Voters must know who is paying for this election campaign
POLITICIANS
usually pretend they govern in the interests of the community as a whole, irrespective of which interest group is bankrolling their party machine. But last week Premier Will Hodgman appeared to reveal a different truth, namely that money talks and when corporate or other interests hand over cash to a political party they are entitled to expect that it will act in their interests.
It was an extraordinary revelation and a reflection of how debased is the state of democracy in Tasmania, although let’s not pretend our state is an isolated case.
On Thursday Mr Hodgman called out Labor Leader Bec White for being hypocritical in attending a fundraising function last year hosted by ALH, a hotels company, while she is pursuing a policy of phasing out poker machines over five years.
According to Mr Hodgman, “Rebecca White goes interstate, takes money under the table from gambling giants then comes back here and pays out on anyone who’s involved in the game”. “That shows that you can’t trust Labor, you don’t know what they stand for, you don’t know what you’ll get, ” he added.
Treasurer Mr Gutwein, fresh from announcing he was pursuing his campaign to get his hands on TasWater despite being overwhelmingly rebuffed last year because his case for government ownership is intellectually bankrupt, chimed in. Ms White is like “a vegetarian owning a butcher shop”. “On the one hand they rail against that particular industry, on the other hand they’re prepared to profit from it,” he said.
The logic of Mr Hodgman and Mr Gutwein’s position appears to be that if you take money from interest groups you should, as a politician, act according to the interests of that group. If they are not agitating such a bleak argument then please tell us that last week they got a little excited in their rush to kill a political opponent and that they didn’t mean what they said.
If it is as it was reported, it is an appalling attitude but perhaps we can be thankful Mr Hodgman and Mr Gutwein are being honest in revealing what many voters suspect. That is, in modern Australian democracy, political parties are open to influence from groups that pay into party and candidate coffers in cash or in kind.
Assuming Mr Hodgman and Mr Gutwein truly believe it is hypocritical for the Liberal Party to receive donations from interest groups and then propose policy that is antithetical to the interests of that donor, they should reveal the full list of donors to the Liberal Party in this election campaign.
Instead though, while he was busy condemning Ms White and appearing to confirm an awful truth about democracy in Tasmania, Mr Hodgman was pretending he had no idea if Federal Hotels is donating or providing in-kind support to the Liberal Party in the election.
Public funding is a small price for a transparent democracy, says Greg Barns
One should take Mr Hodgman’s ‘I know nothing’ response with a grain of salt. It is beyond belief that Federal Hotels, which is so heavily reliant on rapacious poker machines to ensure its bottom line stays in the black, would not be actively supporting the Liberals in this election.
After all, what is at stake is the disgraceful monopoly this company has enjoyed over 25 years. Its very business model is at risk. To ask the community to believe that the leader of the one political party which supports retention of poker machines does not know if Federal Hotels is donating or supporting his party in kind during this election is insulting.
If Federal Hotels has chipped in with funds to ensure the Liberals win the election, then do the right thing and tell us. Let’s have some honesty. As former Australian journalist Bruce Montgomery noted on Facebook last week, Who’s funding the Liberals in Tasmania? Vote 1 Federal Hotels — cut out the middle men; maintain the misery.”
What the Premier and Mr Gutwein’s attack on Ms White last week points to is an urgent need to either have public funding of elections or introduce real time disclosure of donations to political parties.
Those who are voting in this election are entitled, in fact it is a right, to know who influences political parties. Just as financial writers are now rightly forced to disclose if they own stocks in the companies they write about, and researchers have to declare any conflicts of interest when they write papers, so should political parties have to tell us where they are getting their funds.
The best way of course to stop the sort of corruption that private funding of political parties causes is to move to public funding of elections. A price to pay for a transparent democracy is that a minute portion of our taxes goes to supporting elections. Lawyer Greg Barns was an adviser to NSW Liberal premier Nick Greiner and the Howard government. Disendorsed as the Liberal candidate for Denison in 2002, he joined the Democrats. In 2013, he was WikiLeaks Party adviser.