Media outlets missing in action on damning political donations data

It has now been more than 48 hours since the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) revealed its annual dump of political donations data for the 2021-22 financial year. If you’re disappointed with the lack of detailed media coverage, it is worth having a deep dive for yourself on the AEC’s “Transparency Register”.

While Crikey led Wednesday’s edition with two stories after having about two hours to dig into the detail released at 9am, other media were decidedly less interested.

Media MIA

Seven’s main 6pm bulletin in Melbourne on Wednesday managed just a 17-second read by Peter Mitchell, which mentioned the big spending of UAP founder Clive Palmer and billionaire Anthony Pratt. Meanwhile, its rival at Nine was only good for about 15 seconds and covered nothing more than Palmer’s record $123.5 million expense.

Still, this was better than the ABC’s 7pm bulletin and 7.30 — across an hour of primetime news and current affairs (on the one day of the year when there is real news to cover on campaign financing in Australia), they managed to ignore the story completely.

It was a similar situation with ABC Radio’s The World Today edition, although at least its sister program PM produced two stories in the evening.

The Herald Sun jumped on the obscure angle that Shane Brennan, the TV writer behind hits such as A Country Practice and Blue Heelers, had kicked in $325,000 to the Climate 200 campaign kitty, but at least it also stepped up with a brief editorial calling for more transparency in the disclosure system. If even the News Corp tabloids think it is bad, there must be a real problem.

Unions

The Australian was more interested in union-bashing in its page-one story, but in the process managed the rare feat of putting together an interesting individual donation story, revealing that the CFMMEU pumped $100,000 into the campaign of former Australia Institute and Greens staffer Leanne Minshull in Tasmania in a failed attempt to prevent Jacqui Lambie from winning a second Tasmanian Senate seat.

Besides The Australian, barely anyone touched on the most obvious conflict of interest: that registered unions spent $37 million on political activities in 2021-22, including more than $16 million in direct payments to the Labor Party, which have a gerrymandered party structure that gives affiliated unions a guaranteed 50% of the votes at ALP conferences.

Without revealing its intentions before the election, the Albanese government then delivered for its prime funders by legislating a range of union-friendly reforms before Christmas, most notably reintroducing multi-employer bargaining arrangements.

Familiar faces

As for the activities of public companies, it really was a case of the same old faces kicking in.

While the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto, Aristocrat Leisure, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, Cochlear, CSL, QBE Insurance and many other top 50 companies have a strict policy of not directly funding any political parties of candidates, this was in stark contrast to these four examples:

Woodside Energy: Long entangled with Canberra, as demonstrated by the Howard-era illegal bugging of the East Timor cabinet room. After giving $335,415 in 2019-20, it showed relative restraint in 2020-21, handing over $232,350 and then reducing this again to 19 transactions totalling $109,000 last financial year.

Macquarie Group: The millionaire factory executives seemingly go to the opening of every political envelope if this long list of 25 different donations is any guide. All up, it came to $223,000 in 2021-22, slightly down on the previous two years.

Wesfarmers: These nice, clean-cut Perth boys may have got out of coal and ditched their pokies pubs, but they’re yet to give up on political rent-seeking. They gave $228,250 in 2019-20, $221,100 in 2020-21 and then went slightly higher with $233,000 last year, including the maximum “subscription” payment of $110,000 to each of the major parties, buying themselves premium-level access to the main players.

Tabcorp: May as well just shower Spring Racing Carnival tickets on Parliament House as they are so prolific with their MP invitations to gambling events. Free tickets aren’t counted in political donations, but they managed 26 transactions totalling $216,000 last year, up on the $190,445 in 2019-20 and $186,940 in 2020-21.

Disclosures

There will be a serious forthcoming debate in Australia about whether public companies should make federal political donations, including cash for access deals, given states such as Victoria and South Australia have moved to impose severe restrictions and we’ve now got a federal ICAC coming. In the UK, political donations crashed when the law was changed to require prior shareholder approval.

Elsewhere, the federal ALP is to be commended for voluntarily disclosing all contributions above $1000, in line with their yet-to-be-legislated reform policy, therefore producing this whopping 82-page return, which covered 94% of its funding, including with names attached to $54.3 million of the $58.7 million it received. It really is worth a read — hundreds of lobbyists, companies, industry associations and the likes shelled out cash in what was clearly a comprehensive program selling access to the potential incoming ministers.

Only Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party had a more comprehensive disclosure program than the federal ALP, revealing 100% of its funding sources — 17 payments from Palmer’s company Mineralogy.

The interesting point that no one reported about Pamer’s return, however, was that it revealed he still owed Google $9.3 million and News Corp $751,902 as of June 30 last year, some six weeks after the May 21 election. Let’s hope all the billionaires sorted out their outstanding invoices.

Dark money

Overall, there was good coverage of the estimated $105 million of so-called dark money, which funded our registered political parties and independent candidates in 2021-22 — and not all of that would have been donations.

However, some parties and divisions were less transparent than others. Jacqui Lambie did not disclose a single source of her $446,000 in revenue last year, and the Queensland LNP was also pretty threadbare, revealing sources for only $3.97 million of its $14.4 million in funding. This included pokies billionaire Bruce Mathieson, who has retired to the Gold Coast and gave the Queensland LNP $50,000.

As the registered officer of One Nation, Pauline Hanson personally signed her party’s declaration, which was also pretty uninformative given that only $501,558 of the $3.2 million of income was itemised.

Interestingly, while most corporate and industry associations steer well clear of One Nation given Hanson’s long racist history, the Australian Hotels Association was only too happy to kick in $20,000. Sadly, there seems to be no place too low for Australia’s pokies industry.

Quiet on the front

There are dozens of other interesting stories in the data, but informed media coverage is not helped by the conspiracy of silence that generally prevails. Not a single party official seems to have offered any on-the-record comment about the figures this week, and few MPs put their heads above the parapet, especially from the major parties.

One interesting tale involves the airline Regional Express, which is currently muscling up against Qantas and Virgin on their main Melbourne-Sydney route after receiving $29 million in JobKeeper payments, as well as an additional $54 million from the federal government during the pandemic shutdowns to support their regional network.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce publicly criticised this largesse, which was reportedly negotiated by the company’s deputy chairman John Sharp, a Howard-era transport minister who spent many years as a National Party MP.

Lo and behold, Regional Express donated $150,000 to the National Party in 2021-22. Surely there ought to be a rule banning recipients of direct government grants from looping some of the taxpayer cash straight back to the party, which helped arrange the payments in the first place.

Do Australia’s donation disclosure laws need reform? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.