Potential problems with proposal to ban private political donations in NSW
As watchers of NSW politics would know, the NSW government is proposing to ban all private donations to political parties, although the details are unclear. The NSW government is also suggesting public funding.
Some questions immediately arise:
- how do independent candidates, new parties and small parties fund their election campaigns? How does it affect the entry of independent and new parties into electoral politics?
- who would the public funding work? Would the funding for an upcoming election depend on the last election results? Is this reasonable?
- would this system have effectively stopped the Greens moving from being a very small party 20 years ago to their current third-party status?
- does this make the political system less flexible in responding to the electorate? Does it ossify it?
These questions need to be answered.
May 7, 2008 at 6:37 pm
These are very good questions, Sacha. And unfortunately there are no easy answers.
NSW Greens MP Lee Rhiannon and I have worked in the area of electoral funding for years. We find there are many tricky issues that we constantly attempt to explore so we can come up with better solutions to electoral funding - one that is fair for independents, small political parties, emerging parties and the major parties.
Obviously a dialogue among people concerned about the potentially corrupting influence of large corporate and lobby group donations is crucial for all of us to explore the issues thoroughly
See Rhiannon and my latest publication on this topic in New Matilda http://www.newmatilda.com/2008/05/07/state-sale
We hope many concerned citizens will respond and give us feedback.
Norman Thompson,
Director, Greens Political Donations Research Project
http://www.democracy4sale.org