Democracy for Sale

Senator John Faulkner has released a Green Paper into election funding reform.  Public submissions are due 23 February 2009.

The Greens NSW will be making a submission.  We urge you to make a submission.  Details are on the Green Paper's home page.

The paper is an excellent review of the current federal election funding law, problems with our current law, and possible options for reform.

While the  current situation means there is very little transparency in who is filling the coffers of the political parties, we believe the focus of reform should be on a major revision of election funding.  If the law is changed as the Greens propose, many of the transparency problems will disappear.

As we have written in many articles we believe there should be a ban on all corporate and group donations, place a low limit on donations from individuals and put caps on election expenditure. Candidates should also continuously disclose donations from individuals and the money they spend on their own election campaigns.

Limits also need to be adopted for third party activities during an election campaign. Without such limits corporate donations will move as they have in the USA from political parties to a plethora of third party organisations such as companies and lobby groups. The right wing corporate lobby groups would most likely have the larger amounts of money to spend than the more progressive third parties like Greenpeace.

The Greens are keen to hear the viewpoints of others on these and other issues.  We hope that many people and organisations will make submissions after reading Senator Faulkner's green paper