Time to herd the political cats spending our money

Isn't it about time the law imposed upon them standards of governance, accountability to members and public reporting similar to that imposed on any public company?

Don't get your hopes up. The very people who would decide what's best, on whom the public would rely to establish and police such standards, are the very beneficiaries of the current system. They've long had a poaching mentality and are usually where they are because of it. Reform, when it occurs, is usually focused at getting some advantage over the other major player (for example, by hobbling Labor over its trade union connections, or hobbling other parties by seeking to limit donations), or by co-operating in a cartel whereby the big boys unite to freeze out new entrants, or to maintain their quantum advantage over minor parties.

Historically, parties have been private unincorporated associations, most with high-minded constitutions in which members pledge never to go to the courts to enforce party rules or principles. They weren't recognised in Australia's constitution until voters decided, after the events of 1975, that retiring or dead senators should always be replaced by a member of the same party. Electoral commissions, state and federal have registers of parties, usually requiring a constitution and either a minimum number of members or existing registration in parliament.

There have been rules about maximum spending at elections, returns by nominated public officers and, since the 1980s, the receipt of massive transfusions of public cash. But the law has had very little interest in how parties are managed, how they operate and whether they obey their own rules. We ask a good deal more of everyone else who gets a big public subsidy.

It's rare for a court to become involved, although judges are increasingly minded to think that parties are public institutions (or public "utilities") as much as private clubs, and that there are limits to high-handedness.

The flow of money going to parties is by no means confined to payments for every vote received at an election, provided a party gets some minimum vote, say 4 per cent. It also includes allocations of political staff to groups that have party status (in Canberra, usually five seats), generous bipartisan funding of everyone's party think tanks, funding of political education programs for party bureaucrats, "aid" programs designed to export our notions of democracy to the less fortunate and, in some jurisdictions, such as NSW, picking up the lions' share of the organisational and administrative costs of the major parties.

And that doesn't include some of the institutional costs of incumbency. Resources able to be used to work for re-election, whether in the form of generous staffing, massive subsidies for printing, postage and communications, travel and the use of sophisticated electoral software.

Each state and territory has its own system and its own sets of rorts. Many, such as discretionary grants of extra staff to independents, are used to bribe independents and small groups. Payments for votes secured vary (the ACT system is the most generous, in spite of the fact that electioneering here involves the least effort). The types of restrictions on fundraising and campaign spending vary considerably. Labor and the Liberals have rorted the differentials to launder forbidden donations by receiving them in other jurisdictions. Both parties, despite public declarations of virtue, have conspired with donors to avoid disclosure rules.

This week saw some further expressions of public disgust at the rorting mentality of politicians and ex-politicians. Former treasurer Joe Hockey, once the apostle of ending the age of entitlement, was revealed, not for the first time, to be supping deep on "rights" worth many times those being withdrawn from welfare recipients. No doubt his epitomising the double-dipping mentality is an added embarrassment to Malcolm Turnbull as the government negotiates negating its paid parental leave promises.

And just so as to prove a complete bipartisanship in the rorting spirit, a Victorian state minister, Steve Herbert, was revealed to be using his ministerial car and driver to ferry his dogs, as required, between the minister's various residences. It says something about the arrogance of such petty greed that it took hours for staff to persuade the minister he had done something wrong, or that it had a bad look.

I'm unsure if standards have fallen in this regard, but they get a ready press these days. Paul Hasluck commented 50 years ago on the venality of many of his colleagues, including ministers (and deputy prime ministers). There was, in those days, always something especially disgusting in watching the parties unite on a late Thursday night to slip through a pay rise. In my experience, obsessions with collecting anything available, and preferably a little more, was especially marked in party placemen, particularly in the Senate. Most of these were already earning salaries much greater than they had ever earned before or ever deserved.

One way or another, however, modern times see regular embarrassments of rorters, with few signs that the shaming of one deters the others. Some are caught by freedom of information requests, disclosure rules or dob-ins by colleagues. I've no idea what proportion are caught, but observers, such as journalists, are eternally suspicious. There are the spectacular ones, such as Bronwyn Bishop's helicopter rides, or Sam Dastyari's getting Chinese businessmen to pick up his bills. But there is also the regular artlessness of a Barnaby Joyce, Tony Abbott or any number of others who seem astonished that an international junket gifted by a billionaire, a scholarship in the family, attendance at a wedding, or managing a honeymoon as official travel won't go down well with constituents.

Such rorting and hypocrisy has played a major role in public cynicism about politicians and parties. It may be coincidence, but memberships have fallen, and contempt for politicians increased, as public funding of parties has ballooned. The more we hate them, the more they take. And the major parties have come to be seen as "brands" rather than political movements.

Also intrinsically a part of the system, and directly paid for by public funding, has been the emergence of the suits: party professionals, one way or another on the public payroll, moving from positions such as electoral officer, ministerial minder, researcher at a party-associated think tank and, perhaps, work with a trade union or an industry lobby. And then looking for the safe seat in parliament, often after organising a branch stack while on the public teat.

On Friday, I was delighted to have been asked to help launch a new tome, edited by professors Anika Gauja and Marian Sawer, on the regulation of political parties in Australia. Party Rules? is the result of a workshop into resource allocation between the parties, party funding, cartel-like behaviour by the big boys, and whether and to what extent the state itself ought to be playing a role, bearing in mind that a parliament is hardly a disinterested umpire in such matters.

It's all enough to persuade anyone that there ought to be some system of regulation. The wise might shrink from detailed micromanagement of what a party thinks, how it deploys its resources, and how and whether it distributes power among its membership. But taking the money ought to carry with it a responsibility and accountability it's not currently getting.

It can be very complicated. We might, for example, all want a political party to be a mini-parliament of its own, if united about a particular view of the world, such as, for example, the environment or the role of the state. A model club in which everyone was equal and respectful of each other, each dedicated abstractly to the common good, and with all of the constituent parts all humming up and down the hierarchy.

But honest minds will differ about whether such bodies will be more effective if power is centralised, and its leaders are girded with authority to make decisions, rather than being simple instruments of endless debates coming from the grassroots. There will be different opinions about whether A or B ought to be admitted as members, C ought to be expelled, or whether the group should intervene in some section of the organisation that is not playing the game.

The Liberal Party has no business ruling, as a matter of law, what the power of trade unions ought to be in the Labor Party, or how it is exercised. How the Greens preselect members is no business of the Labor Party. We all might have opinions about whether there should be branch plebiscites, or perhaps American-style primaries, in the Liberal Party, when it's choosing its candidates, but the decision ought ultimately to be for the Liberals. No more would the Associations Incorporation Act presume to tell a tennis club how to play tennis, or against whom.

But there ought to be some minimum standards of good governance. ICAC in NSW, after a good deal of experience with the mysteries of NSW party accountability, has recommended that parties receiving public funding should need to submit details of their governance standards. ICAC recommended that the principles of good governance set by the Australian Securities Exchange would be an appropriate model.

By these principles parties must clearly set out:

There's no mention there of any processes of democracy inside the party, or even much of a membership. Gauja says this might be good for financial compliance, but might not deal with the problems of factions and internal politics, or with the fact that commissions with a focus on supervising elections are not always keen to get involved in parties' internal processes.

Nor does it deal with the problem that Australia is a federation, and that parties operate at local, state and federal levels, often to different rules in each. There are tensions between the representative and political arms of a party but, equally, a state premier answers in his or her own way to state colleagues than to the technically more powerful federal branch or federal party leader.

It might be constitutionally possible for the Commonwealth to legislate comprehensively about the registration and governance of parties, but NSW may still decide to ban developer donations while Victoria doesn't, and Tasmania has quite different limits. Those who remember the problems of Moore v Doyle (about the management of trade unions), in which, for some purposes, the state branch of a union, registered both at the federal and state level, could be sometimes an independent entity, can imagine the problems of herding political cats.

Even if each of the political parties promised to focus wholly on the public interest, there's also the problem of having the problem addressed simultaneously in all or most of the jurisdictions, and in ways by which parties were prevented from chicanery, or frightened by the prospect of heavy penalties, preferably criminal ones, if anyone misbehaved. That's difficult, too. The big boys calculate the chances of getting caught, but regard a bit of cheating as something like fiddling one's lunch expenses.

That might be all right if one is only ripping off the club's kitty, or the proceeds of the chook raffle. I can't see why a fraud on public funding of parties shouldn't be prosecuted as remorselessly as a Centrelink fiddle. And with no power on officials to have convenient lapses of memory either.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. Party Rules? Dilemmas of political party registration in Australia, edited by Anika Gauja and Marian Sawer, is published by ANU Press ($38 paperback or free online).