Political parties should stop charging business for access to ministers: Kohler

Last week I bumped into a government relations manager of a major company, who paid $10,000 to attend the ALP conference.

He was very happy with his investment because he got time with Treasurer Wayne Swan. He doesn’t know what difference it might make, but at least someone in Federal Cabinet now knows his company’s point of view.

Everybody was happy: he got access and the ALP got $10,000. The National Conference, which the ALP had to have anyway, suddenly became a fundraiser.

Indeed all ministerial access seems to have become a fundraising activity through the activities of the various state offices of Progressive Business, the ALP subsidiary that exists to “build dialogue” between government and business.

It’s a bit like the sale of ‘indulgences’ in the medieval Catholic Church. The becloaked organisers at Progressive Business are like the questores, or professional pardoners, who went around selling indulgences, before Martin Luther came along in 1517.

Or perhaps it’s more like the spoils of victory. The conquering armies of Napoleon were allowed to keep their plunder, which is how the Emperor managed to get them to march north through the snow in winter on such little pay.

There has been concern for years that political donations would get out of control, so the Australian Democrats tried to reform the practice – before they died from lack of money, and relevance.

Actually it has turned out that the danger is not that donations get out of control, but the exact opposite – that it gets organised and is very, very controlled.

There is now a well-oiled ALP machinery selling access to ministers, both state and federal. Of course they are not selling influence, just access. A smile, a handshake, an exchange of words… sometimes a 10 minute ear bending.

Moreover, it is bipartisan graft – both parties do it when they are in power, with the result that Oppositions tend not to criticise the practice and just wait until it’s their turn.

Last year Malcolm Turnbull proposed that only individuals should be allowed to give political donations and must declare that the money came from their own funds, which is presumably why he is so hated within his party.

His former leader John Howard raised the disclosure threshold for donations from $1,500 to $10,000, which is why entry to the National Conference has a price-point of $9,999 and why political donations have become so opaque and corrupt.

And now the whistle has been blown – the business of selling access to ministers has become ‘A Story’, and journalists with cameras were out door-stopping the Victorian Premier John Brumby on Friday as he arrived at a Progressive Business lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel in Melbourne, happily filming the paying attendees arriving with guilty looks on their dials.

I imagine the managers and directors of the media companies paying these journalists are not very happy with this turn of events – media groups and advertising agencies are the leading beneficiaries of all of this fund-raising, since the money is mostly spent on campaign advertising.

In fact, in my view, the financial pressure that has led to politicians so compromising their integrity by selling access to themselves comes directly from the outrageous prices charged by the media oligopoly for access to its audiences – a topic I explored on Friday.

To the extent that advertising is moving online at a 10th of its former price, killing a lot of journalism’s costs along the way, theoretically means the pressure will come off political parties to raise so much cash for campaigns.

Payment systems like Progressive Business are rarely given up voluntarily. Even if advertising prices fall, both major parties will continue to sell access until they are stopped.

And who’s going to stop them? Who’s going to be Martin Luther? Not the other party. Will the media that gets the money stop them? Only until the journalists are brought under control by their bosses.

It’s up to the various independent commissioners on corruption around the country, where they exist. It is clearly at least a semi-corrupt activity.

And then once it is stamped out, businesses can go back to paying shady lobbyists, who are former politicians, to pick up the phone to their old mates and organise a quiet lunch.

Perhaps a better answer is to do what restaurants and pubs do: pool the tips! Let both sides of Parliament systematically charge for access, and then have the Australian Electoral Commission collect the cash and dole it out equally.

Obviously when the Opposition Leader has an approval rating of 17%, access to him goes cheap, and contributions to the tips pot are uneven.

But there does come a time when the Opposition’s price goes up – and that’s well before the election they are likely to win.

And perhaps the system could be made even more sophisticated by having the market set the price of access – a sort of Emissions Trading Scheme, in which the carbon dioxide emissions being traded are emitting from the mouths of the business people bending the ears of politicians.

There’d be a sort of poetic symmetry in that.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.