Abstract

It would be ridiculous for a short term academic visitor to Australia to pretend to be able to offer insights to Australians about their politics.  But what a visitor can do is bring to bear experience and knowledge of foreign systems to ask how far they apply in the Australian case – and thus to contribute to the formation of a continuing research agenda on Australian politics.  My specialism is the relationship between business and politics, especially in the UK, the other parts of the European Union and the US.  Out of that I have distilled a series of observations, notably about the changing tactics and strategies of business.  An obvious question is: how far would they apply to the Australian case?

Four big developments have marked business politics in the Anglo-American world in recent decades.

Business is under pressure. A generation ago business institutions seemed to be in the ascendant in the Anglo-American system.  Polling data showed a high level of trust in, and satisfaction with, the business enterprise, especially the big business enterprise.  But now the corporation can often feel itself besieged.  Polling data for the US and the UK suggest a long term decline in trust and confidence in corporate leadership.  Moreover, the UK data suggest that business has suffered particularly severely in this respect: in surveys that ask the population to indicate their level of trust in various occupational groups and institutions, large companies and executives of those companies are generally at or near the bottom of the list – alongside groups widely held in contempt, like tabloid journalists.

Moreover, this alteration in the popular mood has been accompanied by an important institutional shift.  The corporation is increasingly lobbied, to use the words of the American political scientist David Vogel.  In the last generation a raft of civil society groups – using latterly web based communication with increasing sophistication –  have challenged the corporation: its employment practices, and its investment practices.  In some instances – for instance in campaigns against the laboratory practices of some pharmaceutical companies, in campaigns against agri-business corporations, and in more diffuse demonstrations against globalisation – this has resulted in physical attacks on enterprises and their employees.

So an obvious question for Australia is: how far is Australian business under comparable pressure?

Business is increasingly organised. Perhaps as a result of this incessant pressure, business in the Anglo-American system in the last generation has organised itself into increasingly sophisticated set of lobbies.  A generation ago, at the apex of the corporate elite, business didn’t lobby – ‘IBM doesn’t lobby’, in the words of one of its legendary post war CEOs.  The elite did not lobby because there existed far more subtle modes of exercising influence:  social integration with political elites; incorporation into the governing machine itself in the form of public service by business ‘statesmen’ (they almost all were men); deals that could be done informally in a club like atmosphere – often indeed literally in elite gentlemen’s clubs.  Greater transparency; a growing division of labour between the life of politics and the life of business; growing professionalization inside corporations, corresponding to the rise of specialised lobbying expertise within the firm: all have helped transform that closed, informal world of influence peddling into something more open, professional and organised.

Thus a second question is: to what extent has business in Australia experienced the same shift in the character of lobbying?

Business is increasingly divided. Business interests have always been in competition and conflict: business communities have been, in Marx’s famous formulation, a hostile band of brothers.  But the scale and speed of change in a globalising world have intensified these divisions: between manufacturing and other sectors; between industry and agriculture; between large and small firms; and between national and global enterprises. A key function of business as a series of organised lobbies, in the manner summarised above, is both to express these divisions, and to try to manage them.

The third question is therefore obvious.  Australian business undoubtedly will experience these tensions.  How, and with what success, does it manage them?

Business funds electoral politics.  Elections are, formally at any rate, the key events in the lives of democracies.  Corporate money has long been important in electoral competition in the Anglo-American world, but in the last generation its influence has become overwhelming.  The forces driving this change are subtly different on either side of the Atlantic, but the outcome is substantially the same: democratic politicians cannot function, or at least cannot win office, without business backing.  In the US the driving forces have been the stupendous escalation in the cost of campaigning, and the way this has intersected with the rise of personality driven electoral politics.  At the very top, as in Presidential campaigns, front runners have to establish a presence from the very beginning of a race – and to do that they need to raise huge sums.  Only two possibilities exist: out of personal fortunes, or from the wallets of the corporate rich.  In both cases they point to the rise of the plutocracy in democracy.  In the UK the cost of campaigning is still funnelled through the national party machines.  A generation ago these machines sat at the top of mass parties. At their peak the Conservatives had over nearly three million individual members, the Labour Party over one million.  This mass membership was a hugely efficient fund raising machine making the Conservatives, in particular, substantially independent of corporate backing.  Now the parties are dying: the Conservatives have about 200,000, Labour about 170,000 members.  With their death is disappearing a key stream of income. Since state funding still makes only a marginal contribution, the parties have been forced to look elsewhere.  In both cases they have been forced to court, in particular, the new plutocracy hugely enriched by the booming financial markets.  The connection with financial plutocrats explains much about the regulatory policies of US and UK governments in recent years.

Thus a fourth question is: to what extent does business fund electoral politics in Australia, and to the extent that it does, what sort of price does it exact in return?
It has often been observed that all single country case studies are implicitly comparative. Looking at the Australian case through foreign eyes, and foreign findings, reinforces the truth of that observation.