Clientelism in Australia

Clientelism is the exchange of goods and services for political support, often involving an implicit or explicit quid-pro-quo.

Australia often views itself as a non-corrupt country. But this isn’t so. The constitution and laws of the land are explicitly designed to prevent corruption.

And yet, we have so much of it. For example, in the last few weeks we have seen the NSW water issue and the garbage disposal industries both challenged by corruption charges.

No one is at all surprised that Clientelism exists in Australia. Except no one even knows what this means.

However if I said to any individual that asks that state governments are inherently corrupt, most would agree. The problem is that state governments rule over rats and mice issues, so people of calibre stay away, leaving ‘mates’ to go in and do favours for developers, farmers, garbage crooks, you name it. ICAC has certainly been busy over the last few years and no one is at all surprised.

At the Federal level it is all a little more sophisticated. Lobby groups influence decisions, nod-wink deals get done and your former minister ends up with a cushy job at Macquarie Bank or one of the mining or bank corporations. This is all about keeping up barriers to foreign competition (maintaining the oligarchy) or embedding regulations that allow corporations to fleece the public.

Local councils – well that is all about development approvals for mates. It has no other function.

I read an interesting article that suggests that the post-war immigration of people from non-English backgrounds has negatively influenced the situation since many of these people came from countries where the ONLY way to get ahead was to seek preferential treatment from mates in government.

Unlike in other countries, Clientelism in Australia is rarely direct (as in the handing out of jobs to mates and the like). The perpetrators sense that they need to be crafty and build in plausible denials to all their efforts. For example, a tender for a government development will be professionally run but the winning bid will be the minister’s first choice.

This works because the public service has been emasculated over the years by politicians. The latter control the former, ruthlessly. The judicial system remains independent to some degree, but for how long?

The public have somehow managed to simultaneously hang onto an English cultural habit of abhorring corruption and yet welcomed it into society. No one is ever truly shocked when it emerges.

The victim here is productivity. When the best way to get ahead in an economy is through Clientelism, where is the incentive to create new businesses?

We have been living off the fat of resources for quite some time and the internal fight has all been to get an unfair share of the proceeds through exploitation of the political system, in one form or another.

I sense that pretty soon the resources sector will flop sufficiently such that we will go backwards. Then I expect the Clientelism to really ramp up. Hopefully democracy will step in and free us of the political clowns that we are bound to. That will only happen if the judicial system remains strong and resists the politicians.

Recently the Supreme court of Victoria reacted to politicians criticizing the judges. So they still have teeth, the judges. We need them to have teeth.