The ossification of Australian politics

Excessive parliamentary entitlements and unregulated private funding give enormous advantages to the major parties, argues Joo-Cheong Tham AUSTRALIA’s federal parliamentarians receive generous funding from the public purse. Entitlements range from parliamentary salaries down to a variety of allowances like the printing allowance. A recent Age article (30 October 2004) highlighted the escalating generosity of the deal, reporting that federal parliamentary entitlements have increased from $354 million for the 1999-2000 financial year to nearly $400 million. Both the size and the nature of this public funding raise serious questions for Australia’s democracy. Public funding of parliamentarians is not, in itself, the problem. Indeed, such support is crucial in any robust democracy - clearly, parliamentarians require funding to represent their constituencies and govern the country. Moreover, public funding has significant appeal. Unlike political donations, it is not tainted by the risk of corruption and undue influence. Properly designed, such funding can also ‘level the playing field’ by ensuring that the electoral contest is open to all. For example, electoral funding, which is calculated according to the number of votes secured by a party, provides a modicum of support to parties that do not enjoy business patronage. Similarly, parliamentary salaries ensure that political office is not a privilege of the wealthy. But problems arise in how this public funding is distributed. The current arrangements for funding MPs through parliamentary entitlements suffer from grievous weaknesses. First, parliamentary entitlements are largely ineffectual in preventing the corrosive effects of political donations. This is simply because they are not tied to any conditions about private funding. Specifically, parliamentarians and their parties remain free to receive substantial corporate contributions. Not only can political donations bring corruption and influence in their wake, but they also distort the electoral contest because of the unequal flow of private money. For example, for each first-preference vote received in the 2001 federal election, the Coalition and the Labor Party garnered more than double the private money than the Greens and the Democrats received. Parliamentary entitlements further entrench the political advantage enjoyed by the major parties because they are distributed inequitably. Australia’s electoral system ensures that the major parties secure parliamentary representation greater than their overall electoral support, because the House of Representatives is not elected under a system of proportional representation. This effect is compounded by the constitutional imperative that the number of House of Representatives members be twice the number of senators. Given that parliamentary entitlements are provided on a per-parliamentarian basis, the major parties therefore reap a disproportionate benefit. So the current system of parliamentary entitlements suffers from two vices: it makes no serious attempt to neutralise the risks of political donations, and it exacerbates political inequality. Its effect on political equality should be of particular concern because of the amount of money involved - $400 million spent on parliamentary entitlements in a single year. Significantly, many of these entitlements, like the printing and electorate allowances, can easily be used for campaign purposes. The vices of public funding stem from the fact that its recipients, the major political parties, control its size and its distribution. There is an obvious risk that public funding is provided in a manner that serves the interests of the major political parties while undermining the health of Australia’s democracy. Indeed it should be clear by now that this risk has been realised with parliamentary entitlements. The result is an ossification of Australian politics: the major parties, through a mixture of excessive parliamentary entitlements and unregulated private funding, enjoy tremendous incumbency advantages while minor and new parties struggle with inferior resources. Joo-Cheong Tham is an Associate Law Lecturer at La Trobe University. Photo: Andrew Jeffre