(Image: Private Media)

This is part 16 in a series. For the full series, go here.

While many of the problems in our democracy are structural and resistant to even concerted efforts to fix them because of their embedded nature, the evidence from what is actually working in Australian democracy suggests there are plausible options for reform that can halt the loss of Australian democracy.

To use our taxonomy of democracy problems, here is what the evidence tells us about dealing with them:

International problems

While problems like inequality and income stagnation — and the extremism and tribalism they encourage — are global, addressing them is a matter of political will, not genius global-scale policymaking. The tools for increasing wages growth — lifting public sector wages, providing greater protections for workers and reducing business reliance on temporary foreign workers — are straightforward. Citizens will have more faith in a democratic system if it looks after them rather than inflicting precarity and real income cuts on them.

And while there’s little we can do to reverse the spread of a highly toxic social media environment, we can address some of its symptoms. Deplatforming extremists from major social media platforms works. Extremists will always exist, but it is mainstream acceptance and the distribution tools of large media that they crave to spread their message and recruit. They are far less powerful when denied access to major platforms.

Structural and systemic problems

Reformers can dream of constitutional change to deliver a better democracy — starting with Indigenous recognition — but the failure to advance something as widely supported as recognition is a reminder of how limited a pathway that is. Our hollowed-out political parties are also the result of long-term social and economic change, which is so far only being remedied on a very limited scale by the various grassroots movements like the Voices of campaigns. Nor is our reliance on extractive industries going to disappear any time soon. In each of these cases, addressing the symptoms rather than fundamental cause appears the only option.

For example, as NSW has shown, curbing the influence and inappropriate access to decisionmakers of corrupting industries like property development and fossil fuels can deliver better policy outcomes. The chief mechanism for curbing influence is — as NSW has shown — cutting off donations. Rather than targeting individual industries — which deems some sectors innately good and some bad — all donations from bodies or individuals not registered to vote should be banned, as suggested by Malcolm Turnbull and, more recently, Michael Yabsley, in the best political book of the year, Dark Money. The only donations allowed, from enrolled individuals, should be capped at a low level.

And this needs to extend to trade union donations to the ALP as well, although unions should still be able to collect opt-in donations from their members.

That still leaves the task of regulating access to politicians, which is likely to still disproportionately favour large corporations, peak bodies, lobbyists and influential figures like media executives. The NSW ICAC’s proposals for enhanced lobbyist registration and reporting requirements, and detailed ministerial meeting diary legislation, along with a requirement for decisionmakers to seek the views of all affected parties, would go much of the way to exposing the lobbying of decisionmakers to public view, but should be applied to all politicians.

More independent institutions are also needed to bolster integrity and trust in public administration. A properly structured federal ICAC is only the most obvious. It’s also clear that politicians cannot be trusted not to rort public funding for partisan purposes. Grants administration must be isolated from political influence, with ministers and their offices prohibited from having any role in the allocation of grants. An independent climate change authority should be established to determine Australia’s emissions abatement obligations consistent with the international agreements we have signed, establish an annual carbon budget and be empowered to fine emitters who don’t reduce their emissions in accordance with the budget, with a tradeable permit scheme.

The irony of such measures is that in order to restore faith in democracy we have to reduce democracy by giving greater powers to independent officials. But we already recognise that a democratic approach to decisionmaking isn’t always the best one, because of the pressures that can be brought to bear on democratically elected decisionmakers by vested interests. We have an independent Reserve Bank, and an independent media regulator, and independent banking and corporate regulators and most jurisdictions have an independent auditor for government; our national broadcasters are independent of government. State governments have established independent panels for property development regulation, removing elected officials from deciding on local planning issues.

In each of those cases, and for other independent regulators and statutory bodies throughout our governmental systems, politicians establish the broad remit and rules to be applied, but the application of those remits and rules is left to independent agencies. In key areas where our democracy has been damaged, governments either seek to undermine independent bodies — attacking ICAC, cutting funding to bodies like the ANAO and the ABC and politicising the public service — or control both rule-setting and administration themselves (think control of grants, where ministers set the remit for a grants program, then go and administer it themselves to ensure grants go where they want them to).

Carefully distinguishing the roles of politicians and “administrators” (understood broadly preserves democracy and limits the corruption that flows from decisions being made by politicians needing to win elections. It also addresses the objection of politicians who (at least when in government) defend pork-barrelling by insisting they’re elected to govern and can do whatever they like as long as they get reelected.

This argument doesn’t wash any more for pork-barrelling grants than on, say, keeping interest rates low for political reasons, or failing to regulate media companies for favourable coverage.

An ideal environment to restore our damaged democracy would be one in which politicians set the broad policy direction free from the influence of vested interests, and independent administrators got on with the task of delivering those goals.