Election 'shocks' should be a warning to politicians: stop sloganeering and start listening | Lenore Taylor

It’s baffling how politicians continue to try to impose business as usual when the electorate keeps telling them it thinks business as usual is bollocks.

There’s a pattern in these years of political upheaval and election result “shocks” that happen so regularly they really shouldn’t still be shocking. Voters want leaders who will speak plainly and promise change in the lives of ordinary people, the average workers who can’t employ lobbyists or avoid taxes through family trusts or offshore havens and whose lived experience defies the assertion that policy benefits for business will quickly flow through to benefits for them.

Yet again and again we see leaders running election campaigns based largely on repeating meaningless slogans, like Theresa May’s “strong and stable” or Malcolm Turnbull’s “jobs and growth”. Sure “Make America great again” was equally inane, but it at least contained the suggestion that things would be different.

These are times when voters seem determined to upend the old consensus, to call time on the view that governments should, when possible, keep out of the way and allow markets to deliver prosperity to all. We shouldn’t be surprised when slogans that effectively say “trust us and we’ll keep things safe and steady” (and the same) don’t really cut it with an electorate is minded to shake things up.

Nor is it feasible for politicians to respond by trying to shut down or sideline civil society voices making this case for change. And yet, as collated in a report by the Human Rights Law Centre unveiled at this week’s Progress conference in Melbourne, this is exactly what the Australian government has been doing.

Community legal centres, refugee groups and others have lost government funding; those that do get money are forced to sign funding agreements that prevent, or discourage, them from advocacy. Community legal centres are dissuaded from lobbying for law reform and the Border Force Act was amended to stop guards or teachers or other workers in offshore detention centres from speaking about the conditions they saw there.

Coalition MPs, some of them now ministers, are demanding environmental groups lose their tax-deductible status unless they spend 75% of their budget on “practical environmental work” like planting trees, rather than lobbying or protesting for pro-environmental policies or outcome.

But surely environment groups are supposed to lobby for the environment, and civil society groups need to advocate for their cause.

Now the government says it will ban foreign donations to political parties, but only if the prohibition extends to advocacy groups, because it claims they exercise “as much influence over the political process” as political parties themselves.

“We don’t want to create a loophole where we look like we’re fixing a problem by saying political parties can’t accept foreign money but then create a loophole where foreign money can pour into third-party interest groups and others, who are just as politically active and have just as much influence over the political process” special minister of state Scott Ryan told Fran Kelly.

By “political process” he must mean election campaigns, since obviously advocacy groups can’t make laws. If so, I understand his argument that any ban has to extend further than the parties themselves otherwise foreign donations could be channelled through the equivalent of the US political action committees.

But he’ll need to be very careful about defining which groups are hit by a ban and for what kinds of activities. Many of his own MP’s are incensed at GetUp!’s well-funded campaigns, against the Adani mine and against individual MPs at the last election, and now being deployed with gusto against immigration minister Peter Dutton. GetUp! is actually lobbying for a foreign donations ban and says it doesn’t mind if it is included, but where would a ban leave international organisations like Oxfam?

In 2010 the mining industry’s $22m campaign against Kevin Rudd’s resources tax helped bring down the prime minister and most of the biggest miners are multinationals, listed on Australian and overseas stock exchanges, so presumably the fees they pay to the Minerals Council for such campaigns would also need to be included.

And if we accept that large donations from foreigners could be intended to influence the political process why should we maintain the fiction that all domestic donors are motivated by an altruistic desire to help the functioning of our democracy, and in no way by an expectation that they are buying influence or access to decision makers?

All sides of politics have long accepted that donations laws need to be changed, but every attempt to do so has foundered because parties have tried to game the changes for their political self interest.

And the various attempts to shut down the voices of civil society advocates should be seen in exactly the same way.

As the soon-to-be-ex president of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, told the conference, it all amounts to “an ideological assault on advocacy by community bodies that receive any form of government funding”. And she quoted from a report from the UN special rapporteur last year which concluded the government was seeking to effectively gag civil society because it saw advocacy as political opposition.

But advocacy groups give voice to the marginalised, the people who can’t afford to make a big donation or buy a seat at an expensive fundraising dinner, and to environmental objectives that our economic accounts don’t assign any immediate economic value.

They give people a richer and more active way to participate in democratic debate than listening to slogans every three years and lining up to decide between often underwhelming choices on election day.

Governments taking a smarter, longer-term view than tactics and slogans for their next election campaign might see that, in a time of of political rebellion, where voters are demanding their concerns be heard, it would be much smarter to listen to civil society than to sideline it.