Money is just one aspect fd, I remember when the packer organisation approached the US presidency and offered "unconditional" support to overthrow the whitlam government. I personally believe the power of the media is huge and easily sways the vote in all but the most extreme electoral climates. We also later on saw hawke sell his soul to the murdoch press for their support so it shows all in politics are willing to hawk (excuse the pun) themselves to the highest bidder.  I cannot help but wonder what "deals" were struck between the media and the howard government in the recent changes made to our own media laws.

Smoke screen over Liberal party funds

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Smoke-screen-over-Liberal-party-funds/2007/02/09/1170524282010.html

Federal Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella has been linked to a secret supporters' fund which raised tens of thousands of dollars that was not declared to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).

None of the cash - which includes a hefty $15,000 handout from tobacco giant British American Tobacco (BAT) - was disclosed on party returns to the AEC, the group admits.

In Victoria, tobacco giants BAT and Philip Morris gave around $40,000 to the Liberals although the party was required to reveal only a single $10,000 contribution from Philip Morris.

The rest of the Philip Morris donations to the state party were in sums less than $10,000, as was another $3000 BAT donation, and did not have to be revealed.

However, BAT's $15,000 offering to the Victorian Liberals in April last year - listed on the company's own AEC return - has turned the spotlight on the Sydney-based support group.

Mr Fennell said BAT donated to the Liberals "just to be part of the political process".

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Labor demands MP explain tobacco money

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking-news/labor-demands-mp-explain-tobacco-money/2007/02/26/1172338550608.html

The Labor Party is demanding Victorian Liberal Sophie Mirabella explain a $15,000 donation she received from a tobacco company.

"Late disclosure by associated entities is not uncommon as evidenced by the $160,000 of undeclared donations to the ALP," she told AAP.

Mrs Mirabella said Mr O'Connor's claims were just regurgitated from old media reports.

But she was reluctant to say where the $15,000 had been spent.

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Inquiry to look at political donations

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Inquiry-to-look-at-political-donations/2007/06/27/1182623975266.html

A parliamentary inquiry has been established to look at donations and election funding given to political parties in NSW.

"The reality is this is an issue even Labor should admit has caused community disquiet," Mr O'Farrell said.

"There is concern out there that political donations buy decisions.

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NZ to adopt 'contentious' electoral law

http://news.smh.com.au/nz-to-adopt-contentious-electoral-law/20071218-1hso.html

New Zealand's parliament has passed a contentious bill aimed at stopping groups such as the Exclusive Brethren from unduly influencing elections.

The Electoral Finance Bill, which has been the subject of street protests and heated debate over the sanctity of free speech in New Zealand, was passed 63 votes to 57.

It was supported by the ruling Labour Party, the Greens and New Zealand First, but opposed by the main opposition National Party.

The bill is expected to take effect from January 1, in time for next year's national elections.

The new law will cap the amount individuals or groups can spend on political advertising at $NZ12,000 ($A10,500) during an election year.

Any person or group wanting to exceed that must register, and even then are restricted to a maximum advertising spend of $NZ120,000 ($A105,000) to air their views.

Once registered they will need to account for how they spend their money, and will be listed on a publicly accessible register.

Under sustained attack from National leader John Key in parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Helen Clark defended the bill.

"What the electoral law talks about is paid speech and the National Party with its secret donors and trusts want to be able to spend whatever they like to buy an election, like Mr Key tried to do last year with the Exclusive Brethren," Clark said.

from crikey:

The combination of an ethically-strong Kevin Rudd, a governance-obsessed John Faulkner and the Wollongong City Council looks like ensuring the stars are about to align for Australia's most comprehensive program of campaign finance reform.

Kevin Rudd opened the batting with Kerry O'Brien on three fronts last night :

Cutting the disclosure threshhold from $10,000 to $1000
banning donations by foreign individuals or companies
Capping the amount of individual donations

Faulkner, the NSW left luminary who grew up fighting Graham Richardson's whatever-it-takes culture in the NSW right, has secured poll position as Special Minister of State and Cabinet Secretary.

He's already out there briefing Piers Akerman of all people, who has columnised today on Faulkner's vision of limiting public funding of candidates and parties to audited expenses.

This would be the Pauline Hanson clause as she has literally made millions from running low-cost campaigns that deliver more than the 4% threshhold to qualify for public funding.

Whilst political welfare is controversial in its own right, Steve Bracks at least ruled out the profit-motive when introducing $1.20 a vote for candidates a few years back. The Feds pay $2.10 - a total of about $40 million at the last election - and there is no requirement to prove up your costs.

Former NSW auditor general Tony Harris opened up another important front in The AFR this morning when he railed against the blatant corruption that comes from paying for access to ministers or party officials.
He's dead right -- cash for access should be banned.

Campaign finance reform could be about to get a global boost given that it was the single biggest issue that John McCain ran on against George W Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries. Rudd seems to be a believer and has the personal authority to over-rule the cyncial machine and bag men in the ALP - although the role of former NSW general secretary Mark Arbib as one of his king makers and close advisers does cause some concern.

Then again, Arbib will just be one vote in the Senate from June 30 and Wollongong has presented Faulkner with a once in a lifetime opportunity to tackle corruption in the NSW Right.

However, Rudd's check list for serious reform needs to get a whole lot longer and include the following:

Caps on spending limits for parties and candidates similar to the UK system
Publically released breakdowns of campaign spending as required in the UK
Limiting donations to individual registered votes, as Malcolm Turnbull has been advocating
Forcing political parties to reveal their balance sheets, such as the $1 billion plus of
net assets controlled by the ALP and its affiliated unions
Making all these disclosures on a more timely basis, rather than annually on February 1, a whopping 7 months after the end of the financial year
The Latham Diaries are well worth another read now that Labor is in power and the former leader makes the point that the union gerrymander over the ALP wouldn't stack up if public funding was conditional on political parties practicing democratic principles.

If Rudd can use campaign finance reform to enforce once vote one value principles on his own party, then he really will go down as a serious change agent and political reformer.

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Bligh rejects move to hide MPs' income

http://news.smh.com.au/bligh-rejects-move-to-hide-mps-income/20080304-1wrp.html

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has rejected the recommendation of a parliamentary committee that rules governing what income and assets state MPs must publicly disclose be relaxed.

A report by the members' ethics and parliamentary privileges committee recommends a relaxation of rules governing what MPs have to list on a register of pecuniary interests.

Currently, MPs have to report any source of income of more than $500 a year.

The rule covers such things as dividends, investment property earnings, farming profits and pensions.

But the committee has recommended the amount should be lifted to link with the tax-free threshold of $6,000 a year.

The committee also backed lifting the reporting requirement for assets from $5,000 to $7,500.

It argued the changes would bring Queensland parliamentary rules in line with rules governing federal MPs.

from crikey:

Olaf Ciolek writes: Re."Stars align for serious campaign finance reform" (Tuesday, item 9). A few months before last year's federal election, The Age published an insightful op-ed piece by the economist Andrew Charlton. He argued that WorkChoices was not just an ideologically motivated assault on the unions. It was also strategically expedient: traditionally, the ALP's coffers have benefited from unions' deep pockets. Charlton believed that with one blow, Howard hoped to neuter both the unions, and the ALP. A similarly plausible duplicity can be read into the Rudd government's recent proposals regarding campaign finance reform. Mayne has estimated the ALP's net worth as between $700m and $1bn. Cutting the disclosure threshold will surely go some way toward increasing transparency in the electoral process. But capping individual donations will greatly affect the comparatively impecunious Liberal party's ability to contest state and federal elections. Indeed, given the decreasing importance of the unions as sources of ALP campaign finance (some 10%), Rudd's mooted reforms are far more consistent with - to use Charlton's term - a "power agenda", than Howard's WorkChoices ever was. If Rudd were really serious about campaign finance reform, he would advocate not just caps on donations, but also caps on spending by political parties. If implemented, Rudd's current proposals would simply perpetuate the ALP's significant financial advantage over Australia's other political parties."

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For sheer hypocrisy, Tony Burke’s attack on Mark Vaile’s moonlighting last week was right up there. After all, Burke himself had been a recipient of corporate-sponsored travel, albeit from a far more controversial source.

Crikey doesn’t often agree with Andrew Bolt, but he was spot on with the following yesterday:

They should get back to work, jeered Rudd's Agriculture Minister, Tony Burke. We need rules about MPs earning cash on the side, lectured Rudd. Hear, hear, the pack gloated.

Excuse me. You want to see an MP earning money on the side? Look no further than Rudd, who earned almost $130,000 during his first three years in Parliament, helping businesses wanting to set up in China.

An MP skipping Parliament to please rich patrons? Look again no further than Rudd, who went on a trip financed by the Beijing AustChina Technology company in 2006, missing not one but several Question Times.

Where the jeers of "bludgers" then? The media holds the Liberals to harsh standards it never imposed on Labor.

Alas, Bolt and the rest of the media have missed the really big story – joining the dots between these Chinese junkets, big Labor donations, property developers and a colourful Asian casino mogul.

Let’s start with exactly what is Beijing AustChina Technology, this mysterious company which Christian Kerr revealed in The Australian last week paid for Rudd, Wayne Swan and the hypocritical Tony Burke to take seven business class trips, mostly to China, over the past four years.

Veteran telecom industry players claim never to have heard of Beijing AustChina Technology. The company’s website trumpets that it acts as an agent for a few telco equipment companies but this press report suggests annual turnover is a rather meager $6 million.

The business address appears to lead to a residential address in Warriewood, North Sydney, and they are a $1 company.

However, company founder Ian Tang, who personally chaperoned Rudd and Swan on one China trip in 2004, now turns out to be pushing a $1.3 billion property development backed by Stanley Ho. Ho, of course, is the colourful entrepreneur who controlled Macau’s casinos for decades and handed control to his son Lawrence a couple of years back rather than face probity tests in Australia when the family joined forces with the Packers to create Melco.

NSW Labor has long been up close and personal with gambling, developer and Packer interests, so it should come as no surprise that Morris Iemma lauded Ian Tang when appointing him an honorary Sydney ambassador.

Such an honour followed the rather generous $258,000 in donations to the NSW ALP by Beijing Austchina Technology, payments which coincided with this period of sponsored travel.

The company’s switch to property development isn’t just a recent thing either. The AustChina group undertook to raise $100 million for a Hong Kong company Pricerite for Chinese commercial developments back in 2005.

Given the Wollongong council fiasco, the opposition should be onto a goldmine exploring sleazy Labor donations. This one goes straight back to the Treasurer and PM, just as Rudd is considering banning all foreign political donations.

Instead, yesterday we had the spectacle of Big Joe attempting to mount an attack in Question Time over dental funding and Millionaire Malcolm calling for a hard-ball Treasury stand on the minimum wage decision.

Lads, we’ve give you the good oil right here. Show us what you’re made of by taking it somewhere in Question Time today. The colourful connections are everywhere. We just need Brian Burke and Hawker Britten in there somewhere.

Iemma finally says enough to donations

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/iemma-finally-says-enough-to-donations/2008/03/22/1205602728855.html

THE NSW Opposition has accused the Iemma Government of making policy on the run after the Premier announced yesterday he would ban political donations.

Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said he would support the proposed ban, but it came after Premier Morris Iemma had spent months ignoring the Coalition's reform calls.

Mr O'Farrell said he had been calling for election-time expenditure caps on parties to limit the amount of money a candidate can spend in a bid for election.

The reforms would reduce the major political parties' reliance on fundraising, and wind down the escalating amounts of money being spent on modern political campaigns.

Mr O'Farrell said a cap would become even more necessary after a ban on political donations, as parties would solely rely on the public purse.

"It would be unreasonable for taxpayers to be signed up for a blank cheque on funding parties," he said.

"We will support any measure which seeks to return integrity and honesty to NSW politics, and we do so against Labor's record fund-raising where they raised $24 million at $110,000 each week for the past four years."

The Greens welcomed the ban proposal, but MP Lee Rhiannon said it must extend to "third parties" to ensure donations did not simply shift to an aligned organisation.

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Labor eyes political donation ban

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23533581-5001021,00.html?source=cmailer

THE Federal Labor Party has said it would consider a NSW proposal for a ban on all private political donations which, if adopted nationally, would establish Australia as one of the few western countries to rely solely on public funding for election campaigns.

However, party officials have raised concerns about the channelling of funds under such a system to third party organisations to run US-style political campaigns.

NSW Labor Party secretary Karl Bitar yesterday confirmed that the public funding model for election campaigns would go ahead in NSW irrespective of the Federal Government's position. "We will go it alone, if we have to," he said.

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Hanson funds claims spur Abbott attack

http://news.smh.com.au/hanson-funds-claims-spur-abbott-attack/20080427-28sj.html

"C-grade celebrities" should not be able to pocket public funding just for contesting an election, federal opposition frontbencher Tony Abbott says.

Right-wing firebrand Pauline Hanson has been accused of siphoning off more than $200,000 in taxpayers' money from the bank accounts of her own political party, News Limited reported on Sunday.

"One of the problems with public funding is that if someone is a celebrity, even a C-grade celebrity, they put themselves on a ballot paper and people will vote for them out of habit," Mr Abbott told Network Ten.

"Obviously, you then get public funding. So, I think it is a cause for concern," he said.

"Plainly, public funding is to fund an election campaign, it isn't designed just go into people's pockets."

The federal government has moved to tighten control on public funding for election candidates who win more than four per cent of the vote.