“The devil is in the detail – loopholes in how donations are defined could end up allowing some vested interests an outsized level of influence on political parties and their policies.”
