In the home stretch to the voice referendum, the billionaire Clive Palmer is once again hoping to influence voters with a massive spend on political ads.
The $2m Palmer is reported to be spending to make claims without evidence that Australians will be forced to “pay the rent” if the yes side gets up is chump change compared with his previous efforts.
These include the $117m spent at the 2022 election and before that the $83m his company Mineralogy donated to the United Australia party for the 2019 election, much of which went on ads targeted at the then Labor leader Bill Shorten.
That was also the campaign in which Labor failed to counteract misinformation that it intended to introduce a death tax.
These headwinds planted the seed in Labor for wide-ranging electoral law reforms: truth-in-political advertising and spending and donation caps. When Labor took government in May 2022 the special minister of state, Don Farrell, revealed these new policies later given the tick of approval by a parliamentary inquiry.
Farrell is expected to reveal the government’s response this year, with a bill to be legislated before the next election.
The referendum campaign has done nothing to dim the government’s enthusiasm for truth in political advertising, with voice proponents including the minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, labelling many arguments deployed against it “misinformation”.
But the director of the federal Liberal party, Andrew Hirst, has hit back at Labor, telling Guardian Australia it is “quite remarkable how [its] concerns about money in politics seem to have been put on hold while tens of millions of dollars of corporate donations have flowed to the yes campaign”.
Despite that salvo, before too long the major parties will be looking to deal on electoral reform.
Their interests align: for Labor to take out big corporate money like Palmer’s, which it says “distorts the political conversation”; and for the Coalition to prevent large donations that help elect independents, who now hold seven heartland Liberal seats.
The Liberal party has resisted caps on spending and donations, arguing that Labor lacks a mandate for the changes, but it has never ruled them out. It is more firmly set against boosting the number of territory senators but Labor sees an opening.
The major parties are so often at loggerheads but on electoral law the preference is bipartisanship. Even while Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese were trading accusations of bad faith about the voice, Farrell and his shadow, Jane Hume, were able to sit down and hammer out a deal on the referendum machinery bill.
Labor saved the reviled referendum pamphlet to win Coalition support and passed a bill without the bells and whistles demanded by the crossbench.
If the Coalition rejects a deal on caps, the crossbench path would be difficult for Labor.
The Greens want a restrictive donation cap of just $1,000 and bans on a wide range of industries, including fossil fuels.
Climate 200, the fundraising body that supported the teal independent candidates, argues major parties and incumbents already have massive advantages.
Kate Chaney, the independent member for Curtin, has introduced a private member’s bill which aims to strip away some of these advantages, ban donations from harmful industries and require member or shareholder approval for union or corporate donations.
By arguing this should be done before any conversation on caps, the bill sets an extremely high bar for the government, one it’s unlikely to even try to vault.
Climate 200 fears that Victorian reforms will be the model for a federal Labor-Coalition deal: smaller donations but more public funding, giving millions to political parties that run at every election.
Simon Holmes à Court, the Climate 200 convener, says he will be watching to see if reforms go beyond transparency towards “locking out challengers and entrenching the two-party system as public support for the major parties continues to decline”.
Even bipartisan attempts to amend electoral law can fail, as they did under the Gillard government when a deal struck with the Tony Abbott-led opposition fell apart because the major parties proposing increased public funding was “completely toxic” out in the electorate.
By that logic a multipartisan approach is best. But it would be a difficult needle to thread, to craft reforms that allow enough fundraising and spending for insurgent independents to take on the major parties but not so much that billionaires can exert an influence.
That’s if the political will existed. Clearly majority government is preferable for Labor rather than allowing a growing crossbench, with Greens and independents just as capable of taking seats from the left and right.
On Saturday voters will go to the polls, possibly for the last time under the old rules in which lies are legal and the only brake on big money is how much those donating or spending are prepared to lose on a vanity project or lost cause.
Dutton complains about Qantas’s and others corporates’ support for yes and progressives cry foul when they see Palmer further tipping the scales for no.
But when the referendum is over, Labor and the Coalition may find themselves on the same side. Then it will be over to voters to decide how badly they want big money out of politics – or if the regulatory cure is worse than the disease.
