Rigged — subtitled “How Networks of Powerful Mates Rip Off Everyday Australians” — started life in 2017 as an “amateur booklet” called Game of Mates. Like its predecessor, Rigged catalogues how the Australian political and financial system operates, how the trade of political favours, information and access skews the system against the average person, what it costs us, and what might be done to improve matters.
I asked Dr Cameron Murray, who co-wrote the book with Professor Paul Frijters of the London School of Economics, if part of the impetus to revisit and expand their work had anything to do with the Morrison government, an outfit characterised by a “mates first” approach and whose shambolic time in office hadn’t begun in 2017.
He gave a stark reply: “It literally doesn’t matter who is in government — your favoured political party really comes down to a preference in communication style. It’s like the old Seinfeld joke about sports teams: the players come and go, it’s the shirt you’re cheering. It’s about protecting a network of interests.”
There is nothing partisan in the least about this process, Murray says.
“This is the normal way these things operate,” he tells Crikey. “Queensland has a fairly rusted-on Labor government, and I think of them as a property developer mafia. Different sides have better mates in different areas. So Labor has better mates in the superannuation industry, while the Liberals are more friendly with, say, banking or mining.”
The book creates two hypothetical characters: James, who indulges in the game of mates, jumping from government roles to interest groups, parlaying connections and knowledge into influence over legislation and profit; and Sam, the average Australian, not plugged into these worlds and therefore subject to different rules.
As economists, part of the job Murray and Frijters set themselves was to map out, in hard numbers, what this merry-go-round actually costs us as a nation. The figures swiftly jump into the billions in lost government revenue alone.
“It’s a mistake, a hidden assumption, that governments like having and spending more money. What governments like is looking after their networks. What’s driving these decisions isn’t budget balance, and honestly if any politician says a decision is because of the budget, they’re lying. It’s an excuse for a political agenda.”
The pandemic has made that abundantly clear, Murray argues.
“The Liberals during COVID spent hundreds of millions in overpaid stimulus to businesses that saw no change in their turnover, and then conclude ‘Oh, well they can just keep it.’ So it’s not about the money, it’s about keeping the right people happy.”
Transparency is “another great big pretend idea”, Murray adds, rattling off a series of barriers to greater public understanding of what’s done with their money: ASIC searches at $25 a pop; a NSW database on compulsory acquisitions that gives you nothing except a count of how many there have been; the lack of publicly available documents on public/private deals.
Transparency issues extend, as Crikey readers would well know, to the ability of the wealthy to use the law to keep questions about how they make their money to a minimum. Maha Sinnathamby, founder of Greater Springfield, gets a mention in Rigged — the book notes, with what might be called a revealing vagueness, that the authors have some first-hand experience with Sinnathamby’s use of the legal system.
The book is not all doom and gloom — it offers solutions, ranging from more public competitors for corporate behemoths to better decisions around the pricing of state resources (be it mining, land et al). Most intriguingly, Murray and Frijters advocate for a more randomised approach to appointing decision-makers — more citizens randomly appointed to assess decisions affecting the public interest, less direct political control. This could go as far as political representation, Murray argues.
“Queensland ditched its upper house in 1920s,” he said. “I’ve been really advocating for the idea that we should return it as a citizens’ parliament.”
And ultimately Rigged, for all its shocking statistics and dispiriting revelations, is about solutions.
“The positivity message is, while you have to acknowledge that the insiders who benefit from this don’t want change, there are opportune times for change that come around,” he says.
“There’s a point of crisis in industries when they are run this way, and when those points of crisis come it’s important to be talking about useful solutions.”
