I’m glad the video covered some good points, I recommend viewing or at least skimming, instead of knee-jerking at the title.

One of the big issues with political donations, being a form of capital influencing politics, is that people with more available capital can have more influence. On an idealist level, this contradicts some expectations we might have of a democracy with fair representation, like the ideal of one-person-one-vote. But looking at present conditions rather than ideals, we have to consider wealth inequality: I’m no expert but I think it says a lot that in 2023, the Australia Institute claimed “Ninety-three per cent of the gains from economic growth have gone to the top 10 per cent of income earners. The rest of us — the bottom 90 per cent — have only got 7 per cent of that economic growth.” (also note, “the top 10 per cent of income earners get a lot of their income from profit”, whereas the bottom 90 per cent mainly get it from wages. The importance being they have very different political values and priorities to most workers.) So, we can see that even though the worker class vastly outnumber the owner class who make money from profit, their capital and therefore ability to influence politics, even as individuals rather than interested corporations, far outbalances the masses even if we were somehow all aligned.

When some parties have enough funding for constant print, internet and television ads while others are basically unknown by most until election day, it’s a shame. Look at Clive Palmer as an example of disproportionate funds, although the same applies to the big parties even if we’re so used to it. I’ve seen some countries give free airtime (maybe 5 or 15 minutes?) for every party or candidate to explain their platform, I think that’s a great idea at the least to reduce unfair advantage.

Another reason for removing lobbying is that I’d rather my union (for example) not waste their money on it. In a recent survey they did, one of the questions was what priorities do we think the most of their money should be spent on, and one of the options is lobbying the Labor Party. It’s just a coping mechanism for putting their preferred party ahead in a broken system.

I think it’s nice to see that that the proposed South Australia laws also acknowledge the status quo and in some cases give some advantage to newer parties which don’t have all the seats and existing exposure of the main parties.

It would need to be done in a way to not disproportionately harm minor parties and independents who depend on small donations from individuals, which is of course the opposite to what the ALP and conservatives would prefer.

South Australia is currently consulting on draft laws to cap political donations, but there are potential constitutional issues and practical shortcomings with the proposed laws. It doesn’t adequately kerb third-party campaigners, which could create a problem similar to America has with the creation of PACs/Super PACs. There have been previous High Court cases which have made it harder to block third-party campaigners, but Anne Twomey here thinks a more carefully-targeted law could be constructed to address this problem rather than ignoring it entirely.

Can I donate to your campaign to ban political donations?