Improving Corporate Political Donations Disclosure: Lessons from Australia

ABSTRACT

One of the activities corporations should be accountable for is their level of political donations. This paper examines two mandatory corporate political donation disclosure regimes in Australia and identifies three important lessons. First, our review confirms that although few citizens may care enough to scrutinise donation disclosure, there are people interested in such information and we should take political donation disclosure regimes seriously. Second, a well-funded entity must be made responsible not just for administering the disclosure system, but also for reviewing and recommending updates to the system. One disclosure regime examined in this paper was never updated to reflect the existence of the internet until 2007, because no-one was responsible for monitoring the regime and suggesting necessary updates. Finally, details concerning the ultimate source of donations should be provided.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Lorne Cummings for his support of this work, John Dumay for providing helpful comments, anonymous journal reviewers and the delegates at the 6th Australasian Conference on Social and Environmental Accounting for providing feedback and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Shane Leong http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-7629

James Hazelton http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3291-8206

Notes

1. Currently, the NSW threshold is $1000, while the AEC threshold is $10,000 indexed to inflation and will be $13,200 over the 2016/2017 financial year.

2. The Wollongong ‘sex for development’ scandal was caused by the discovery that a town planner used her position to gain approval for a development application that did not comply with the relevant standard (Independent Commission Against Corruption 2008). This was made all the more scandalous due to the fact that the application was lodged by a person with whom she was in a relationship, meaning there was a clear conflict of interest. The Port Macquarie-Hastings scandal occurred because the cost of a community centre was tens of millions higher than was anticipated (ABC News 2008). This particular scandal has had more to do with incompetence than corruption.

3. The Inquiry received 189 submissions, but 8 were not publically available.

4. Appendix 2 provides further details on common submission themes.

5. Six SCEPPF submissions did request a higher disclosure threshold, possibly out of the belief that compared to how much major political parties earn, $1000 donations are too trivial to be worth disclosing. Interestingly, no Green Paper submission recommended increasing the disclosure threshold, suggesting that a threshold of $10,000 indexed to inflation is high enough.