Lazy Labor protests rather too much on campaign finance

Is Labor’s anger at the crossbench for its “Fair and Transparent Elections Bill” real or confected? The bill, which would require real-time disclosure of political donations over $1,000 and cap donations at $1.5 million, has apparently enraged Special Minister of State Don Farrell. According to Nine newspapers, Farrell is “furious at the teals’ stunt” (the crossbench group includes Andrew Wilkie, the Greens, Jacqui Lambie and Lidia Thorpe, but we’ll stick to the teal angle for now). That’s according to “a senior government source, speaking anonymously” — let’s call them Fon Darrell.

Hypocrisy is the charge from Labor at the teals. “They agree with banning big money, just not theirs,” Farrell said.

Perhaps Farrell really is furious — not because the teals want to protect their ability to fundraise off groups like Climate 200, but because the crossbench actually has a political financing bill, whereas he doesn’t.

Labor was elected in May 2022 on a platform of imposing real-time reporting of donations above $1000 — something that multiple states now have. Farrell said at the time he wanted the reforms in place ahead of the next election. But nearly two years later, there’s no bill. First Farrell fobbed the issue off to the joint standing committee on electoral matters. It released an interim report last June backing real-time reporting for donations above $1,000, but Farrell decided he needed the final report, not the interim report. The final report came out in November. Four months later, you guessed it, still no bill.

When the interim report emerged backing the $1,000 threshold, Farrell said he “supported the proposal”, which was gracious given it was actually the policy Labor took to the election. “All of those things are perfectly capable of being dealt with in our first term,” Farrell assured us at the time. That garnered headlines in the corporate media like “Labor poised to cap donations” and “Major overhaul looms to keep big money out of politics“.

As it turned out, Labor was poised to sit on its backside and do nothing. In October, Farrell said there’d be a bill late in 2023 or early in 2024. Nothing happened until a week ago, when the government briefed Nine journalists that it planned to bring forward a bill at some unspecified point. That produced more headlines like “Big money to be taken out of politics in radical electoral overhaul“, despite similar headlines promising similar overhauls in the past never leading anywhere. Interestingly, the same outlet was describing the crossbench’s bill today as a “stunt”.

Importantly, Labor is now briefing journalists that, contrary to what Farrell has repeatedly said over the past two years, no changes will be in place before the next election — meaning we’ll have to wait up to 18 months to see who is trying to buy influence and access ahead of the 2025 ballot.

Farrell has insisted he wants to pursue the reforms in a bipartisan manner — a bizarre position that effectively gives the Coalition a veto over what Labor promised voters it would do at the last election. And the Coalition are the most malignant parties of all when it comes to political donations. Virtually every other political party, from Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson through to Labor and the Greens, now disclose all donations above $1,000, or in some cases all donations, regardless of the $15,000+ disclosure threshold. The Coalition continues to hide behind John Howard’s debauching of the political donation disclosure laws to evade scrutiny — and they’re the people Farrell wants to do a deal with.

There will be fights over political donation and spending caps. The crossbench, probably rightly, suspects that Labor wants to make a deal with the Liberals to undermine the capacity of independents to finance their campaigns and target winnable seats. The imposition of caps on third parties is a vexed issue, and Labor will try to avoid any limitation on its heavy dependence on trade union funding, which gives relatively small organisations enormous access to and influence over Labor and its policies. But there is universal agreement — apart from the miscreants of the Coalition — that real-time disclosure of even small donations is both practical and useful transparency.

There’s no reason why Labor has sat on its hands for nearly two years rather than undertaking that simple reform. Rather than railing at the crossbench for finally doing what Labor hasn’t, maybe Farrell should do his job.

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