Please, let's get money out of our politics

The Electoral Finance Act is up for repeal, but what will take its place?

Walt Whitman once described American politicians as, amongst other things, "pimps, malignants, murderers, jobbers, mail-riflers, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, expell’d gamblers, monte-dealers, pimpled men, gaudy outside with gold chains made from people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together".

Perhaps Illinois’ erstwhile governor, Rod Blagojevich (he of the hairstyle to rival Peter Dunne’s), saw Whitman's terms as aspirational. While his inventive use of the gubernatorial prerogative might serve as a rather exceptional example, US politics has an unhealthily close relationship with big money, and always has had. And with our Parliament set to embark on yet another rewrite of our campaign financing laws – the ill-fated Electoral Finance Act being (rightly) earmarked for extinction – it’s perhaps timely to reflect on the political-money nexus.

Recent incidents here only serve to highlight the need to, if not remove, then certainly heavily constrain money’s influence on politics. Taito Phillip Field is before the courts. Winston Peters fought and lost the Owen Glenn issue in the court of public opinion. Revelations emerging in the Herald about Yang Liu, a Chinese businessman of a number of guises, suggest some unsettling links to various politicians from both National and Labour.

When you consider our world-leading transparency rating, then consider how bad things could be, it provides incentive to put in place rigourous rules to keep things clean.

For if at one end of the spectrum lies Blagojevich, not far away is the likes of Dick Cheney and his umbilical cord-like-ties to Halliburton. The Halliburton-Cheney relationship is well known. The history of Halliburton serves as a salutary example of the symbiotic relationships which develop when money and power mixes.

Halliburton began in the early 1900s as a small Texas construction firm called Brown & Root (as readers of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biographies will know well). In the 1940s, it was still small but growing and ambitious. It then forged financial ties to the then-budding, but equally ambitious, politician Johnson. As Johnson rose on the back of substantial money, so too did his backers, which just happened to win some major infrastructure tenders. Congressman Johnson became a man of considerable wealth and immense political power. Brown & Root/Halliburton became an immensely large and wealthy company with considerable political contacts.

(There is some irony in that while Johnson was a politician of exceedingly dubious methods, he was largely responsible for two of the most progressive initiatives ever to survive the US Congressional quagmire – the civil rights legislation and his Great Society initiatives.)

Blagojevich, Cheney and Johnson are emblematic of a political culture in which private money is central to the process. Nor is it just the US. In Britain, the Sunday Times recently alleged that four Labour peers were willing to be paid to put forward amendments to change legislation. In Australia, the New South Wales and Western Australian state legislatures have been beset with scandals around fundraising and lobbyists.

What Parliament has to begin thinking about is a clean sheet with respect to how we run our politics.

For starters, if private money is to be in politics, it needs to be entirely transparent. The use of secretive trusts to fund parties and campaigns must be banned. Tight limits on the amounts that political parties can spend would reduce the need for private (and public) cash. Third party campaigning should be allowed but under strict transparency rules. The Parliamentary funding of our political parties needs to be opened to public gaze by making it subject to the Official Information Act. Even a register of lobbyists might help to keep our politics as clean as we like to think it is.

One shudders to think what National and Act might come up with, if left to their own devices, while Labour’s credibility has been dented by the EFA. Perhaps a shiny new MP could make a name for her or himself by championing the cause of a clean-money democracy? Or perhaps a couple from different parties? A cross-party approach to high standards in public office would be something to admire at a time when politicians’ stocks are at a low ebb.