Category: Democracy & elections

The confusing choice for Melbourne’s Chief Garbage Collector

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

By far the most useful and important thing the Melbourne City Council does is to take away garbage, but for some reason the position of Chief Garbage Collector, aka Lord Mayor of Melbourne, is being keenly contested.

There are eleven candidates, at least seven of whom are campaigning seriously if the contents of my letterbox and the Google ads when I typed in ‘Melbourne City Council’ are a guide.

I told Tim Wilson, who is running for Deputy Lord Mayor on the Peter McMullin ticket, that I would vote for him. But that was before I realised that McMullin was a member of the ALP, and I cannot vote for Tim without also voting for McMullin. Admittedly, McMullin is of the multi-millionaire former Deputy President of the Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry kind of Labor, and his campaign literature has the crucial words ‘rate freeze’ in it, but I’m not sure that I can bring myself to put a ‘1’ next to the name of a member of the ALP.

Of the other campaign materials I have received, pollster Gary Morgan’s promise of 5% cut in rates certainly caught my eye. And I feel I owe Morgan something for providing survey results for free. On the other hand, Morgan has a famously abrasive personality. When he used his polling company to see who was the frontrunner for the Lord Mayor’s job, he published the results with this fine example of pollster neutrality in the comments:
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Could political expenditure disclosure laws be unconstitutional?

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

I am pleased that the NSW government has dumped its absurd and anti-democratic plan to ban political donations.

The apparent cause, however, was not a realisation that the original proposal was a bad idea. It was this advice on its constitutional and practical difficulties by the consistently impressive Anne Twomey.

Twomey’s report does not discuss the law in which I have the greatest personal interest, the federal laws on political expenditure disclosure. Under the current law, persons or organisations spending more than $10,300 on an election issue have to disclose both how they spent the money and, if it was based on donations of that amount or more, who the donors were.

The current federal government plans to reduce that threshold to $1,000, meaning that thousands of people and groups that may comment only incidentally on election issues will be caught up in tougher disclosure requirements than political parties (which have to disclose donations, but don’t have to itemise expenditure). Those individuals, or the office-holders of the groups, face a conviction and possible jail sentence for failure to comply.
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The Will of the people

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

Will Wilkinson has a good libertarian analysis of the US election result.

Some parts I particularly liked:

I have always thought that the symbolic or cultural value of an Obama victory would be enormous. The dramatic reaction last night confirmed that. I understand why so many people are elated, and part of me is elated, too. I find it hard to see how you could not be. There is no denying that an election can be culturally transformative. It means something profound that a black man was elected to the most visible, high-status position our society offers. …

But, frankly, I hope never to see again streets thronging with people chanting the victorious leader’s name. …

romance in politics is dangerous, misplaced, and beneath intelligent people. Were we more fully civilized, we would tolerate the yearnings projected on our leaders. Our tribal nature is not so easily escaped, after all. But we would try to escape it. We would discourage and condemn as irresponsible a romantic politics that tells us that if we all come together and want it hard enough, we’ll get it. We would spot the dangerous fallacy in condemning as “cynicism” all serious attempts to critically evaluate the content of political hopes.

Victorian government still committed to anti-democratic reforms

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

The Age‘s headline reads ‘Backdown on activist councillors’, in reference to the anti-democratic bill currently before the Parliament restricting the freedom of councillors to vote on matters they had previously been involved in, limiting rights of financial support for candidates, and denying voters the capacity to choose candidates committed to defending their interests.

The actual amendments have not yet been put to the Parliament, but based on Minister Richard Wynne’s media release the bill is still very unsatisfactory.

Rather than any objection to or submission on a proposal, the bill now proposes to cover only parties to a civil actions or VCAT appeals, or those who lodge objections to a planning permit. But as I argued last week, if a candidate runs on issues relating to the same subject as a civil action, VCAT appeal, or planning objection, the election victory turns the ‘private’ interest into a ‘public’ interest as well.

And there is no word about changing the absurd requirement that councillors keep complex records of who donates to them and then match them against all matters they have to decide on in council meetings.

I’m yet to hear what the Liberals will do on this bill – the Greens are still leading the fight. But I am hoping that the Liberals will come good.

Conflict of interest laws vs democracy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

One of the West’s great cultural and political achievements is the idea of an ‘office’, the idea that certain roles should be performed in the interests of persons other than the person who fills that role at a particular time. While tribal cultures see little or nothing wrong with their leaders handing out ‘public’ privileges to their friends, relatives and cronies, in the West this is now seen as a ‘conflict of interest’, if not corrupt.

But in many cases the line between personal and public interest in a matter is far from clear. The Age this morning reports on legislation before the Victorian Parliament that in my view redefines legitimate political interests in the outcome of issues as personal interests. In the future, local councillors may be prevented from voting on the very motions before council they may have been elected to support or oppose.

For example, they will be held to have become an ‘interested party’ if they have lodged an appeal in relation to a council decision, or have made an objection or submission. Say the Council wants to cut down the trees in your street, or redirect its traffic, or let someone build a house that overshadows your garden. You go through the normal processes to protect your interests, by making an objection. This fails.

So you run for election on one of these issues, win a mandate to act on them, and then because of your earlier steps to protect your interests you cannot vote on the matter. Not only are you deprived of your right to vote, but the democratic will of the people who supported you is also frustrated.
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Liberal primaries

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Julian Leeser had an op-ed in the SMH yesterday calling for primaries to be introduced for Liberal Party preselections (his full paper is here). Party members could vote automatically in preselections, while other people could vote after paying a fee (to limit supporters of other parties voting for unelectable candidates).

I used to be against primaries, mostly on grounds of financial cost to the party and to the candidates, and the dangers of party divisions being on display during high-profile preselections. And thinking ahead to what would happen under a possible future presidential primary, we would not want the US system where the presidential campaign effectively runs for two years.

But overall I have changed my mind and think the Liberal Party should adopt primaries.

Both major parties need to increase their membership base, but particularly the Liberals who lack the institutional support Labor has through the union movement. The campaign against political donations is likely to have considerable success, at significant cost to Australian democracy in making politics even more one-sided. The Liberals have to tap into the 10% of the Australian electorate who say they strongly support the Liberal Party, plus the 20% who say their support is fairly strong (AES figures).
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The problem of Ministerial discretion

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

All this week, The Age has been in campaign mode on corporate political donations. But the problem with their analysis (you don’t need to read it, or help from me, to guess what line they are pushing) was there in the very first paragraph on Monday:

CORPORATE donors to the Victorian Labor Party are almost invariably companies with lucrative public contracts or development, gaming or alcohol interests at the mercy of Government discretion. (emphasis added)*

Isn’t the problem, then, that businesses are at the mercy of Ministerial decisions, rather than that perhaps some try to minimise the risks posed to their income by sending a few dollars the ALP’s way? Wherever possible, governments should set rules of the game that are neutral between businesses, and let the outcome be driven by how they play by the rules, rather than by picking winners or playing favourites.

While it is improper to try to influence a tender outcome or property development approval with donations, there is nothing wrong with backing a party that proposes rules of the game that are consistent with how a business or other organisation sees the world. Renewable energy companies should be allowed to back the Greens, unions should be able to back Labor, and corporate Australia should be able to back the Liberals in their occasional tax cutting mood.
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The views of Liberal defectors

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

The SMH had a report yesterday on the results of the 2007 Australian Election Survey. It comes up with the following unsurprising findings:

? Industrial relations and global warming were the biggest vote-changing issues.

? Rising interest rates did not cost the Coalition as dearly as thought.

? Voters respected Mr Howard but were virtually in love with Mr Rudd, giving him the highest “likeability” rating in the survey’s 20-year history.

? Low-income battlers moved decisively back to Labor.

? The Coalition would have struggled under Mr Costello.

But the article doesn’t make use of a useful question in the AES, on which party the respondent voted for in 2004 (with a caveat, of course, on the reliability of 2004 memories). This question can be used to sort the views of people who defected to Labor in 2007 from those who were Labor voters anyway.

When we compare people who switched from Liberal to Labor between 2004 and 2007 with those who remained with the Liberals we can see that the former group was more anti-WorkChoices. Of the 19% of 2004 Liberal voters who voted Labor in 2007, 80% disapproved of WorkChoices. Only 23% of those who stayed with the Liberals disapproved of WorkChoices.
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Banning political party donations

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

Since I last posted on political donations, the debate in NSW has escalated beyond disclosure to prohibition. The SMH was endorsing this route again yesterday. As usual, no serious consideration has been given to the likely consequences of such a move.

Arguably, in the Labor Party unelected party officials and conference delegates already have too much power over elected Labor MPs. They were trying again to exercise that influence at the NSW Labor conference yesterday. If ‘outsiders’ have less access to politicians, then the party insiders, in Labor’s case the unions, will have even greater relative influence. That is not to say that they will always get their way – politicians will usually be more concerned with the broader real-world and electoral implications of policy. But the insiders will proportionately get more of the decision-makers’ time.

But a ban on political donations won’t help political parties, even while it will help party power-brokers. Most of what parties do between elections is fundraising. Much of the social capital element of political parties would disappear without fundraisers. Already parties are suffering from not being able to give members enough to do, and this problem would worsen further if donations were banned. Parties would become quasi-state institutions, rather than being parts of civil society. Continue reading “Banning political party donations” →

Political incentives

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

There is a strange disconnect between the debate on political donations laws, with yet more regulation proposed by the Prime Minister yesterday, and with the problems faced by Australian governments.

We have plenty of bad policies, yet very few of them have even plausible, let alone proven, links to political donations. As I noted last year, the people who are ‘bought’ in Australian politics aren’t politicians, they are voters. Politicians promise to spend billions to get themselves elected. Many bad or ineffective programs stay in place because they create their own constituencies that fight for them. In between donors and voters, donors lose every time. The incentives in the Australian political system aren’t to favour donors, but voters – donors are only ways of getting the campaign message to more voters.

As this theory of Australian political incentives would predict, there are very few cases of proven improper influence by donors, particularly at the federal level. Joo-Cheong Tham and Sally Young’s book on political finance laws, though proposing a bureaucratic extravaganza of regulation that would require the political parties to employ small armies of lawyers, provides little evidence that they are not proposing a solution to an imaginary problem. They suggest that a long-term donor to the Liberals may have received improperly favourable Ministerial discretion in an immigration case, and note that the unions finance the ALP, but they can’t actually nail a case.
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