“You can ask the question 100 times. I’ll give you the same answer.”

Whatever else one might choose to say about him, federal Opposition Leader Angus Taylor is a man of his times. When politicians from the major parties, state or federal, are asked about donations, as he was this week after his name came up in Sydney hearings of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the wall descends.

Take Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is all about “engaging with people” but becomes strangely reticent when asked about the July 20 dinner he attended at a mansion in Point Piper, Sydney, where attendees were reportedly expected to donate about $10,000 a head to the Labor Party.

“I attend lots of dinners in lots of places, and I don’t talk about private dinners,” he said. Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek added that such things were “a matter for the party”.

Recently ousted premier Jacinta Allan sang from the same hymn sheet when she was questioned about donations to Victorian Labor’s 2022 campaign war chest by CFMEU-aligned building companies such as BK Labour and CCL.

Whoever it is, the party leader always seems to suddenly defer to the machinery when money is involved.

We are often assured – as Plibersek and Allan did – that the declaration regime around these donations means that everything is above board. “Anything that’s donated above $5000 will have to be disclosed within a few days,” Plibersek told the Seven Network.

At present, that is not the case. Until the Electoral Reform Act comes into full effect on January 1, 2027, the disclosure threshold is $17,300 and the donations do not have to be reported for months. What this illustrates is that the system for regulating donations is in flux.

Indeed, both federally and in Victoria, changes to donations law are being challenged in the courts. Former independent MPs Rex Patrick and Zoe Daniel argued in the High Court that the new regime contains loopholes that work to the advantage of major parties with branches across the nation.

Melbourne Law School professor Joo-Cheong Tham, a director of the Centre for Public Integrity, told this masthead that while the legislation should be amended to address these issues, there was a risk of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

“If expenditure caps are struck down, it will be a return to a free-for-all for big-money election campaigns,” he said.

That prospect loomed in Victoria in April, after the High Court struck down the state’s existing campaign finance laws, again after a challenge by two independent candidates, Paul Hopper and Melissa Lowe, supported by the Climate 200 group.

The state Labor government rushed in new legislation in response. “Victorians deserve to know who’s donated, how much they’re donating, and it’s absolutely fundamental to free and fair elections in any democracy,” was how then-premier Allan put it in June, before passage of the Electoral Further Amendment Bill 2026.

But Climate 200 co-convener Simon Holmes a Court and shadow attorney-general James Newbury have already indicated further legal challenges. For the former, the problem is the millions in taxpayer money available to major parties in the shape of “administrative expenditure funding”; the latter wants the affiliation fees that trade unions pay for membership of the Labor Party to be treated as donations.

It is often said that some debates are too important to be left to politicians. But faced with the detail of the donations landscape, it is perhaps understandable that that has happened. The Age believes a first crucial step to improving matters would be for our political leaders to stop pretending all this has nothing to do with them.

We need ministers, prime ministers and premiers to front up when they are asked about payments and to show they are across the detail, just as they would need to be with other issues. When they themselves are on the dinner menu, they should know how much those around the table have paid.

If fundraising events came with real-time reporting of who gave what to whom, these leaders could still plead ignorance – but it would cost them. And, as NSW Liberal Party operative Robert Assaf was reminded at the Sydney ICAC hearings this week when he said his faction “didn’t think the law [on donations] applied to us”, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The alternative – growing public cynicism and resignation about money in politics – will not take long to show its face, whether it is in the shape of Pauline Hanson flying around the country in a plane bought for her by Gina Rinehart (which was appropriately declared), or the sort of unabashed issue-based auctioneering we are beginning to see when long-term Liberal donors swap over to One Nation.

Albanese may talk about “private dinners”, and One Nation may insist that Rinehart is just a hard-working taxpayer being given a chance to promote her views, but the wider public are entitled to a clearer picture.

The investigation that triggered this week’s hearings in Sydney is a welcome one, and the watchdogs we expect to carry out this kind of work should be appropriately resourced and encouraged. It may well be that we need a broader definition of their remit.

But before any of that, we need politicians to grasp that answering this question the same way 100 times is eating at the foundations of our democracy. It’s time for a different response.

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