Lessig’s “Change Congress”

I went to see Prof Lawrence Lessig talk on Friday night about his new project, Change Congress. Change Congress’s aim is to encourage candidates to sign on to a new campaign finance system to change the role of money in politics.

As Lessig said on Friday, the problem isn’t that money is in politics, it’s that the money is in the wrong places. Corporate lobbyists are able to buy access to politicians for their clients which may lead them to make decisions not strictly in the interests of their constituents. It’s not so much that lobbyist dollars and corporate donations “buy” the vote of the politician but that they may feel obliged to reciprocate and come to a position on a Bill for less than the right reasons.

Money in politics, as it currently stands, breeds a mistrust of politicians just as Big Pharma has made people wary of their doctors’ advice (including a decrease in the proportion of parents immunising their kids, for starters). In order to rebuild trust we need to change the donations system so that donations come only from individuals and are capped at $100. The aim of this is to break the dependence on corporate donations and have the candidate look to their constituents and individual supporters for the money they need to run a campaign. It’s hard to be beholden to a special interest group if all they can do is ask their members to donate the maximum legal amount. Even then, would all these donors say “I’m a member of such and such a group and we all support you”?

Lessig refers to the role of money in politics as corruption. It corrupts the process. Money buys influence, access, etc. The acts of the members of Congress may be completely legal and even ethical but they are still corrupt. This is what Lessig terms “good souls corruption” rather than direct bribery, extortion and evil people being evil. We need to reform the culture of politics in order to do away with this corruption which is no more an integral part of American democracy than the butterfly ballot. To learn more, watch the video here.

It was interesting to note that there were essentially two types of people at Friday’s lecture. The first group you would expect to see: lawyers, Law academics, Judges, etc. The second group was young, internet-savvy, politically aware nerds. Yes, some of these young people were Law students (or academics) but it was still good to see young people getting engaged with topics which may be considered quite dry, even within the topic of politics.

Prof Lessig’s reputation as a revolutionary, intellectual reformer (a man with a vision rather than a Kalashnikov) means that people are willing to listen to the message of hope he brings. In the past, it was a message that the restrictive copyright system didn’t have to be the way our creative industries worked. Now, the message is that the corrupting influence of large sums of money handed over from industry to politicians doesn’t have to be the way politics works.

In Australia, we are lucky enough to have a system of public funding for elections. Federally, you get about $2.50 for each first preference vote you get. In Queensland, you get about $2 per vote if you can prove you spent that $2. So, at least in Queensland, it still takes donations up front before an election to run a campaign unless you’ve got heaps of money in the coffers.

We see businesspeople like Clive Palmer, Silvio Pradella and others such as trade unions and farming and business groups pumping tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of the two major political parties. Premier Anna Bligh went as far as to say that Clive Palmer had “bought” the LNP and the charge has been levelled at the ALP that they are in the pocket of the unions (a theme the Liberals ran hard on at 2007’s federal election).

Perhaps the public financing of election isn’t working as well as it could be if these private donations are still high enough that the major parties can accuse each other of being unduly influenced by moneyed interests. I don’t doubt that people listen to these messages and weigh up in their mind if they’d rather be ruled by a party which owes its success to trade unions or to big business.

Of course, public funding doesn’t mean that we have to ban individual donations. I don’t think that would be particularly democratic. What should happen, though, is that donations should be restricted to individuals (because incorporate bodies don’t get a vote) and be capped so as to avoid an unfairly weighted level of “influence”. Elected representatives are there to represent all their constituents, not just those who voted for them and certainly not just those who made a whopping great contribution to their election campaign.

I’d like to take the ideas of Change Congress on board and help organise a similar campaign in Australia but I think it might be more wise for a group like GetUp! to run a campaign. We’ve got to get big donations out of politics. It’s fine to have the Business Council of Australia and the ACTU try to influence politicians, I wouldn’t deny them the opportunity to have their say; what’s not fine is having a group put pressure on politicians financially as well as by pushing for certain law outcomes.

If we want a Parliament who are working in the interests of their constituents and the nation (rather than the coal industry) then we need a system in place which breaks the dependence on industry donations. Even if the ALP aren’t making decisions on the ETS at the behest of the coal industry, they are at least perceived to be doing so. This mistrust of the processes of government doesn’t help the public’s perception of the worth of democracy.