The Influence and Laws of Political Donations | AUSPOL EXPLAINED

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Auspol Explained my name is David - your curly-haired ginger host. Do you ever wish people would just give you thousands of dollars? I know I do - link to my Patreon in the description - but unfortunately I am but a humble human person and not a politician. Yep. Today's episode is all about political donations. What are the laws around it? What are the limits? Do corporations really give thousands or millions to influence parties? Well let's find out.

First off: how much can be given? The answer is as much money as you have really. In 1984 Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke introduced the disclosure requirement and set the threshold at $1,500 for political donations. This number has changed over time and now gradually grows. As of this video: donations over 13,800 dollars must be disclosed. That doesn't mean that you can't donate more than that. You can. This just means that if a political party receives less than that threshold then they don't

need to declare it or have a record for who it is from. If money more than the threshold is donated then the party must disclose the full name and address of the donor. So all the donations from supporters of $20 can be anonymous. No one really needs to know how much money you gave to the your preferred political party. But if someone rich comes along and slides $200,000 across the table then the political party has to let everyone know about it - unless there is some sneaky business happening.

I'll get into that later in the video in the section about hidden money. Dun dun dun money, but hidden. Like I said: there's no cap on donations. Corporations and individuals can give a party 1 million dollars if they want. Malcolm Turnbull gave his own party, the Liberals, 1.7 million dollars. once. Unless you are a foreign donor in which case there are limits. Foreign donors cannot give over $1000. That was only banned surprisingly recently - by banned I mean now foreign companies need to use

Australian subsidiaries to donate money. So they still can get around it. In 2018 One Nation tried to get twenty million dollars from the NRA during the visit to the U.S. in exchange for trying to soften Australia's gun laws by using that money to gain extra seats in parliament. Whoops! That's illegal! Spoilers they didn't get the money though. In May 2006 liberal Prime Minister John Howard changed the threshold of disclosure from $1,500 to ten $10,000. The government justified this by saying th

at $10,000 is not enough to buy influence. To any companies out there that want to sponsor this channel I'll let you know that I agree with that. However, ten thousand and ONE dollars will buy you pretty much any ad you want to just shove into my videos. Hit me up. Please. Please give me ten thousand and one dollars. The threshold has grown steadily since and generally increases by two hundred to three hundred dollars per year. That's because it's linked to the Consumer Price Index so in a year

or two the figures in this video will be out of date and the amount of undisclosed money that corporations or individuals can give a political party will be even higher. Politicians also have to declare if they get personal gifts up to a certain value. Politicians have to disclose sponsored travel or hospitality received at more than $300, gifts valued at more than $750 from official sources such as other forms of government officials, foreign or Australian, and gifts of $300 or more from non-go

vernment officials must be declared. In 2015 the then New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell got in trouble for denying he was given a pen as a gift. It was valued at $1,195. That's an expensive pen! Some politicians get into physical fights, get arrested for heinous crimes, there's been at least one murderer elected to Parliament, and he thought... declaring a pen would be bad for him. "Dear Diary, today I got in trouble because of a nice pen.... which I am using to write in you now..." (evil

laughter) He should have declared it though. Like... obviously. How do we know about those political donations though? Well, fun fact: you can look up political donations via the AEC website. Link will be in the description. Remember kids: the AEC is your friend. They monitor donations and release annual statements for disclosed donations. A criticism of this system is that an annual disclosure doesn't lend itself very well to analysis and scrutiny. Did a donation happen during the time of a cru

cial or controversial policy decision? Would anyone care now the news stories that would have been relevant is no longer in the limelight? Donations relevant to elections are often revealed after the election has happened. This is also relaxed compared to other countries. In Canada and the UK they lodge quarterly returns and in the U.S. they do it monthly. Donations are then used for multiple purposes including funding parties' election campaigns. So getting more money than your opposition is ki

nd of important on trying to win seats - especially in marginal areas where every message and ad counts. Unlike other parties, The Greens don't take corporate donations. Their donations are entirely from members and they even have a policy to limit political donations. They want to ban donations from mining, development, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, banking, defense, and pharmaceutical industries. These industries also happen to be the biggest sources of political donations in Australia. Must be

some kind of weird coincidence or something I guess. The Greens also want to cap donations to $1,000 per year regardless if that's an individual, union, or a charity, and make the disclosure threshold $1000 as well. Their reasoning is that political donations interfere with democracy and influence policy. Now I said that there is a threshold for disclosure: that doesn't mean that we know what's going on with political finances though. Things can get muddy real quickly. Parties don't need to dist

inguish between donations and other receipts. This means that donors can give money that they see as a donation and then the party receiving it can label it as "other receipts." Major parties also tend to disclose around ten to twenty percent of their income as donations, twenty to thirty five percent is a gray area labeled as "other", and then there's fifty to seventy percent of that just undisclosed. During the 2017 to 2018 financial year there was $62.8 million of untraceable income for polit

ical parties. So there's just a lot of hidden money. Hidden money. Told you I get back there. And it comes from... somewhere... I'm not a gambling man but I bet it's not from the back of the couch. Spoilers: it's businesses. So how does this happen? There are multiple ways that political parties can hide their donations. This includes fundraising. One way to get around disclosing who is a donor is to hold a fundraising party. People will then can pay a fee to attend a fundraising party and then

the party doesn't need to disclose the individuals who attended. That money is labeled as "other." This means that a business person can pay a thousand dollars or more to attend one of these functions, be in a room, and have a direct discussion with a minister - then leave without any disclosure. The Liberal party sold access to a state council meeting for $3000 that it labeled as a "business observers program." This can also be labeled as a "service fee" instead of a donation. Both major politi

cal parties do this. The Liberal party has the Australia Business Network and the Labor Party has the Federal Labor Business Forum, where members can contribute subscriptions to have access to policy briefings and boardroom meetings. Next up: donation splitting. Splitting your donations into smaller amounts is a tactic used to mask those donations. Parties will have different state branches and so a donation made under the threshold to each individual branch ultimately can become a lot of money

and it still wouldn't need to be disclosed. If a party has a national branch and then eight state and territory branches that means as of 2020 someone could hypothetically donate $124,000 to that party without having to be disclosed. They can do this as a company then they can do it again as an individual. So... a lot of money. Or, what they could do is just make a series of smaller donations over time instead of a lump sum that breaches the threshold. Parties are meant to declare if the combine

d value is over that of a threshold, but they can also hide behind aforementioned fundraising bodies or associated entities that aggregate donations before then passing them on. So therefore they may disclose that they have received a large amount of money but they don't have to disclose the individual sources that comprised that funding. Which brings us to: associated entities. An associated entity is an entity associated with a company or business. For political purposes an associated entity i

s, according to the AEC, "an entity that is controlled by a registered political party, or operates wholly or partially to benefit a registered political party, or as a financial member of the party, or has voting rights in a political party." They can be unions, think tanks, or just dedicated fundraising groups. The Cormack Foundation is a registered associated entity of the Liberal Party and has donated over 40 million dollars to the Liberal Party. It also donates to other right-wing parties l

ike Family First and the Liberal Democratic Party, which is like libertarians and not the same as the Liberal Party despite a similar name. The Cormack Foundation was the largest donor to a political party in 2015 to 2016 which gave $2,525,000 to the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party and $400,000 to the National branch. The John Curtin house limited is a Labor owned associated entity. It similarly has donated millions of dollars over the years to the Labor Party. Associated entities must als

o lodge returns. There's also a lack of regulation. Although there are laws and regulating political donations actual prosecutions don't happen very often and enforcement of these laws are somewhat relaxed. Donors and political parties can even amend their original declaration years after it has happened. We don't even have a federal Independent Commission Against Corruption or ICAC to oversee if political donations are twisting our democracy. This is despite pushes from the Greens and Labor to

establish an ICAC. The Liberals have repeatedly voted against establishing such a body. This doesn't mean that everyone is getting away with it though. Don't worry, people do get in trouble. For example: Optus admitted to four criminal offenses of failing to disclose political donations to New South Wales Liberal and Labor between September 2014 and April of 2015. They were ordered to pay over $40,000. But, format anti-corruption Commissioner Anthony Whealy QC said on the issue of political dona

tions: "you can have as many prohibitive laws and regulations as you like. However, the absence of an efficient regulation and the absence of effective oversight leads inevitably to the law being disregarded." This comment was prompted from the discovery that 13 big companies including Woolworths, Caltex, and Origin Energy had failed to declare political donations that they'd given while seeking approval for property developments in New South Wales. The New South Wales state law is that a donati

on over $1,000 must be declared if the company is lodging an application for a development approval. Woolworths failed to declare over $100,000 in donations to the New South Wales Liberals and Nationals while seeking approvals to a supermarket of theirs. Which brings us up to the issue of influence. Donations tend to go to where the relevant powers are. For example: gambling restrictions are based off state laws so it's hardly a coincidence that gambling companies donate far more towards state b

ranches than they do to federal. So it doesn't seem like a coincidence that when under Labor PM Gillian Gillard a bill was introduced that would affect the operation of electronic gambling machines, ClubsNSW greatly increased their donations to the Liberal Party as they oppose the changes in gambling laws. In 2017 a select committee into the political influences of donations found that there is a "growing concern about political donations made by vested interests and their influence on public po

licy." From their report: political donations can "create a conflict between private interests and public duty and, therefore, create the possibility that holders of public office will give undue weight to the interests of their financiers rather than deciding matters on their merits and in the public interest." The report also admitted that it's difficult to objectively establish the intent behind political donations and their influence on policy but did say there are "strong indications of und

ue influence" as seen by patterns of political donations over time and how they correlate with key policy decisions. So let's talk about the elephant in the room: Mining. Big mining companies contribute both to Labor and Liberal and it used to actually be pretty even. Then Kevin Rudd proposed a non-renewable resources tax or "mining tax" in 2010 and then political donations for the Liberals just shut up by millions of dollars. The Liberals are appealing to mining companies because they are less

environmentally focused and therefore will allow or approve environmentally damaging projects. For example: in 2019 they approved a uranium mine in Western Australia despite knowing that a report said it could potentially lead to the extinction of 12 different animal species. So fast forward to the 2019 election and Labor is being really ambiguous about their support for the Adani coal mine whereas Liberals on the other hand, empowered by the millions they've received from coal donations, went h

ard on Labor and campaigned aggressively on the promise that the project would create 10,000 jobs even though the Adani coal mine will only produce 100 ongoing jobs and not even 1,500 during the construction. The Coalition now receives 81% of the donations made by the mining industry with 10% of that going to the Nationals as 71% of that to Liberals. So it's hard to believe that it's a coincidence that political donations from mining companies, or just any company at all, go drastically up durin

g election years. Clive Palmer, a former member of the Nationals and the Liberal Party, spent a ridiculously massive amount of money in 2019. He spent $83 million donated by his mineralogy company to his political party, the United Australia Party. That was more spending than Labor, Liberal, and Greens combined! And although his party the UAP did not win any seats during the 2019 election they did spend the last week or so of his campaign with targeted anti-Labor ads so as to deliberately try an

d get the Liberals elected. Clive Palmer claims responsibility for this but ABC election analyst, and man I secretly wish was my dad, Antony Green says that although preferences from Palmer went mostly to Liberal over Labor, Morrison probably benefited more from the anti-Labor advertising campaign. According to Clive Palmer this was better than a donation to charity. He also says he wasn't using it to gain approval on his upcoming mining projects which would be larger than the Adani coal mine. T

his then prompted Labor leader Anthony Albanese to say that he is open to the idea of a cap on political donations. So Palmer compares his campaign to a donation and it effectively works by adding to the anti-Labor advertising spending of the Liberals, but it doesn't count as a donation to the Liberals because it was done by a different party. Obviously whoever wins an election is based off many factors like policy, personality of leaders, and other factors like scandals, and so boiling it down

to simply just who has the most money isn't particularly critical or complex - but it's also clear that having lots of money to get an anti-opponent message out clearly has a benefit. After all, the past four out of five elections have been won by whichever major party has the most money to spend. It is a bit of a concern if a billionaire seeking federal approval for his mining operations comes along and then out spends the competition in a bid to keep a party he has says historic ties to in pow

er. As former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan once said: "the rising power of vested interests is undermining our quality and threatening our democracy." Now keep in mind that I did point out that mining companies give to both Labor and Liberal. This is because like, hey, if you're a business and you want favourable policy and you give lots of money to just one party but then the other one wins then it's a little bit awkward. It's just good business policy to play both sides of politics. It also enco

urages a party to be favorable to you because they need that money to fight their opponents and, like what we saw in 2010 with Kevin Rudd's mining tax, angering a company can backfire and greatly benefit your opposition. So yes, money has an influence. Perhaps the biggest example of how money has influenced politics is climate change. Scientists agree that climate change is real, and the very few studies that disagree with that consensus have found to have had bad methodology, and of course we h

ave known about it for decades. Climate change is undeniably one of the biggest issues facing the entire planet this century. The coal industry even published in the Mining Congress Journal in 1966 that carbon dioxide in the air would lead to climate change. So when I say we have known about it for decades I mean the science has been settled and determined long before I even came into existence. But unfortunately Exxon, a giant oil company, researched the effects of climate change in the 70s and

realized that a warmer climate would allow them to drill the Arctic for longer periods of time during the year. So they, and other oil companies, proceeded to pour millions of dollars into misinformation campaigns and deliberately created the rise of climate denialism - a baseless conspiracy theory that has benefited corporations ever since. Yes climate change denial is not the byproduct of free thinking, it is not the byproduct of skepticism. It is a conspiracy theory created by an oil company

that sought not just to protect their profits but to exploit an environmental crisis it was deliberately creating to further increase those profits. So next time you see someone on Facebook ranting about how climate change isn't real, or it isn't a big deal, please remind them there are people out there who actually got paid lots of money to spread that lie. They are not one of them. They're missing out. Why do the work of a giant corporation for free when you can get over thirteen thousand dol

lars donated to you and not even declare where it's from? Hey giant corporations, I try to have lots of integrity and not put bias into these videos but like, if you want to give me $13,000 or more, like... we'll see what happens. Just saying. I know earlier I said ten thousand and one dollars but you know, like, inflation and consumer price index and... other excuses. Just as the tobacco industry historically tried to cover up that tobacco causes lung cancer and to stop politicians from putting

restrictions on their industry the fossil fuel industry worked hard to polarize public opinion by denying that climate change is real. As a result of years of political lobbying and deliberately funding misinformation campaigns we now have a public divided on an issue that was settled decades ago. We have definitely known that climate change is real around fifty years ago and it was believed to be real or even predicted far earlier than that, and the evidence over those decades has only continu

ed to grow to confirm that scientific consensus. And we can see now - currently - the effects of climate change that we predicted decades earlier. Now we have politicians benefiting from this climate denial and "skepticism" in the form of donations from fossil fuel companies in exchange for less ambitious emissions reduction targets, less taxes on fossil fuel industries, and more corporate subsidies. Politicians routinely deny or downplay the importance of climate change either because they care

more about their political donations or they have too fallen for the victim of misinformation. Politicians out there might genuinely not understand the science and therefore think that the myth of climate denialism is real. Former liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull is critical of his own party and blames in part the coal lobby for the Liberals' lack of action on climate change. It should therefore come as no surprise to the Liberals, who greatly benefit from donations from the coal industry, rejected

the UN's International Panel on Climate Change report that said that we must reduce emissions to zero by 2050 to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming. To achieve this goal, coal must be phased out. The Liberal government instead continues to invest heavily in the coal industry despite renewable energy creating more jobs and generating electricity at a cheaper price. Disclosed mining donations reached over 1 million dollars for the first time in 2007 to 2008. That's also the first year that a carbon pric

ing policy that would affect their profits was taken to an election. Spikes in donations also correlate heavily with elections, timelines for project approvals, and debates on industry policies, like the aforementioned "carbon tax" or "mining tax." It's undeniable that mining companies have an influence on Australian politics and work to shape policy in their favor. They are perhaps the biggest influencing factor on Australian politics given the size the importance of the industry. So now what?

Obviously a lower threshold would show us more about who was donating what but it would not stop those donations from happening or the influence that those donations wield. We already know that giant corporations donate large sums and we already know that they influence policy and aim to sway elections in their favor. But I would also like to remind you that political parties aren't just the politicians in Parliament, they are also comprised of ordinary people who have membership and input on po

licy. Fundraising from ordinary people is also important to parties and so people aren't powerless to exert their own influence. So get involved, find a political party that you like, and have your voice heard. Elections are won based off votes. Political parties need policies that win over large groups of people, so you are not powerless. Make sure you are enrolled to vote and contact your local MP to make sure that they know what issues matter to you. And most importantly on Election Day you g

et to exert your influence by voting and best of all it is free. And so that's it! There you have it. Those are the rules around political donations and also how little we actually know about what happens behind the scenes. There are many ways that people get around revealing information and the influence that it can wield. Thank you so much for watching. Please share so other people can learn, subscribe, like, and comment down below what you would like to learn about next. There's a Patreon in

the description as well as a link to a copy of the script with all the citations I use to make this video. Thank you very much and I will see you next time *clicks*