Extract from The Guardian
Everyone in Australian politics is chasing cash, and Sam Dastyari’s
lapse of judgment over a travel entitlement repayment is a symptom of a
system that needs cleaning up
Once upon a time in Canberra, there was an ironclad convention. People in glass houses didn’t throw stones.
The response to short-term imbroglios about the misuse of parliamentary entitlements or about donations that don’t meet the pub test was to move on quickly. No one inside the system benefited from anyone looking too closely at the closed conventions of Canberra.
Bronwyn Bishop proved something of a step change in this practice. Labor’s aggressive pursuit of the former Speaker of the House of Representatives threw out the unofficial mutually assured destruction pact. Now, various imbroglios are fair game politically. It’s not entirely clear why the convention has changed, but it’s a welcome development. Progressively, a conversation is building about donations, disclosure, influence and perks.
I’ve written ad nauseum that this is one of the most important conversations we need to have in Australian politics, because cleaning up the system is the first step to ensuring that our representative democracy works for people, not rent-seekers and undisclosed interests.
But somehow, the serious conversation never seems to happen. Once upon a time it didn’t happen because of the three monkeys convention, but now, it isn’t happening because short-term scandals seem to be substituting for systemic action.
Every now and again a flare is fired, much finger-pointing and faux outrage and rank political expediency ensues, media outlets chase increments of the fresh scandal through the news cycle, very occasionally someone falls on their sword to stop the destructive cycle of sunlight being shone on dim places – then things return to normal.
The Labor senator Sam Dastyari is the current bunny in the headlights. Let’s step through his poor judgments. Dastyari blew his travel budget by $1,670.82. Instead of putting his hand in his own pocket he asked the Top Education Institute to write a cheque. The company is a private education provider, run by businessman Minshen Zhu, with links to the Chinese government.
The transaction was declared in accordance with the rules. So lets pause right here.
The rules allow this transaction to occur, which of course normalises the conduct if you are so steeped in the business of chasing corporate cash for political endeavours that you don’t stop and think for five minutes how this might look to people who don’t routinely chase corporate cash to cover their operating expenses.
Everyone in Australian politics is chasing cash.
It’s not just random or rogue activity.
Everyone.
That’s the hard facts of the matter.
In the 1980s and for most of the 1990s, political fundraising was highly centralised – a handful of people, controlling a single pipeline. The prize was drumming up dollars for television advertising during campaigns.
Now the whole process is hardwired into organisational structures of political parties and their associated thinktanks: lots of people, chasing dollars to fund their campaigning activities (which cover a much greater field of activity than during the quaint analogue period) and also cover their own operating costs.
It’s more prolific, and it’s more diffuse, and inside the system, effective fundraisers are rewarded – it helps them aggregate power.
For someone like Dastyari, who has been a state secretary and who would probably struggle to tell you accurately how much cash he’s raised for Labor over the years, an inconvenient bill just north of $1,000 is lunch money, nothing you’d give even 10 seconds thought to.
As for China’s interest in Australian politics – a recent investigation by the ABC found Beijing is now the largest source of foreign-linked donations in this country. Businesses with connections to China coughed up more than $5.5m between 2013 and 2015, according to that report. A separate report by Fairfax Media said the Western Australian division of the Liberal party had benefited to the tune of half a million dollars in the past couple of years from donations from Chinese businesspeople with links to the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop.
Sensible people in politics have been worried about this trend for quite some time, and worried about the appetite of some of their colleagues for chasing dollars from Chinese business interests, who are often indistinguishable from government interests.
The simplest course of action would be to ban foreign donations.
Dastyari’s lapse of judgment about the overspend has been compounded by a report on Thursday revealing that during the recent election campaign he made sympathetic noises about China’s position with regard to the South China Sea, while standing at a press conference next to a donor who had very kindly picked up one of his legal bills.
It’s an elegant case study of a boiling frog.
If all the incentives in the system point you in a certain way, then this is the way the story inevitably ends – with a lack of clarity about where to draw boundaries.
This is the problem we need to talk about, the culture of self-harm that pervades in Australian politics. We need to understand that one dopey senator and his overspend and his overreach is a symptom, not an aberration, and not something that will change with a specific sanction on Dastyari.
We have to look at the system, not the symptom.
Someone has to wake these folks up, because bit by bit, action by action, they are sleepwalking into their own integrity crisis.
The response to short-term imbroglios about the misuse of parliamentary entitlements or about donations that don’t meet the pub test was to move on quickly. No one inside the system benefited from anyone looking too closely at the closed conventions of Canberra.
Bronwyn Bishop proved something of a step change in this practice. Labor’s aggressive pursuit of the former Speaker of the House of Representatives threw out the unofficial mutually assured destruction pact. Now, various imbroglios are fair game politically. It’s not entirely clear why the convention has changed, but it’s a welcome development. Progressively, a conversation is building about donations, disclosure, influence and perks.
I’ve written ad nauseum that this is one of the most important conversations we need to have in Australian politics, because cleaning up the system is the first step to ensuring that our representative democracy works for people, not rent-seekers and undisclosed interests.
But somehow, the serious conversation never seems to happen. Once upon a time it didn’t happen because of the three monkeys convention, but now, it isn’t happening because short-term scandals seem to be substituting for systemic action.
Every now and again a flare is fired, much finger-pointing and faux outrage and rank political expediency ensues, media outlets chase increments of the fresh scandal through the news cycle, very occasionally someone falls on their sword to stop the destructive cycle of sunlight being shone on dim places – then things return to normal.
The Labor senator Sam Dastyari is the current bunny in the headlights. Let’s step through his poor judgments. Dastyari blew his travel budget by $1,670.82. Instead of putting his hand in his own pocket he asked the Top Education Institute to write a cheque. The company is a private education provider, run by businessman Minshen Zhu, with links to the Chinese government.
The transaction was declared in accordance with the rules. So lets pause right here.
The rules allow this transaction to occur, which of course normalises the conduct if you are so steeped in the business of chasing corporate cash for political endeavours that you don’t stop and think for five minutes how this might look to people who don’t routinely chase corporate cash to cover their operating expenses.
Everyone in Australian politics is chasing cash.
It’s not just random or rogue activity.
Everyone.
That’s the hard facts of the matter.
In the 1980s and for most of the 1990s, political fundraising was highly centralised – a handful of people, controlling a single pipeline. The prize was drumming up dollars for television advertising during campaigns.
Now the whole process is hardwired into organisational structures of political parties and their associated thinktanks: lots of people, chasing dollars to fund their campaigning activities (which cover a much greater field of activity than during the quaint analogue period) and also cover their own operating costs.
It’s more prolific, and it’s more diffuse, and inside the system, effective fundraisers are rewarded – it helps them aggregate power.
For someone like Dastyari, who has been a state secretary and who would probably struggle to tell you accurately how much cash he’s raised for Labor over the years, an inconvenient bill just north of $1,000 is lunch money, nothing you’d give even 10 seconds thought to.
As for China’s interest in Australian politics – a recent investigation by the ABC found Beijing is now the largest source of foreign-linked donations in this country. Businesses with connections to China coughed up more than $5.5m between 2013 and 2015, according to that report. A separate report by Fairfax Media said the Western Australian division of the Liberal party had benefited to the tune of half a million dollars in the past couple of years from donations from Chinese businesspeople with links to the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop.
Sensible people in politics have been worried about this trend for quite some time, and worried about the appetite of some of their colleagues for chasing dollars from Chinese business interests, who are often indistinguishable from government interests.
The simplest course of action would be to ban foreign donations.
Dastyari’s lapse of judgment about the overspend has been compounded by a report on Thursday revealing that during the recent election campaign he made sympathetic noises about China’s position with regard to the South China Sea, while standing at a press conference next to a donor who had very kindly picked up one of his legal bills.
It’s an elegant case study of a boiling frog.
If all the incentives in the system point you in a certain way, then this is the way the story inevitably ends – with a lack of clarity about where to draw boundaries.
This is the problem we need to talk about, the culture of self-harm that pervades in Australian politics. We need to understand that one dopey senator and his overspend and his overreach is a symptom, not an aberration, and not something that will change with a specific sanction on Dastyari.
We have to look at the system, not the symptom.
Someone has to wake these folks up, because bit by bit, action by action, they are sleepwalking into their own integrity crisis.
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