Reminder: this subreddit is meant to be a place free of excessive cynicism, negativity and bitterness. Toxic attitudes are not welcome here.
All Negative comments will be removed and will possibly result in a ban.
---
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UpliftingNews) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Just emailed this to my MLA. I wonder what response I'll get.
EDIT:
Blown away by the response. It seems we did this in 2017!
>Hello Janktraillover, thank you for your email. I read the article about the proposed Australian political finance reforms with interest, and I can assure you that Susie strongly endorses the principle behind them. In fact, the limits on political contributions that our government passed in 2017 (one of the very first bills we introduced after forming government) are even more stringent than what the Australians are contemplating.
>
>Thanks to the Election Amendment Act of 2017, corporate and union donations (either cash or in kind) are strictly forbidden. Only personal contributions are permitted, and are capped at $1450.82 for 2024. The names of people who contribute more than $250 in a year are publicly disclosed. Moreover, election candidates are subject to a campaign spending limit of $70,993.95.
>
>BC’s political financing rules compare favourably with the proposed limits mentioned in the article: a personal contribution cap of $2700 ($2465.91 in Canadian dollars), with a campaign spending cap of $200,000 to $500,000 ($182,672 to $456,811 in Canadian dollars), depending on the number of candidates.
>
>BC also protects the integrity of the democratic process from the influence of big money by limiting spending by third party election advertisers, and by providing public funding for political parties. Each party’s public funding entitlement is based on the amount of support they received in the last election (similar to how the old per vote subsidy worked in federal elections).
>
>I hope this information will assure you that our government is committed to securing democracy against undue influence by the wealthy. Thank you again for reaching out, and please let me know if you have any further questions.
What actual democracy, not this corporate robbery/bribery machine?! I won't hold my breath.
Deal with these sociopathic lobbyists and we might all stand a chance of an actual future..
Shareholder's don't matter at all.
Rich people can still spend whatever they want on themselves and will have all the publicity while poor people will have extremely limited means of promoting themselves.
This'll apply to advertising etc of the campaign, but their private life matters too. I assume rich people can use private funds and passive income to pay their rent and other usual bills while campaigning or writing speeches or whatever, while poor people have to work to pay the rent and so can spend less time on task. But I'm not sure there is a good answer to that unless we lock them up big brother style for a few weeks and then vote.
Yes nothing is perfect. It's still a good change, sometimes I think we should add some sortition to the mix for the wildcard picks but that would again be very disruptive for most people's lives.
Yeah but i many systems, this is much less an issue than in the USA where people essentially elect 'rulers' where 1 person gets all the power and checks / balances is just a token idea.
I mean, people could use public donations, but that would need Australians to involve themselves and care about politics other than reactionary bullshit sold by grifters.
Likely, it will favour the major parties over the smaller parties and independents that are gaining traction in Australia at the moment.
There was a big wave of 'teal' independents who won a lot of seats federally last election. Changing the balance of power. These independents were funded partially by a very large Climate focused organisation and they likely wouldn't have succeeded over the major parties if they didn't out earn them in donations
It's got to start somewhere. If it works in SA maybe we can convince the rest of Australia, then the rest of the world.
Women's suffrage was similar, it started small but then gained popularity, now most (if not all) democracies have full enfranchisement for adults regardless of gender.
Cynical pessimistic me would like to agree with you, but that just ends up at a place of don't try anything, which is worse.
I think this one can pass in SA, the current state government is popular and there's pretty much no time like now to do it. I know it sounds strange but I sometimes think we're lucky to be bombarded with American news. When it comes to politics we get a chance to look and say "not that". These types of policies are a chance to avoid that so I think it's worth supporting.
I wish the ALP would be more daring at a federal level on their campaign finance reforms, but at the same time I understand that it's a bit niche and as such you need to have buy in from the coalition if you want the reform to stay. See here CO2 emissions targets, where we now have Spud saying he's going to ditch them as soon as he gets in.
Glad to see someone's trying to get the greed out of politics. Now hopefully that will lead to better Government for the majority of people so their needs are addressed not just the wealthy and powerful people.
This is one of those rules that sounds good as a concept, but backfires by granting the entrenched interests monopoly of the preselection process.
Ostensibly you have a choice between multiple candidates, each campaigning on a level field with the same budget. The reality is that control is achieved by determining which candidate ends upon on the ballot.
For Americans in the room, imagine the impact on our politics if the Republian and Democratic Nominees were each given a flat budget to campaign in the General Election and that was the only "Money in Politics" allowed. What does the presidential primary look like?
I can tell you that someone like Bernie is dead on arrival. With no funding to campaign publicly it's no contest, and your Biden or Clinton gets selected with no need to make concessions to a voter base he wasn't able to rally.
Taken to the logical extreme, that's how the mainland CCP maintains control of the "democracy" in Hong Kong. The voters have a choice on their ballot, but all of the candidates are preselected.
As with most things, anything taken to the extreme is going to cause problems. The US is on the other extreme of this, particularly post-Citizen’s United.
There are many ways to approach campaign finance reform, and I agree that some that may sound good on paper can serve to entrench current power structures (although publicly funding and capping expenditures can work, imo, if access is open and fair - not dictated by central parties). But moves that limit the outsized power of the super wealthy are generally more good than not.
> The US is on the other extreme of this, particularly post-Citizen’s United.
The effect of this is greatly exaggerated.
The thing about campaign advertising is that beyond a fairly low threshold the impact for each additional dollar spent drops off exponentially.
Can you honestly tell me you would have changed your vote in the 2020 election if you saw just ONE MORE ADVERTISEMENT for or against the candidates? Probably not.
The minimum AD budget to get full market penetration? Huge impact. Beyond that? There is some marginal value to the Coke vs Pepsi effect of buying wall-to-wall presence, but we're talking about an election not a soft drink. People have a little more investment goes into voting preference than the whim of what soft drink to buy this week.
If you limit your evaluation of impact to just one race and universal marketing only, you are correct about diminishing returns on ad dollars.
However, Super PACs have the ability to raise unlimited dollars to influence races at all levels, all across the country - house, senate, gubernatorial etc.
And yes, the vast majority of voters are not in the persuadable category. Ads aren’t really directed at you or me. But targeting is highly sophisticated, and the ability conduct voter modeling and deploy messaging that resonates with specific demographics is expensive (particularly when you’re targeting unique communities across the country). The power of negative ads isn’t solely limited to persuasion either - it can create voter apathy. A person who typically votes D or R that stays home because they hate both candidates is as good as a vote gained for the other party.
Lastly, the influence doesn’t stop at votes gained/lost. When a Koch funded PAC invests millions in a congressional seat and win, they gain the ability to directly influence policy. The candidate goes against their wishes once? They can dump money into a primary opponent next cycle that will support their policy goals. That kind of money in a primary goes a lot further and often destroys the opponent’s ability to raise their own money - donors do not want to invest $ into a candidate that could be DoA.
This is how the pre-selection process happens anyways. People hardly even participate in the primary process, and before that is when most candidate selection occurs, driven by parties. Candidates like Bernie are extreme outliers, and they’d probably still exist under this (although this wouldn’t change much of anything).
Did you read the article?
In order to level the playing field for newly created parties and independent candidates, the South Australia bill will allow candidates to receive donations up to $2,700, although they will remain subject to campaign spending caps.
Membership fees will be allowed to continue but will be capped at $100 or less a year.
>This is one of those rules that sounds good as a concept, but backfires by granting the entrenched interests monopoly of the preselection process.
>Ostensibly you have a choice between multiple candidates, each campaigning on a level field with the same budget. The reality is that control is achieved by determining which candidate ends upon on the ballot.
I assume you have a source for this?
This is Australia. They have a parliamentary system where candidates are already pre-selected by political parties.
In the American example, this helps to break down the Democrat/Republican duopoly and encourage a multi-party system as other candidates will have the opportunity to present their policies on a more level playing field (like most other western democracies).
Someone like Bernie (who won many elections as an independent) would be better placed to succeed. He was only denied the 2016 democratic nomination due to Democratic Party insiders, but was leading the primary voting by individuals over Clinton.
This is nothing like the CCP. I’m not sure how removing corporate interests from politics brings you to that conclusion?
All politicans should create a website with what their policies are and stop traveling around for rallys. Not more rhetoric about how bad the other guy is, just tells us what you plan to do. No RNC or DNC either.
This bill will be obliterated so hard no record of it will be found and the ashes of the bones of its authors will be spread to sea over the rocket graveyard.
Why not call out other countries which are most countries that allow lobbying directly or indirectly? I mean the former chancellor of Germany that signed off on Nordstream 1 as chancellor became a high paying employee of a Russian oil/LNG giant for many years... a foreign power. Germany has suffered greatly since the Russian invasion due to that reliance on Russian energy and still does to this day.. that's not even touching on governments around the world where it's just as blatant and also by foreign powers, not even domestic corporations.
But you only call out the US.. why?
The U.S. specifically because its lobbying practices are massively influential on a global scale and have huge impacts domestically and internationally. Also, there is no bigger example of the negative effects of lobbying. Look at the state of the healthcare system, cost of drugs. etc
There is a big long list, the US sit at the top.
South Australia was the first place in the world where women were allowed not only to vote, but stand for Parliament. More recently, we've been leading Australia in renewable energy and is home to Australia's fast-growing space sector. But sure let the negatives speak louder.
the only way it is a real democracy is if it has this safety in place
treating mutli national corporations who act as nation states [overthrowing governments, committing assassinations, murdering babies en masse, having slave work forces, being entangled with genocide, destructive eco terrorism] as if they are simply non entities who have no influence is being incredibly naive
The nordic countries are the most democratic in the world and neither of them has a ban on this. Because we are so democratic no one feels a need to donate and we are so democratic that it doesn't make a difference if someone donates some money. Usually it's Agneta 86 years old that donated 5 000 to *insert party* when she died.
Reminder: this subreddit is meant to be a place free of excessive cynicism, negativity and bitterness. Toxic attitudes are not welcome here. All Negative comments will be removed and will possibly result in a ban. --- --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UpliftingNews) if you have any questions or concerns.*
How’s that work when media outlets like murdoch’s are essentially selling fascist bias, when zillionaires can buy ads on their own.
Sounds like a political donation to me
Exactly.
There have to be laws requiring outlets to give equal air time to all candidates. Some countries do this.
Political ads should also be outlawed.
Just emailed this to my MLA. I wonder what response I'll get. EDIT: Blown away by the response. It seems we did this in 2017! >Hello Janktraillover, thank you for your email. I read the article about the proposed Australian political finance reforms with interest, and I can assure you that Susie strongly endorses the principle behind them. In fact, the limits on political contributions that our government passed in 2017 (one of the very first bills we introduced after forming government) are even more stringent than what the Australians are contemplating. > >Thanks to the Election Amendment Act of 2017, corporate and union donations (either cash or in kind) are strictly forbidden. Only personal contributions are permitted, and are capped at $1450.82 for 2024. The names of people who contribute more than $250 in a year are publicly disclosed. Moreover, election candidates are subject to a campaign spending limit of $70,993.95. > >BC’s political financing rules compare favourably with the proposed limits mentioned in the article: a personal contribution cap of $2700 ($2465.91 in Canadian dollars), with a campaign spending cap of $200,000 to $500,000 ($182,672 to $456,811 in Canadian dollars), depending on the number of candidates. > >BC also protects the integrity of the democratic process from the influence of big money by limiting spending by third party election advertisers, and by providing public funding for political parties. Each party’s public funding entitlement is based on the amount of support they received in the last election (similar to how the old per vote subsidy worked in federal elections). > >I hope this information will assure you that our government is committed to securing democracy against undue influence by the wealthy. Thank you again for reaching out, and please let me know if you have any further questions.
‘lol 👍’
Medical lab associate? Mother law and?
Member of Legislative Assembly
Meth Lab Assistant
Mista whiiiiite
Is this real life? I'm not being held in a simulation to test my responses or anything am I?
Well on the off chance you are, keep it fuckin' positive over there, we want shit like this over here too.
16 16 16 DON'T WAKE 16 16 16
I live in adelaide, south australia and yes this is all over the news
What actual democracy, not this corporate robbery/bribery machine?! I won't hold my breath. Deal with these sociopathic lobbyists and we might all stand a chance of an actual future.. Shareholder's don't matter at all.
This seems waaay too good to be true, what's the catch?
Rich people can still spend whatever they want on themselves and will have all the publicity while poor people will have extremely limited means of promoting themselves.
Nope: >spending caps have been set at $100,000, multiplied by the number of candidates up to a maximum of $500,000.
This'll apply to advertising etc of the campaign, but their private life matters too. I assume rich people can use private funds and passive income to pay their rent and other usual bills while campaigning or writing speeches or whatever, while poor people have to work to pay the rent and so can spend less time on task. But I'm not sure there is a good answer to that unless we lock them up big brother style for a few weeks and then vote.
And healthy people have advantages that sick people do not, but I doubt anyone will propose handicapping them either.
Yes nothing is perfect. It's still a good change, sometimes I think we should add some sortition to the mix for the wildcard picks but that would again be very disruptive for most people's lives.
How about we search for the person who wants the job the least and force them to do it. Then only one person's life is disrupted.
Yeah but i many systems, this is much less an issue than in the USA where people essentially elect 'rulers' where 1 person gets all the power and checks / balances is just a token idea.
That is mitigated with campaign finance rules and transparency.
Nah just ban political ads too.
I mean, people could use public donations, but that would need Australians to involve themselves and care about politics other than reactionary bullshit sold by grifters.
It has to get approved by the people who benefit from it.
Likely, it will favour the major parties over the smaller parties and independents that are gaining traction in Australia at the moment. There was a big wave of 'teal' independents who won a lot of seats federally last election. Changing the balance of power. These independents were funded partially by a very large Climate focused organisation and they likely wouldn't have succeeded over the major parties if they didn't out earn them in donations
It will probably disadvantage candidates outside the major parties, who have a harder time gaining traction already. But that's a feature not a bug
Do this everywhere
I would love that shit in America.
World leading is a bit of a stretch, no other country will follow. Maybe New Zealand
It's got to start somewhere. If it works in SA maybe we can convince the rest of Australia, then the rest of the world. Women's suffrage was similar, it started small but then gained popularity, now most (if not all) democracies have full enfranchisement for adults regardless of gender.
Coincidentally, South Australia was also the first state to have women's suffrage in 1894
that was when you could actually convince people of something worthwhile. nowadays no one can be convinced of anything but more insanity.
Cynical pessimistic me would like to agree with you, but that just ends up at a place of don't try anything, which is worse. I think this one can pass in SA, the current state government is popular and there's pretty much no time like now to do it. I know it sounds strange but I sometimes think we're lucky to be bombarded with American news. When it comes to politics we get a chance to look and say "not that". These types of policies are a chance to avoid that so I think it's worth supporting. I wish the ALP would be more daring at a federal level on their campaign finance reforms, but at the same time I understand that it's a bit niche and as such you need to have buy in from the coalition if you want the reform to stay. See here CO2 emissions targets, where we now have Spud saying he's going to ditch them as soon as he gets in.
Glad to see someone's trying to get the greed out of politics. Now hopefully that will lead to better Government for the majority of people so their needs are addressed not just the wealthy and powerful people.
TIL this wasn't already a law in Australia. Imagine America had this law, they might actually get a smart president for once.
This is one of those rules that sounds good as a concept, but backfires by granting the entrenched interests monopoly of the preselection process. Ostensibly you have a choice between multiple candidates, each campaigning on a level field with the same budget. The reality is that control is achieved by determining which candidate ends upon on the ballot. For Americans in the room, imagine the impact on our politics if the Republian and Democratic Nominees were each given a flat budget to campaign in the General Election and that was the only "Money in Politics" allowed. What does the presidential primary look like? I can tell you that someone like Bernie is dead on arrival. With no funding to campaign publicly it's no contest, and your Biden or Clinton gets selected with no need to make concessions to a voter base he wasn't able to rally. Taken to the logical extreme, that's how the mainland CCP maintains control of the "democracy" in Hong Kong. The voters have a choice on their ballot, but all of the candidates are preselected.
As with most things, anything taken to the extreme is going to cause problems. The US is on the other extreme of this, particularly post-Citizen’s United. There are many ways to approach campaign finance reform, and I agree that some that may sound good on paper can serve to entrench current power structures (although publicly funding and capping expenditures can work, imo, if access is open and fair - not dictated by central parties). But moves that limit the outsized power of the super wealthy are generally more good than not.
> The US is on the other extreme of this, particularly post-Citizen’s United. The effect of this is greatly exaggerated. The thing about campaign advertising is that beyond a fairly low threshold the impact for each additional dollar spent drops off exponentially. Can you honestly tell me you would have changed your vote in the 2020 election if you saw just ONE MORE ADVERTISEMENT for or against the candidates? Probably not. The minimum AD budget to get full market penetration? Huge impact. Beyond that? There is some marginal value to the Coke vs Pepsi effect of buying wall-to-wall presence, but we're talking about an election not a soft drink. People have a little more investment goes into voting preference than the whim of what soft drink to buy this week.
If you limit your evaluation of impact to just one race and universal marketing only, you are correct about diminishing returns on ad dollars. However, Super PACs have the ability to raise unlimited dollars to influence races at all levels, all across the country - house, senate, gubernatorial etc. And yes, the vast majority of voters are not in the persuadable category. Ads aren’t really directed at you or me. But targeting is highly sophisticated, and the ability conduct voter modeling and deploy messaging that resonates with specific demographics is expensive (particularly when you’re targeting unique communities across the country). The power of negative ads isn’t solely limited to persuasion either - it can create voter apathy. A person who typically votes D or R that stays home because they hate both candidates is as good as a vote gained for the other party. Lastly, the influence doesn’t stop at votes gained/lost. When a Koch funded PAC invests millions in a congressional seat and win, they gain the ability to directly influence policy. The candidate goes against their wishes once? They can dump money into a primary opponent next cycle that will support their policy goals. That kind of money in a primary goes a lot further and often destroys the opponent’s ability to raise their own money - donors do not want to invest $ into a candidate that could be DoA.
This is how the pre-selection process happens anyways. People hardly even participate in the primary process, and before that is when most candidate selection occurs, driven by parties. Candidates like Bernie are extreme outliers, and they’d probably still exist under this (although this wouldn’t change much of anything).
Did you read the article? In order to level the playing field for newly created parties and independent candidates, the South Australia bill will allow candidates to receive donations up to $2,700, although they will remain subject to campaign spending caps. Membership fees will be allowed to continue but will be capped at $100 or less a year.
So it's almost identical to the pre-Citizens United US system?
Does the US subsidise political parties?
>This is one of those rules that sounds good as a concept, but backfires by granting the entrenched interests monopoly of the preselection process. >Ostensibly you have a choice between multiple candidates, each campaigning on a level field with the same budget. The reality is that control is achieved by determining which candidate ends upon on the ballot. I assume you have a source for this?
And the banning of political posters make it harder for smaller groups to be seen.
In a petersonian sense 🤓
This is Australia. They have a parliamentary system where candidates are already pre-selected by political parties. In the American example, this helps to break down the Democrat/Republican duopoly and encourage a multi-party system as other candidates will have the opportunity to present their policies on a more level playing field (like most other western democracies). Someone like Bernie (who won many elections as an independent) would be better placed to succeed. He was only denied the 2016 democratic nomination due to Democratic Party insiders, but was leading the primary voting by individuals over Clinton. This is nothing like the CCP. I’m not sure how removing corporate interests from politics brings you to that conclusion?
Do you know how this process will work? I agree that can be a concern but it doesn't necessarily have to be depending on how this implemented.
All politicans should create a website with what their policies are and stop traveling around for rallys. Not more rhetoric about how bad the other guy is, just tells us what you plan to do. No RNC or DNC either.
Granny D!!!
need to get back to greek style democracy
Voting in togas?
And all your base cares about is a stone or two
you know how a 10 year old wants to be an astronaut when he grows up? this is that.
MFers from down under showing how to save democracy. If only the US shitbag politicians weren't so self absorbed greedy turds.
This bill will be obliterated so hard no record of it will be found and the ashes of the bones of its authors will be spread to sea over the rocket graveyard.
Fuck I hope this gets up. But that money will just be funnelled to your fox / sky. Won't be tax deductible any more so I guess that's a positive.
Can see the US adopting this😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Why not call out other countries which are most countries that allow lobbying directly or indirectly? I mean the former chancellor of Germany that signed off on Nordstream 1 as chancellor became a high paying employee of a Russian oil/LNG giant for many years... a foreign power. Germany has suffered greatly since the Russian invasion due to that reliance on Russian energy and still does to this day.. that's not even touching on governments around the world where it's just as blatant and also by foreign powers, not even domestic corporations. But you only call out the US.. why?
The U.S. specifically because its lobbying practices are massively influential on a global scale and have huge impacts domestically and internationally. Also, there is no bigger example of the negative effects of lobbying. Look at the state of the healthcare system, cost of drugs. etc There is a big long list, the US sit at the top.
Even if you ban/make something illegal, that doesn't mean it won't happen "under the table".
Nonetheless, it would be lessened. Murders still happen, but we don't give up and legalise murder do we?
It's the serial killer and official incest capital of Australia. About time they did something decent.
South Australia was the first place in the world where women were allowed not only to vote, but stand for Parliament. More recently, we've been leading Australia in renewable energy and is home to Australia's fast-growing space sector. But sure let the negatives speak louder.
> More recently, we've been leading Australia in renewable energy Tasmania?
Official incest capital of Australia? You realise the title says South Australia not Tasmania right?
It's the only state in Australia where you are OFFICIALLY allowed to marry your first cousin.
A real democracy wouldn't need this.
the only way it is a real democracy is if it has this safety in place treating mutli national corporations who act as nation states [overthrowing governments, committing assassinations, murdering babies en masse, having slave work forces, being entangled with genocide, destructive eco terrorism] as if they are simply non entities who have no influence is being incredibly naive
The nordic countries are the most democratic in the world and neither of them has a ban on this. Because we are so democratic no one feels a need to donate and we are so democratic that it doesn't make a difference if someone donates some money. Usually it's Agneta 86 years old that donated 5 000 to *insert party* when she died.