Want to have a say on political campaign funding in Australia?

It hasn't escaped attention that, in the last few decades, the dollar amounts of both public funding of candidates/political parties standing for federal election and private political donations for these same parties have been growing at such a pace that Australia is now seeing election campaigns actually begin long before an election is declared.

It has never been more obvious that the biggest political parties are attempting to buy their way into government via expensive sustained media campaigns.

Incumbent governments in recent years have also barely concealed the fact that they will use government advertising budgets for the same end.

So it was interesting to see that this week the Australian Special Minister for State released the Electoral Reform Green Paper: Donations, Funding and Expenditure.

The perception of undue influence can be as damaging to democracy as undue influence itself.

It undermines confidence in our processes of government, making it difficult to untangle the

motivation behind policy decisions.

Electors are left wondering if decisions have been made on their merits.

Restrictions on the use of money in election campaigns and the raising of money by political parties and other political actors enacted in other jurisdictions have as their aim the limitation of the potential political influence exercised by private sources of wealth, by controlling either the supply of, or the demand for, campaign cash – or both.

The central priority of this approach is to maintain a degree of fairness between the individual participants in the political process, and equality of opportunity between the candidates and parties contesting the vote.

Many countries have pursued electoral reform to reduce or remove these problems.

Limiting or eliminating donations to political parties, limiting spending, increasing public funding and other support and extending electoral regulation to third parties are solutions pursued or proposed elsewhere.

These and other remedies are discussed in this Green Paper.

Copy of green paper can be read here.

The Australian Government invites written submissions in response to this paper.

General comments are invited.

Interested people are also invited to respond to some or all of the specific issues raised in the paper, and, in particular, some or all of the questions at Chapter 11.

The closing date for submissions is 23 February 2009.

Late submissions may not be considered.

Details on how to make a submission here.

Favourite Wikileak of 2008

From Times Online and Wikileaks this month on the folly of pollies.

"JACQUI SMITH, the home secretary, has suffered fresh embarrassment from a new Whitehall leak disclosing that ministers are seeking new powers to search the homes of staff working on ID cards.
An 11-page confidential Home Office document – which was sent to a campaigner against ID cards – suggests that the employees’ homes could be entered without the need for a police warrant."

U.K. Home Office document is here.

Fred Singer is a 'climate scientist'? And here I was thinking he was an Exxon Mobile superannuant!

Club Troppo has pulled a really entertaining rabbit out of the hat since 19 December, with its online debate headed by David Evans a well-known greenhouse sceptic.

This is a serious debate worth visiting and, if you have a mind to obey the rules, participating in.

It made my day to read Evan's describing Fred Singer as a climate scientist.

Now S. Fred Singer may be a lot of things (including a man with a couple of decent university degrees, an extended work history in atmospheric physics and a published author), but a reputable voice on climate science he has not been for some time.

As far as I can tell he is fatally compromised by his perceived longstanding relationship with Exxon and other big oil/energy companies as well as his association with the discredited Frederick Seitz petition and, his constant repetition of a fear that developing climate change policy will in turn distort energy policy, a principle argument that there is no global warming trend and there might even be a cooling trend and, an assertion that an emissions trading scheme would just be a tax ruse.

Indeed Singer has been a denialist since at least 1998 when this correspondence occurred.
However, almost every argument he has floated over the years seems to be easily refutable by academics and working scientists.

This has led Singer to assume the position of front man for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) which appears to represent the published opinion of around 23 authors who reputedly are not all scientists and, his Science & Environmental Policy Project founded in 1990 is beginning to sound distinctly nutty.

Now I am aware that there has been legitimate scientific opinion which has swum against the tide in the past and later been proved right, but Fred Singer appears to have done no independent or collaborative science in years and apparently relies on a anti-global warming stance he developed years ago before much of the current data had been either gathered or collated.

The fact that the NIPCC document published this year online has purportedly 'peer reviewed' the same primary sources as the UN international panel does not give cause for comfort because of the small number of participants involved.

As Singer has reportedly also published his doubts about the links between second hand smoke and lung cancer and between UV rays and skin cancer one has to wonder at anyone citing him as an expert.

NIPCC's 2008 Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate can be found here.

The former candidate objects!

It would appear that it isn't only the Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy who wishes to censor content on the Internet.
At least one failed local candidate for political office also has a personal list of 'unwanted content', if a comment recently posted on North Coast Voices is any indication.

It's seemingly quite alright to keep a 'sanitised' campaign website alive long after the event and cheerfully link a current blogger profile to that site, but having another's legitimate political opinion still posted for the world to see apparently goes against the grain for one who obviously would rather forget a foray into the political arena earlier this year.

I wonder if newspapers were also asked to remove any mention of the candidate from online articles commenting on that local government election campaign? I suspect not.

After all - that would be changing the Clarence Valley historical record.
A record of which North Coast Voices is now part, along with a number of other blogs, bloggers and letters to the editor correspondents.

Scheduled posts during Australian national Internet censorship trial 24 December 2008 onwards

Due to the fact that the Rudd Government intends to run a trial of its national ISP-level filtering scheme and because some Australian ISPs are now participating, North Coast Voices is uncertain if it can reliably publish over the next six-seven weeks or if it will be able to be read by local visitors.

Predictably the Minister's office refuses to clarify his recent obtuse remarks about a new 'closed' trial without customer involvement.

However, it now appears that the 'live' trial is to go ahead based on the existing ACMA black list and a further 'closed' trial will be conducted using a vastly expanded dummy list to test performance levels.

In an effort to keep online we have pre-scheduled a number of posts for the festive season.
Please pop in to see how we are faring and leave a comment or two.

Cha ghéill sinn!