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.
Because the Australian Government's live trial of its mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme is fully functional from tomorrow, North Coast Voices apologises in advance to its readers for the incredible stupidity of the Prime Minister and the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy which may cause our blog to disappear from view over the life of the trial.
