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Proposed campaign finance changes are disingenuous and disrespectful

Don Farrell speech

Source: McKell Institute

If reports are accurate, proposals about to be made by the government to reform campaign finance are both disingenuous and disrespectful.

We don’t know yet the actual provisions, but judging by Senator Don Farrell’s recent speech at the McKell Institute we can be pretty confident that protecting the ALP/Coalition duopoly is the main purpose of the legislation.

The Senator’s reasoning is disingenuous because he deliberately conflates billionaires like Clive Palmer with donation aggregators like Climate 200.

They are entirely different animals. Clive Palmer is one businessman directing one donation; Climate 200 co-ordinates the donations of 11,200 citizens across Australia.

It’s also disingenuous to claim that either the ALP or the LNP are genuinely representative of the communities from which their members of parliament are drawn, and that any other model is therefore flawed.

It’s difficult to get current figures, but take the Liberal Party of NSW for example. Depending on which source you use, the average number of Liberal Party members per federal electorate in NSW was between 364 and 428 in 2021. Electorates at that time were about 100,000 voters and there were 41 in NSW. That’s about 0.43 per cent representation.

Farrell also cites the centrality of the two-party system to the Westminster system. He is either misinformed or being deliberately misleading.

The two-party system is not integral to the Westminster system. There are several definitions of that system but an uncontroversial one is:

  • The Westminster system comprises: A head of state – the sovereign or their representative; an elected parliament, made up of one or two houses; a government formed by the political party or coalition that has majority support in the lower house of parliament

There’s nothing about the necessity for two parties. Surely, if the duopoly were so critical to Australian democracy, it would be embedded in the Constitution? But our founding document is not only silent about two parties, it’s silent about parties altogether. Representation is in the Constitution; parties aren’t.

It should worry us all when the Special Minister of State, responsible for the Electoral Act and the Australian Electoral Commission, does not understand the fundamentals of the democratic system that he is charged to protect. This is one reason why I support the joint standing committee on electoral matters’ recommendation to improve civic education.

Perhaps more dangerously, the Senator is also being disrespectful of the nearly one-third of Australian voters who no longer vote for the major parties, a proportion of the electorate that has grown at each federal election. Are those citizens voting unwisely? Do they misunderstand the vital importance of the power of the two-party system? Or have they come to the realisation that cosy duopolies are not a good thing in politics, any more than they are in markets.

I wholeheartedly support campaign finance reform. The power of entrenched interests over the major parties goes a long way to explaining why we have failed to deal with climate change, why we have an intractable housing crisis, why we have failed to deal with social media, and why we seem incapable of designing and implementing policies that look to the long term.

But the government’s proposal does not address these challenges. It insists on applying 19th-century solutions to a 21st-century democracy. It smacks very much of generals fighting the last war instead of getting ready for the next.

The parties will, of course, tell you it’s a problem that so many Australians vote for independents or smaller parties. But it’s not. It’s a strength of our democracy that we need to recognise by making it easier for even more people to take part in politics.

In 2022, a record number of new MPs was elected, many from the community independent movement who wanted to reform campaign financing. But even so the vast majority of MPs – in fact 77 per cent – were incumbents, most backed by Labor or the Coalition parties.

The reason so many incumbents were re-elected is because they had a massive financial advantage from the millions of dollars that parties raise that we simply do not know the source of. This is an enormous barrier to ordinary people like me entering politics and limits the competition we need for a healthy democracy. It ultimately reduces diversity and innovation in politics.

In response to the 2022 result and pressure from independent MPs, Labor promised substantial changes. But what they’re now proposing will actually make things worse.

Every Australian – rich or poor – is entitled to one vote. And every Australian exercising that right should also be allowed to exercise it how they see fit, for a party, for an individual, for a coalition or whatever.

If, as seems to be the case, an increasing number of Australians do not want to be represented by either side of politics, then they must be allowed to choose an alternative. It’s clear the major parties are seeking to prevent that.

Duopolies don’t like competition.

Nicolette Boele is a climate finance executive and community independent candidate in Bradfield, on Sydney’s north shore. In 2022, she won the largest swing against a sitting Liberal MP. Find out more here

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