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Photo: Thennicke, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Access to ministers goes mostly to the groups with the most at stake and the most money. Nobody has to break a law for this to happen. The Grattan Institute's 2018 audit, Who's in the room?, put numbers on it, and some of its fixes are only now arriving.
Since the early 2000s, more Australians agree that "people in government look after themselves" and that "government is run for a few big interests" (Australian Election Study, cited by Grattan). In a 2018 poll of 2,218 people, 85% said at least some federal MPs were corrupt. 56% said they had witnessed or suspected an official favouring a donor or supporter. The share was higher among people who had worked in federal government themselves.
Grattan's report asks what sits behind that feeling, using public records.
Parties declared $43 million in donations at the 2016 federal election. Just 5% of donors gave more than half of it. About 40% of the parties' money came from sources the public couldn't see, much of it probably small gifts under the disclosure threshold, then about $13,500.
Some donations track policy fights. Gambling-industry donations spiked in 2010–11, while the industry campaigned against the Gillard government's poker machine reforms. Labor backed down, and the donations fell back.
In July 2018, about 500 commercial lobbyists sat on the federal register. Another 1,755 people held sponsored "orange passes" that let them walk Parliament House unescorted. Many in-house lobbyists for companies, unions and charities never had to register at all.
The federal government didn't publish ministerial diaries. Queensland and NSW did. There, 62–63% of senior ministers' outside meetings were with businesses or industry bodies. Industries whose profits hinge on government decisions, such as mining, property, gambling and finance, got more meetings than their size in the economy would suggest.
Since 1990, about a quarter of former federal ministers and assistant ministers took jobs with special interests after politics. Ministers promise to wait 18 months before lobbying on matters they handled. Grattan notes the promise is administrative only, with no penalty for breaking it. About 68% of ministers and shadow ministers had declared corporate hospitality.
Four moves from the resources portfolio into the industry it oversees:
| Politician | In office | Afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Ian Macfarlane | Federal Minister for Industry when the mining tax was repealed (2014) | Chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council from 2016 |
| Martin Ferguson | Federal Minister for Resources and Energy, 2007–2013 | Chair of the advisory board of the oil and gas industry's peak body, APPEA |
| Ben Wyatt | Treasurer of Western Australia, left politics in 2021 | Joined the boards of Woodside and Rio Tinto in 2021 |
| Mark McGowan | Premier of Western Australia, left office in 2023 | Has advised BHP and Mineral Resources |
None of it breaks a rule. That's the point: the system allows it.
In 2010 the Rudd government proposed a 40% tax on mining profits above the bond rate, as the Henry tax review recommended. The Minerals Council of Australia launched an advertising campaign within days. Mining companies spent about $22 million on ads; the government spent about $9 million replying. After Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd, the government negotiated a narrower tax with the three biggest miners, estimated at the time to cost $60 billion in revenue over ten years. The Coalition repealed it in 2014.
Grattan's point is not that miners were wrong to argue their case. Everyone may lobby. The worry is who can afford to be heard loudest, and whether ministers ever hear the people who can't.
Grattan names unions, industry bodies and GetUp! among the biggest political advertisers of the past decade. Unions are major donors too. The issue is money and access wherever they come from, not one side of politics.
Sociologist Alvin Gouldner described the near-universal urge to return a favour. High Court Justice Stephen Gageler applied it to politics in McCloy v New South Wales (2015): "the basic human tendency towards reciprocity means that payments all too readily tend to result in favours." No bribe is needed. A system that puts the same people in the same rooms, year after year, produces the tilt on its own.
| 2018 recommendation | Status |
|---|---|
| A federal anti-corruption body | Done. The National Anti-Corruption Commission began work on 1 July 2023. |
| Lower the donation disclosure threshold to $5,000, with faster reporting | Legislated. From 1 January 2027 the threshold drops from $17,300 to donations above $5,000, with disclosure within days during elections. |
| Cap election spending to cut reliance on big donors | Legislated in the same package, with donation caps: $50,000 a year from one donor to one recipient, indexed. |
Grattan's other asks, publishing federal ministerial diaries, linking the lobbyist register to orange passes and making the cooling-off period enforceable, sit outside electoral law. Check their status before you assume either way. The new donation rules first apply at an election after 1 January 2027; watch who they help and who they don't.
Australians gave the world the secret ballot. Tasmania and Victoria began voting in private in 1856, while British voters still declared their choice in public, where a boss or a landlord could see it. Britain followed in 1872, and in the United States it became known as the "Australian ballot" (Wikipedia, 2026a).
And Australians still turn up, sausage in hand. Community groups run barbecues outside polling places to raise money for the school or church hosting the vote; "democracy sausage" was the Australian word of the year in 2016 (Wikipedia, 2026b). Few countries treat voting as something you do with your neighbours on a Saturday morning.
In 2013 some people in Indi, a rural seat in north-east Victoria, felt nobody in Canberra was listening to them. Instead of complaining, they formed a group, Voices for Indi, talked with their neighbours about what the region needed, and asked a local woman, Cathy McGowan, to stand. She had no party and no big donors. She beat the sitting member by 431 votes (Wikipedia, 2026c).
When she retired in 2019, the same community chose another local independent, Helen Haines, and won again. The seat had passed from one neighbour to the next, with no party machine in between. It's the answer to everything above: when enough ordinary people organise, they get heard.
Donation caps, fast disclosure, public funding, open diaries, and a voucher every voter spends. Seattle has run one since 2017. Here's what happened.
Photo: Betterkeks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
After students occupied its parliament in 2014, Taiwan built vTaiwan: an online process that finds the rules people who disagree can both accept.
Photo: Artemas Liu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Quadratic voting lets you show how much you care, not just which side you're on. How it works, where it's been tried, and what can go wrong.
Photo: Hustvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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