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From Wikipedia: “Despite the Australian Electoral Commission publishing a yearly list of political donors, it is often difficult to ascertain who made the donation, as political parties sometimes use associated entities as front organisations to hide the source of the donations.”
Read about Associated Entities in Wikipedia by clicking here.
Imagine my surprise when I read this. In my naivety, as a typically innocent and gullible member of the public, I had always assumed that party donations were on full display via a public register. At first glance there are indeed registers of donations being paid directly to party state and national bodies. Yet these registers are supplemented by the donation registers of each party’s collection of Associated Entities. There’s an astonishing number of them! So to see all of the donations made to any party you actually have to look across all of the donation registers of all of their Associated Entities individually, and it ain’t at all obvious from their names which party they would belong to!
The AEC website does in fact provide a mechanism to search for all of the donors for any party; it is called a “Party Group Analysis”, and is located near to the bottom of the menu of searches that the AEC makes available. What is most striking about the searches that come back is the sheer number of pages; for the 2011-12 Returns, it is 13 pages for the Liberals and a thundering 45 pages for the ALP! Yet oddly, when leaving the default setting of 20 results per page, only the first 5 pages of search results are given a direct link. You can also click on the link labeled >>, and jump straight to the last page which then offers direct links back to the previous 4 pages.
So the very design of the AEC website makes it very hard to navigate to a “black hole” that lies within the search results of both major parties. Unless the default number of search results per page setting is increased, the only way to reach these middle pages would be to painstakingly navigate from page to page. Even then, you have to also click on each Associated Entity link to see the actual trails of donations. For the Liberals’ 2011-12 Returns the default search yields a “black hole” that covers pages 6 through 8, whilst the ALP’s “black hole” extends from page 6 through 40. Try navigating to John Curtin House Ltd for example via the ALP Party Group Analysis and you will realise just how difficult it is to get to an Associated Entity located in the middle of the alphabet.
If the intention is really an attempt to hide donations from scrutiny, then isn’t it a wonderful irony that these Associated Entities will be the first place for an informed public to look when scrutinising party funding!
I invite interested readers to examine these registers, and perhaps post comments about what they find. Use the following link http://periodicdisclosures.aec.gov.au/, and then select Party Group under the Analysis title near the bottom of the menu. Don’t forget you will need to click on the Associated Entity’s link to see the actual trail of donations received from that source. A hint might be to start from the middle pages of search results and work outwards!
I have already identified quite a number of donors with vested interests in an assortment of current affairs, just by viewing the donations sourced via the Cormack Foundation and John Curtin House Ltd. These are the two Associated Entities referenced by the Wikipedia article as being Front Organisations of the 2 major parties. Yet there remain many mysteries out there, and the public have a moral right to know why all of these donations were made. My most puzzling enigma is more than $2,000,000 donated via John Curtin House Ltd by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This is the department belonging to the former NSW ALP Senator Bob Carr, now federal ALP Minister for Foreign Affairs. So at face value the ALP is donating money to itself, but perhaps this means the money is really coming in from overseas? For all we know, this could be anything from an anti-Assange slush fund to a gift from Putin to keep our federal government in vintage wine, and where is the public accountability?
Remember that when investigating corruption, it is the money trail that counts. If there is anything to hide it is likely that the organisation involved will have made it hard to examine the money trail. Think about political parties sourcing huge amounts of income from their Associated Entities per this article, but also think about other organisations with involvement in current affairs that might reasonably be expected to publish detailed Annual Reports via their websites but choose not to.
The party funding model in Australia is broken and cannot possibly command any respect from the public. We must insist on a new funding model that makes it illegal for vested interests to donate. Maybe then we might see that the parties will represent the public interest, instead of representing villains such as the gambling industry.
This problem appears to be institutionalised nationally, so I suddenly see a role for the Monarchy which I had never previously recognised. We will have to go beyond our borders, and actually petition the Royal Family in the UK in order to get these matters properly investigated. We will need a Royal Commission whose terms of reference are set from the UK, and which is also staffed with UK judicial inquisitors.
This is a wake up call. The corruption blighting our country must be tackled. Please ask your MP if he/she is willing to request a Commission of Inquiry into corruption in Australia, and please assert that it must be convened from outside of our borders.
Kev Rothery is an IT Specialist who emigrated to Tasmania 8 years ago. Kev takes a keen interest in local affairs, and is a former employee of The Wilderness Society Inc. He believes in the importance of public participation, and the right of the public to be properly informed.
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Comments (5)
Looks like John Curtin House has been donating million$ to the ALP for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Curtin_House
I’m guessing the money comes from the mining industry or even the tobacco industry. If you consider the Obeid-McDonald inquiry in NSW then coal and coal seam gas could be other secret donors.
Rather than this system of legalised bribery of MPs and parties, why can’t we pay our bribes directly for the legislation we want passed?
BHP, Gina, etc, would still carry the day, but at least we would have some explanation for the outcomes.
John Hayward
Ban all forms of donations to any running for public office and also ban electoral advertising, other than once to explain their policies.
Corruption, deceit and lies as what our political and governance is all about, nothing else.
#3 A.K You’re exactly right. If you’ve been wondering why there’s not a lot of difference between ALP and Liberal policies these days it’s because they’re both being bank-rolled by the same corporate interests.
The reason that parliamentary debate has become so toxic is probably because the 2 parties are now competing for their respective commercial interests rather than party ideology. The notion of parliamentarians acting as public servants has fallen by the wayside, except for a few notable exceptions.
I believe there are still factions within both major parties (think Rudd and Turnbull) that offer some remote hope of stopping this rot. Turnbull is actually on record on this matter. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_donations_in_Australia
Have no doubt that Rudd was knifed because of the rising power of ALP’s far right, manifested in the likes of Simon Crean. The looming threat of election defeat though would stop the money pouring into their operation, so they may conclude it a political necessitate to reinstate Rudd.
The question then is can the Australian public make party funding an election issue?
Having reflected on this some more over the weekend, a Royal Commission convened from the UK would not be an appropriate means to deal with corruption in Australia after all. Apparently there is no legal instrument for it anyway, but even if there were, it could drag on for years and only provide a temporary fix.
So the true answer lies in changing our governance, by making political parties and independents publicly funded. Political donations of any kind need to be illegal. This year’s election provides an opportunity for our corrupted democracy to repair itself, if it can just get onto the national radar and into at least one party manifesto. Such an outcome would be an example for other countries to follow.
Viewing some recent news events, it seems likely we’ll be in for some astonishing revelations about corruption in the near future.
In the final analysis, maybe the whole Pulp Mill debacle will have served a purpose in helping to expose it? Is it too much to hope that at least some of Gunns’ $3 billion debts will be found and recovered from the corrupt money trail?