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May 31, 2013
This week's secret deal between the ALP and Coalition over public funding for their party apparatus highlights their self-interest. They needed $10 million a year to do administration work, apparently.
The self interest is not just their collective hand in the public till (ie., the extra funding for their own parties); but for the way they tried used this to attempt to squeeze out the emergence of minor parties. They did this through the mechanism of doubling electoral nomination fees and by giving back the extra $125,000 in increased electoral fees to the major parties but not to the minors.
David Rowe
The two major political parties have a collective interest in ensuring that they have this massive advantage over anybody else who wants to enter the political field and that they don't want other players in the field. Hence the ant-democratic instincts of both the ALP and the Coalition.
Political reform on this issue means moving the parties away from reliance on private sources of funds and to give them public money. The idea is to make the parties less vulnerable to special interests, to lobbying and to corruption by ensuring that the public money replaces the private money.
This is a necessary step to break the fraudulence in the system.
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This deal to lavish tens of millions of dollars on political parties was designed to make political funding more transparent and accountable. It was struck down because it was negotiated in secrecy and presented, without supporting arguments, as a fait accompli.