Listed companies must watch some of the flapping of arms and noise around political donation disclosures with some bemusement, considering the reporting regimes for banks and other entities reporting to the Australian Securities Exchange and ASIC.
Entities that are big and ugly enough to be lending money also need to have meaningful conversations with APRA, of course, with the associated reporting on prudential matters.
Each set of financial statements, for example, is a near-miracle event in the era of enterprise-wide reporting software, because each individual line item needs to comply with at least one, if not more, accounting standard or other regulation.
Some people get this right more than others, as the most recent financial reporting surveillance report released by our corporate cop noted not long before Christmas (always an interesting time to gift the community with the findings of a key piece of work).
Valuing assets and determining impairment values are still the biggest problems companies face when making decisions on what is a fair representation of a company’s financial state.
An exploration of why people seem to muddle through some of this is warranted in a separate column, but the fact is we can happily see financial statements from companies and then observe them getting kicked in the teeth by the marketplace if they get things wrong or the regulator takes them to task.
Political parties on the other hand seem to be given some privileges not necessarily accorded to those for whom MPs want to write the rules.
Visit the web site of a political party and see whether you can find a set of financial statements available for the public to look at before they make a donation to the organisation.
Try and look very hard. You won’t find any.
You will find a dirty big donation button on the web sites of most of our political parties without any real governance information that gives you some idea of their assets and liabilities. How the hell do they run the business of a political party? What do they owe? How are they going to finance the next campaign?
It is time the electorate started to apply some more stringent analysis to the political parties that are asking for permission to take the reins of authority at the national, state or even local government level.
The question that ought to be asked more often is why do corporates wind up copping tougher regulation that those legislating, the politicians, want to apply to themselves?
It should not matter what legal structure they have in place – a classic way in which some people avoid accounting and disclosure to the broader community.
Our laws should stipulate clearly: if you seek political power through elections in this country then you should provide on both your web site and to the electoral commission a full set of financial statements.
Those political parties that are not prepared to meet the same reporting standard that they expect of corporates ought to be made to leave the pitch.