The conventional tools for addressing political finance concerns are public funding, donation caps and spending caps. These tools are blunt instruments that have so far failed to rein in vested interests or address cash-for-access, and they risk many perverse outcomes – most notably, introducing unfair barriers to new entrants, independents and minor parties.

As the Australian Parliament seriously considers changes to electoral laws, including those governing political finance, this paper recommends an alternative suite of political finance reforms that would go a long way to making the political playing field more level and addressing cash-for-access at its roots: exposing it when it happens, making governments pay a political cost for facilitating it and banning it outright where doing so is proportionate, constitutional and likely to be effective.

Key recommendations:

• Requiring the disclosure of all political contributions by corporations and all cash-for-access payments, regardless of size.
• Lowering the disclosure threshold for political donations from Australian citizens to $5,000, or a lower figure if possible.
• Introducing real-time disclosure of political contributions, including weekly disclosure during an election campaign.
• Publishing ministerial diaries as governments do in NSW and Queensland.
• Introducing a mega-donor cap that prevents any one entity from contributing election-distorting amounts of money.
• Establishing a public library of materials funded by the communications allowance paid to parliamentarians, so they can be scrutinised.
• Exploring alternatives to the current public funding model that would accommodate new entrants.
• Considering a ban on donations from companies receiving large government contracts and the tobacco, liquor, gambling and fossil fuel industries.