Australian Democracy as Oligarchy

A. C. Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Abstract

Seventy per cent of Australians say the government serves itself rather than the people it represents (Cameron and McAllister, 2016). Eighty-five per cent believe at least some federal MPs are corrupt; eighteen per cent believe most or all of them are (Transparency International Australia, 2018). At the same time the country slipped eight points on the Corruption Perceptions Index between 2012 and 2017 — the only top-ten democracy to do so (Transparency International, 2018). These are not the views of cynics. They are the steady, repeated reading of citizens about the government built in their name. This paper takes the Grattan Institute's 2018 audit of access and influence in Australian politics — Who's in the room? — as its evidence base, and argues that what the survey numbers describe is not a failure of representative democracy but its predictable output. Five per cent of donors fund half of every election cycle. Forty per cent of party money has no identifiable source. There are three orange-pass holders walking the corridors of Parliament House for every lobbyist on the public register. A quarter of federal ministers leave office and walk through a revolving door into the very industries they regulated. None of this is illegal. All of it is structural. The design produces the room, and the room produces the policy. Direct democracy — the first OMXUS goal — is not a complaint about the people in that room. It is a proposal to dissolve the room.

Keywords: representative democracy, policy capture, political donations, lobbying, revolving door, structural corruption, direct democracy, Australia, Grattan Institute, OMXUS

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1. The Room

There is a room in Australian politics. You have never been in it. Most people who write about it have never been in it either, which is why it takes a Gra