Human Rights Law Centre-led group warns against ‘disproportionate influence by those with the fattest wallets’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Clive Palmer’s $60m in spending at the 2019 election shows Australia needs caps on political expenditure – not just donations – a group of civil society organisations has warned.

The group, led by the Human Rights Law Centre, Australian Conservation Foundation and the Uniting Church in Victoria and Tasmania, called for the electoral reform in a submission to the joint standing committee on electoral matters inquiry into the 2019 election.

The call for caps on both donations and spending was echoed in separate submissions by Melbourne University’s professor Joo Cheong-Tham and GetUp.

In the wake of the surprise Coalition victory at the May election, Palmer said he had “decided to polarise the electorate” with an anti-Labor advertising blitz in the final weeks of the campaign, rather than attempting to win seats for the United Australia party. In the final week alone, Palmer spent $8m in electoral advertisements.

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The submission noted the party was reported to have spent $60m on a “contentious” campaign that failed to win a single seat but Palmer “claims to have secured the Coalition government’s win with his preferences”.

“That is double the expenditure projected for both the Australian Labor party and the Liberal party combined, and 167 times that of the Greens,” it said.

“Our constitution enshrines Australians’ equal opportunity to participate in our representative democracy, and yet currently billionaires can use vast sums of cash to buy a national platform that is well out of reach to the rest of us.”

The submission warned that without spending caps “we remain vulnerable to disproportionate political influence by those with the fattest wallets”.

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“The status quo ensures that political inequality is the reality of our democratic system. If we’re to achieve a fairer Australia, we need spending caps in elections.”

The civil society group argued the federal government is an outlier, with spending caps in force in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, and under consideration in Queensland.

In January 2019 the high court struck down a NSW law setting stricter spending caps for third-party groups, such as unions, than for political parties. The submission suggested that spending caps are “not only constitutional but benefit Australian democracy”, explaining that the result shows only that caps “should be set at the same level for political parties and third parties”.

It also called for caps on donations, greater transparency around lobbying, closing the “revolving door” between parliament and businesses that lobby politicians, and a federal integrity commission.

GetUp submitted that the 2019 election “saw Big Money play a more significant role than ever before as Australia shifted to US-style campaigning, in which billionaires like Clive Palmer were able to drown out opponents through unprecedented campaign spending”.

“The 2019 election was the direct result of the failure to take action against big money.”

GetUp also raised the alarm on “disinformation”, warning that “political actors must be held accountable for disseminating misleading material”. It called for further consultation to develop a policy response that still upholds the principle of free speech.

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In a separate parliamentary inquiry in January 2018 the Minerals Council opposed spending caps, arguing they were “arbitrary” and could be regarded as a constraint on freedom of speech.

The Labor MP Kate Thwaites, a member of the committee, said Australia’s democracy faces a dilemma of how to rebuild trust in politics when voters don’t trust politicians.

“There’s a role for everybody in rebuilding trust in government, including civil society,” she said.

Political campaigning that suggests politicians are “all terrible” is “part of the problem” of declining trust. “If people have no trust in government then why ask for change if voters have no expectation it could be delivered?”

Labor’s organisational wing has asked the committee to investigate whether the digital behemoths are having a negative impact on Australian democracy after Facebook refused to take down fake news about the “death tax” circulating during the election.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions – which spent up to $25m on the campaign, including $6.5m in ads – did not make a submission to the committee, despite its leader, Sally McManus, blaming Palmer’s ad spending and the death tax misinformation for derailing its campaign.