Over the past little while, various figures in the Coalition have had a lot to say about how Australia’s political system works.



People have expressed views about the money that washes into the major party system through donations and fundraising – mainly the view that Sam Dastyari’s decision to ask a businessman for financial help was somehow aberrant behaviour, conveniently ignoring the fact that political parties asking wealthy patrons to kick in to fund the latest crusade is a core part of contemporary political business.

We’ve had the special minister of state, Scott Ryan, opening an important conversation about third-party activism and its role in the Australian political scene, and also signalling he could cop more continuous disclosure of political donations – while dead-batting pretty much everything else.

Moving from money to campaign custom and practice, on Thursday we had the Liberal party’s federal director, renowned hard man of centre-right politics Tony Nutt, fighting back tears at the National Press Club about what he termed “cold-blooded lies” from Labor in the recent campaign.

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It was a memorable performance from Nutt and, unfortunately for him, it didn’t go quite as well as he intended. Dissembling is ubiquitous in politics, as Nutt was quickly reminded as he was presented with a back catalogue from past Liberal campaigns: the $100 lamb roast courtesy of Labor’s carbon price; the wipe-out of Whyalla; the budget emergency (now never spoken of); the demeaning, innuendo-laced smackdown of the Labor candidate Anne Aly by Western Australian Liberals in 2016. We would have invoked children overboard too, but unfortunately time ran out.

Perhaps these were warm-blooded lies?

In any case Tony – checkmate.

But here’s the thing.

As political journalists, we can hurl off a cheap comment piece – gotcha Tony, you goose – and leave it there; one small missile fired into the outrage cycle, on to the next outrage. Or we can play a role in trying to make the system work for people. We take the sum of these recent parts, and attempt to drive an important conversation forward, motivated by a simple ambition: that politics work to serve the public interest. We have that indirect power.

People inside the system have direct power. They can actually create change. So rather than standing up at the National Press Club complaining about a breach of a gentleman’s agreement during campaigns, or stamping your foot because your opponents had, without keeping you in the loop, developed a slicker way to target and disseminate their exaggerations, you could stop complaining and blame-shifting and butt-covering, and actually do something.

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Novel I know, but let’s give it a go.

So what are the prospects of doing something rather than indulging in peevishness?

The joint standing committee on electoral matters (JSCEM) has been given a recent reference wide-ranging enough to provide scope for concrete proposals to emerge that would overhaul the donations and disclosure system.

Sticking with Nutt’s specific complaint for a moment, the recent reference to JSCEM also includes a direction that the committee assess the potential application of truth-in-advertising provisions covering communication with voters – including third-party carriage services.

Now why is this there? Partly because the brains trust of Liberal campaign 2016 is still seething about being comprehensively done over on Medicare – cranky enough to briefly contemplate a resort to regulation; and partly because Nick Xenophon – who controls a critical voting bloc in the new Senate – wants it there. Xenophon was thumped by negative advertising about penalty rates in South Australia in the closing stages of the recent election – a campaign which he says was misleading and ultimately depressed the NXT’s vote.

Regulating truth in politics is a tough business, because it’s an art form that turns fundamentally on a clash of contestable propositions. I’d go as far as saying a truth provision is potentially fraught. But I’m not slippery enough or supple enough or postmodern enough to think that truth doesn’t exist.

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If Nutt is even half-serious about “cold-blooded lies” then the test won’t be acrimony at the press club, it will be how seriously the Coalition ponies up to the truth-in-political-advertising conversation we are about to have through JSCEM. Ryan hasn’t yet taken a public position on this issue.



An issue Ryan has taken a position on is the rise of third-party activist groups. The strength of the progressive field operation in the recent federal election campaign has really rocked the Coalition, which once traded on its dominance in marginal seats campaigning. Default mythology has it that the Liberals are supposed to be masters of marginals – not Labor, and certainly not actors outside the political process such as the union movement, single-issue campaign groups or GetUp!.

The special minister of state says, albeit tentatively, he’ll have a broad-ranging conversation about donations and disclosure – provided it covers all groups active in political campaigning, not just established political parties.

His argument is motivated by concern that constraining political parties while leaving activist groups unconstrained can lead to perverse outcomes – you can empower groups that are not elected, and not accountable to anyone, at the expense of the people’s representatives in a democracy, who are elected and are accountable to the citizenry.

Ryan’s rationale at the level of principle is sound. In a representative democracy, it is better that we strengthen political parties relative to other players in the system, because parliamentarians perform two functions in a democracy. They represent the interests of voters in a direct way, they are our representatives, and we can vote them out if they don’t deliver. Formalising people power through representative democracy also works to constrain the influence of other powerful institutions in the system, because politicians are supposed to make decisions with an eye to the broader public interest. This is the theory, in any case.

Nutt was correct this week in pointing to the American system as an example of what we don’t want Australia to become – a universe where super political action committees are permitted to raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals – and then spend without constraint in an effort to advocate for or against various candidates.

At the philosophical level you could shrug and say that’s free speech, that’s the beauty of living in a democracy, but only if you are comfortable with the practical consequences of some voices being far more equal and influential than others. The peculiarities of the US system create politics written and authorised for the wealthy, or the institutionally powerful, by the wealthy or institutionally powerful – which is partly why we’ve had the dramatic rupture we’ve seen in this presidential season.

Tracking back to Australia, and our own conversation, really important questions remain unanswered.

As GetUp! countered entirely reasonably this week in response to Ryan’s signal, what is an activist group for the purpose of this discussion? Just progressive activists? Are some activists more heinous than others? What about the Business Council of Australia or the Minerals Council, if those organisations campaign or advertise in an effort to influence policy outcomes? How about Cory Bernardi’s new grassroots movement, Australian Conservatives – in, or out?

Is any regulation being proposed, and if there is, what form would it take, and will it apply to everyone?

And what about all the activism we don’t actually see – the soft power sorties by countries such as China or the United States or Israel, the ones that don’t involve handing out leaflets in marginal seats? How about the hidden activity that goes on between politicians, lobbyists, donors, special interest groups – the activity that isn’t recorded anywhere, isn’t open to any meaningful scrutiny, unless an integrity body with broad-ranging powers flushes it out into the open – and Ryan says we don’t need one of those at the federal level because we’ve got the Australian Electoral Commission and the parliamentary press gallery.

As a longtime member of the gallery, I can say without any shadow of a doubt I lack the investigative powers of an independent commission against corruption and, quite apart from my lack of investigatory power, often I lack the time to dig as much as I want to.

So where have we landed? I know for the first time in a long time we have a process in train that could deliver a better outcome for voters. What I don’t yet know is this: is the government, and other players in the political process, up for a serious conversation about institutional influence, one that takes account of all the manifestations of influence?

Or are we about to embark on a cherry-picking exercise that is structured to either sink any prospect of meaningful reform, or a cynical effort to advantage one actor in the system at the expense of an opponent?

I suggest you watch. We are about to find out.