Opinion: Vested interests gaming democracy

SIMON BEVILACQUA: DEMOCRACY was hijacked in the 2018 Tasmanian state election. And it must never be allowed to happen again.

There needs to be a forensic analysis of the gaming industry’s financial and in-kind backing of the Liberal Party and its support groups, says Simon Bevilacqua.

DEMOCRACY was hijacked in the 2018 Tasmanian state election.

And it must never be allowed to happen again.

There needs to be a forensic analysis of the gaming industry’s financial and in-kind backing of the Liberal Party and its support groups.

A former supreme court judge told me such an inquiry should be independent, made public, and led by a senior barrister or judge.

Once we have the information, we must build a rigorous regulatory framework to govern political donations and campaigns.

The hijackers appear to have found a legal path through loopholes in donation and campaign regulation in the same way multinationals use accounting and shortcomings in company law to minimise paying a reasonable amount of tax.

We must close those loopholes.

Premier Will Hodgman this week put electoral reform on the agenda.

That’s good news because our political process has been debased.

There was one booming, repetitive and widespread voice in this campaign: that of the gaming industry standing behind the Liberals.

The Liberals’ television scare campaign against minority government started a month before any other party, with saturation coverage in peak viewing times and during major sport.

The Love Your Local campaign joined the fray in a classic pincer movement.

Pubs were draped in huge anti-Green and anti-Labor banners, and hotel employees sported shirts with the same message.

The Liberals are required to come clean — belatedly, in about a year’s time — about their donors and how much they gave the party, but we may never know how much went to Love Your Local.

I am told there is no requirement for disclosure because the lobby is not a political party.

That’s wrong. This was a two-pronged attack.

I am also told the gaming industry was free to give individual candidates up to $13,000, and in-kind support and other assistance, without having to declare it.

The road from Hobart northeast through Sorell and beyond was dominated by blue Liberal candidate signs at a ratio of about 10:1, and it was the same west from the capital to Westerway.

There was an unprecedented blitzkrieg of social media and internet advertising too.

Senior Liberals have said that those who claim their campaign was tainted are disrespecting the will of Tasmanians at the ballot box.

What rot. Advertising works. That’s why companies spend on TV, newspapers, radio and online. If it did not work, the gaming industry would not have spent an estimated and disputed $5 million.

Concerns are widespread.

There was one booming, repetitive and widespread voice in this campaign: that of the gaming industry standing behind the Liberals.

Former Tasmanian Liberal deputy premier Sir Max Bingham told me he was “greatly concerned”, saying it was a “salutary lesson for all democratic idealists”.

“We’ll just have to grin and bear it and learn from it,” Sir Max told me. “Since the gaming industry was prepared to spend so much, let’s see what we can get out of them for that social licence.”

Former New South Wales supreme court judge Anthony Whealy, chairman of corruption watchdog Transparency International, said payments to the Liberals, Love Your Local and candidates should be made public.

“It’s a scandal,” he told me. “The people are entitled to know.”

He suggested an inquiry by a local judge or senior barrister to provide a public report.

He warned that Tasmanians should also be kept informed of any benefits that now flow to the industry from the Government.

Former Victorian supreme court judge David Harper told me the election left “absolutely no doubt that we need serious electoral reform”.

“There’s a real inevitability that the means by which parties fund their actions, especially at the time of an election, open the way for serious corruption. I’m not suggesting it has happened in this situation but the public cannot be sure the system is clean,” he said.

Former speech writer for Gough Whitlam and Field minority state government adviser Pete Hay said the campaign advantage provided by the gaming industry meant “the Liberals did buy this election”.

“Is that a gross abuse of democratic practice, an act of corruption even? You bet it is,” he told me.

The Labor Party, the Jacqui Lambie Network and the Greens were howled down by a megaphone trumpeting a highly orchestrated, multifaceted scare campaign that reignited old community divisions and was based on exaggeration, omission and demonstrably false statistics.

Its falsehoods were pointed out but the megaphone kept blaring.

Putting criticism of the campaign’s integrity aside, the big issue is that one voice dominated this election — that of an industry which stood to profit from the result.

That’s not democratic, it’s autocratic.

More than 100 years ago, Hobart judge Andrew Inglis Clark, principal author of the Australian Constitution, wrote: “I desire the abolition of every institution that confers political power or personal privilege as an appendage to birth from a particular parentage, or to the possession of wealth.”

We should sate Inglis Clark’s democratic desire and reform our electoral system.