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The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is campaigning against the excessive power that is wielded by a wealthy few through political donations. We now live in a lobbyocracy where one vote one value has been replaced by one lobby dollar, one decision favour. Lobbyocracy is a collaborative project where we use wiki-based software to track the donations made to political parties and the policy outcomes of this. We expose the dodgy back room deals and show how money is siphoned through front groups to side step accountability. Lobbyocracy undermines the democratic process because lobbyists have a much higher level of influence than those without large financial and political resources available to them. This reduces access for most people to the nodes of power. Moreover, access to information regarding these donations is often hard to obtain, hidden behind anonymity, front groups and "backdoor" donations. This then decreases the amount of control communities have over their own destinies. The decisions made by governments are not based on community concern but on commercial interest. This gives certain interest groups more say over the running of the country than those that are directly affected in their day to day lives. Help us show that lobbyocracy is the hypocrisy of democracy. Lobbyocracy.org.au
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The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is looking for volunteers to help our Lobbyocracy Campaign to expose the dodgie developments that donations have helped facilitate. Whether it is the $300,000 donation to the Victorian Labor Party that saw the Walker Corporation get approval for the Kew Cottages redevelopment or the interference in the Port Phillip local council that will mean the redevelopment of the St Kilda Triangle – we want you to help us uncover the dirt. The project will include working on the Lobbyocracy wiki (www.lobbyocracy.org.au) as well as the development of a google map to help illustrate the point. Eager volunteers can contact the Centre by emailing
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- no technical knowledge required.
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Submissions to the Green Paper on Electoral Funding were made available from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet today (available at: http://www.pmc.gov.au/consultation/elect_reform/submissions.cfm ) The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice contributed a submission which can be downloaded from here: http://www.pmc.gov.au/consultation/elect_reform/pdfs/sub35.pdf Our submission made four key points: - That Election Expenditure should be capped removing incentives for political parties and candidates to fundraise.
- That there needs to be a centralisation of disclosure regimes and that the various state branches of a political party should be treated as one entity to provide a more realistic picture of the funding of political parties.
- All donations to political parties must be banned with the possible exception of small donations from individuals to a maximum of $500 per financial year.
- That the public funding of elections should continue to be made available but that:
- there should be provisions for access to public funding for new political parties
- that the money should be only made available for electoral expenditure and not an automatic entitlement
The rules of the system will help determine the type of politics that are engaged in. It is our belief that with these changes there would be significant improvements to the transparency and accountability of political parties. Because Australians currently have the ability to buy political influence, debate has been restricted in Australia and political parties have been able to ignore the concerns of their rank and file members. Why look to support from your members when you can just receive a handful of donations from large donors? We believe that by making the above changes we would see a re engagement with the membership base of political parties which can only be good for democracy.
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The Australian Electoral Commission has released the details of disclosed political donations for the 2007/08 financial year. Once again, Australia's appalling disclosure regime means that only donations of $10,500 or more are disclosed and it has taken until February 2009 to disclose donations from July 2007. Please go to our campaign site, www.lobbyocracy.org to see who has donated to which party. The Federal Government has released a Green Paper on Electoral Reform. The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice will be replying to that by February 23.
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The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice today launched their latest campaign targeting the influence that donations to political parties have on Australian politics.
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Three organisations dedicated to the promotion of democracy today called on the federal government to dump its bill that will see the limit for disclosed donations increase from $1,500 to $10,000.
Seizing on the recent release of donations made to political parties in the 2004/05 period from the Australian Electoral Commission, Democracy 4 Sale, Democracy Watch and the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice jointly stated their staunch opposition to the proposed legislation.
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