Political transparency: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:24, 2 April 2022

91% of the time the better-financed candidate wins.

Dark money in our political system

Politicians get into power by campaigning. The better funded a campaign the more likely a candidate is to get into office^[1]. Corporations exist to make money therefore donations always come at a price.

Taking Australia as an example, public funding for campaigning has been widely debated^[2]. There is a common understanding that transparency is good, similar to how CCTV reduces crime the fear of being watched is a great deterrent to wrong doing. As such the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) publishes some open data about political donations^[3] and Google openly publishes its ad revenue from politicians^[4]. This data is widely available but is difficult for the public to digest (see below) and is flawed in it inception as not all donations are disclosed. Only donations under $13,800 are declared. This leads to large donors circumventing the intention of the law by splitting large donations into smaller chunks. For example Zali Steggal received $100,000 from the coal millionaire John Kinghorn which when questioned said that it was one cheque which was a split donation from 8 of his family members^[5].

Proposed MP uniform, showing donors.

Ideally for the public fully understand who is telling us what to do it should be mandated that all politicians wear badges much like sportsmen wear the brand of the company that is sponsoring them (see image to the right). Alternatively, we could adopt a very simple, proven change which would reduce the influence corporations have on our democracy, ban direct corporate sponsorship and implement a voucher system so that everyday voters can contribute to parties whilst getting rid of corporate influence.

A democracy voucher is a method of public financing of political campaigns used in municipal elections in Seattle, Washington, United States. It was approved in 2015 and debuted during the 2017 election cycle. The program provides city residents with four vouchers, each worth $25, that can be pledged to eligible candidates running for municipal offices. It is funded by a property tax and is applied on a first-come, first-served basis.

The data shows many leads, however a lot are dead ends. It seems donors can sometimes hide their identities behind associated entities^[6].

Graph 1: Donations made to each politician.

Out of 151 MPs and 76 senators, 40 have disclosed donations to their campaign. This graph break down the donations given to individual MPs by their source. Additionally, you can type in a name of an Australian political candidate and it will show who their main financial contributors are. By looking generally at the data an anomaly instantly pops out, Steggal. Although 1378 donations were made to the Steggal campaign, only 13 donations had names attached, only $350,726 of the $1.1 million in donations the Steggell campaign pulled in is accounted for under current electoral laws - about a third^[7].