Monday 10 June 2002

Funding Politics

Maltastar  

   
 
Few issues strike more right at the heart of democracy than the funding of politics, both at party and individual level.


 
“political parties face an overhead bill which must accumulate to a princely six-digit sum each year”
 

Our electoral system is built round party politics. Both at the general election and now also in local elections, the electorate votes for individuals with the party logo next to their name.

Political parties now face at least one electoral test each year. Next year they could be made to gear up to three electoral contests – the general election, local elections and the referendum.

Political parties need to communicate tirelessly with the electorate. Such communication costs a lot of money. The organisation of mass activities (meetings, rallies, festivities, etc) and the regular mailings to the electorate require funding running in the thousands per month. This apart, the party organisation does not come cheap either.

 
With headquarters demanding not only the original investment but also maintenance, security, insurance, reception apart from the normal administration duties, political parties face an overhead bill which must accumulate to a princely six-digit sum each year.
 
“The Nationalist Party do much less effort to make popular collections and yet they spend much more.”
 
The main parties own direct tools of mass communication through media company subsidiaries involving radio, TV and newspapers. Whilst these activities could be self-financing they are certainly not contributing any cash flow to their political owners and if anything they could well be a cash drain at least to finance part of the investment which the media companies occasionally require.

In case of the Labour Party, tradition related to the sixties mortal sin tragedy, has dictated that the left leaning Maltese newspapers, which could indeed be cash cows, are owned by the GWU denying the party a regular source of income.

Parties evidently run their fund raising campaigns but these are normally linked to specific capital project or to specific extraordinary expenditure items (e.g. election campaigns). The substantial recurrent expenditure has to be funded from somewhere and it is here where the mystery lies.

Anyone who thinks that through their mass collection activities the parties generate anywhere near what’s necessary to pay for their regular operational requirements, let alone the capital and special projects, would probably believe in fairy tales.

 
And it is in the interest of democracy that the matter be de-mystified. From where do the political parties finance the operational deficit? The Labour Party strives to make ends meet by organisation routine and endless door to door collections, twice annual telethon, monthly coffee morning gatherings purely to keep its body and soul together.
 
“It is high priority that political party funding be brought to the fore of the national agenda”
 

The Nationalist Party do much less effort to make popular collections and yet they spend much more. Quite apart from the fact that voluntary work is still much more prevalent within the MLP than within the PN, the activities of the PN are by far more expensive to organise and sustain.

In the interest of democracy serious thought must be given to include transparency in electoral party funding. With the reigns of government in hand for a continuous period of 15 years (bar 22 months) the PN has dished out so many contracts which have added and inflated the bottom line of private sector organisations, both local and foreign, that they can draw on much more sources of direct corporate donations than the MLP can. Whether they actually do it or not is left to the reader’s judgement but the question of where the expenditure is funded, remains.

Strange things happen which obviously help to feed the imagination of those in an endless search for the ultimate truth. How do contracts like Tal-Qroqq hospital get awarded on a direct basis to a foreign organisation whose only restraint in dishing out contracts is cost control procedures by parties ill-equipped to perform such function?

Does the fact that this was a cabinet decision make it any more transparent, if the party in government could hypothetically draw on the beneficiaries of such contracts to finance its operations?

 
The Labour Party reads out its financial accounts at the annual general conference. The Nationalist Party does not even go that far. This insults my understanding of democracy giving rise to serious suspicion that real powers could reside elsewhere than in the hands of the duly elected people’s representatives.

It is high priority that political party funding be brought to the fore of the national agenda. It is worth considering public funding for political parties under strict expenditure surveillance by national superpartes like the Office of the Ombudsman, The Auditor general or the Office of the President. Direct contributions should be abolished unless donor is prepared to have his name and details made available for inspection of the superpartes and should be limited in scope to hundreds not thousands.

And as publicly owned organisations I would consider essential that political parties publish their annual financial statements with the same prominence and standards as expected from publicly listed companies.

Until this happens democracy is not being served and the Labour Party is at the short end of the stick.
 
   

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