Sweeping reforms of campaign finance and lobbying laws are needed to end corporate influence over Australian politics that would be regarded as illegal and corrupt overseas, the Human Rights Law Centre says.
In a new report titled Selling Out, the HRLC takes aim at three industries – fossil fuels, gambling and tobacco – that it claims are distorting Australia’s democracy through political donations, lobbying and public attack campaigns.
It calls for more transparency of political donations and a ban on those over $6,000, public disclosure of ministerial diaries and an end to the rotating door between political life and corporate lobbying.
Other reforms sought by the HRLC include a strong federal anti-corruption commission and a cap on spending by all organisations that campaign during elections. The law centre says the Morrison government’s proposed corruption watchdog is inadequate.
Friday’s report comes ahead of a federal election due to be held by May, and the release of 2020-21 political donations data by the Australian Electoral Commission next Tuesday.
“Australians should be able to trust that politicians as their elected representatives have our best interests at heart but this report reveals it is big, harmful industries like tobacco, gambling and fossil fuels that are calling the shots,” Alice Drury, a senior lawyer at the HRLC, said.
Drury said most Australian states were ahead of the commonwealth when it came to the HRLC’s legal reforms wishlist.
“These are really commonsense law reforms that most states have already done and certainly, in many countries overseas, were implemented a long time ago.”
AEC data included in the HRLC report shows that corporate political donations can be quite small compared to their profits. Between 2011 and 2020, one of Australia’s biggest companies, miner BHP – which makes billions of dollars a year in profits – gave just $2.9m in political contributions.
But Drury said the AEC data was inadequate because it could take up to 19 months for a donation to be revealed, and many contributions escaped disclosure because they were made indirectly through industry associations.
“The amount of money required to have significant amounts of political influence is actually somewhat low, or perhaps lower than you might expect,” she said.
“Bearing in mind that we only know what is voluntarily disclosed in many instances, because disclosure laws are so weak, and also when you look at the sum of donations from each industry, it does become quite significant.”
Drury said it was also important not to look at donations in isolation.
“Each of these levers works together to have the end result of a huge amount of political power in the industries. It’s not political donations alone, or lobbying alone, or public attack campaigns alone. They work as a feedback loop with one another.”
The report examines three public campaigns mounted by industry lobby groups in Australia in about 2010: the mining industry’s campaign against the mining tax, a campaign run by Clubs Australia against pre-commitment and pokie machine bet limits, and the tobacco lobby’s efforts to block plain packaging laws.
Of the three, only the plain packaging campaign failed, with the mining tax campaign now widely regarded as one of the most effective corporate campaigns in Australian political history.
Drury said lobbying was a democratic right but had become an industry dominated by corporate interests, drowning out the voices of ordinary people.
The HRLC proposed closing a loophole that allows lobbyists directly employed by companies – estimated to be about 80% of the industry – to avoid putting their names on a public register kept by the attorney general’s department.
Drury said she also supported ending what one lobbyist described to Guardian Australia as an outrageous exemption from the register enjoyed by accountants and lawyers who lobby on behalf of their clients.
“Insofar as you’re just making representations on behalf of a client with a financial interest, and you’re trying to influence a decision in that respect, I don’t see why any different principles should apply to them,” she said.
The widespread practice of quickly leaving government to become a lobbyist has “created its own elite class of the politically powerful and the incredibly rich” and should be banned, the HRLC said in the report.
It said an existing cooling-off period designed to prevent ministers from lobbying in their portfolio areas for 18 months after leaving office was weakly enforced and called for a three-year ban – modelled on laws in Canada that attract penalties including fines or cuts to government pensions if they are breached.
Former politicians who have moved to lobbying or peak body groups include Labor powerbroker Stephen Conroy, who was formerly the chief executive of gambling group Responsible Wagering Australia, and the former NSW Liberal minister Michael Photios who has worked as a lobbyist for the Australian Hotels Association.
Drury said Scott Morrison’s proposal for a federal anti-corruption commission was inadequate, as it did not include public hearings of the type held by bodies in most states and was too narrow in scope.
“Experts on integrity commissions, consistently across Australia, have been calling for a model that allows for public hearings when it’s in the public interest and that extends the jurisdiction of the integrity commission beyond narrow forms of illegal corruption to misconduct that can undermine the administration of public funds and public institutions.”
