freedom of expression

Time to ditch tax-deductibility for environmental groups?

Recent correspondence, where an environmental group asked other environmental groups to recommend voting against the government at the next election, has highlighted the problem of self-censoring by environmental groups which have tax-deductible status. Basically environmental groups with tax deductibility status cannot recommend that people vote for or against a particular political representative or party even if that person or party has promoted laws and activities which directly and negatively impact on the concerns of their membership.

Solutions to these constraints.

1. Abandon tax-deductibility status
or
2. Create or find another organisation or group which is not tax-deductible to use the information and advise on political choices accordingly.

Candobetter is an example of such a free-acting group

Candobetter.org - http://candobetter.org has remained informal and has not sought tax-deductibility so that it can comment freely. We like to get news and views and would be prepared to publicise a voting recommendation. Our platforms are: Reform in democracy, environment, population, land use planning and energy policy. We are basically a netsite with a variety of voluntary journalists who operate under their own names or pen-names. We love new authors. We also republish and publish reports on submissions or the actual submissions, which are so often wasted by being sent to the Government.

Candobetter has taken advantage of one of the few good things the Howard government did, and that was reform of Australia's defamation laws. It is now much safer to publish the truth, so it is much easier to write interesting and informative articles about what is really happening in this country. We publish from all around the country, with the aim of showing people that what is happening in a place like, e.g. Devilbend, is also happening in NSW, e.g to Cumberland Woodlands or with the Repco Rally in Tweed Valley. At the moment the editors support most of what we do from their own pockets and spare time. We are always very pleased if someone offers to pay some of the bills. The biggest cost is time, which is not billed for. The biggest financial cost is our independent server access. This independent server also means that our website is safer than most.

The disadvantages of tax-deductibility:

Tax deductibility for environmental organisations gained popularity and became a kind of criteria of respectability because it was felt that the deductibility might encourage wealthier people to contribute more donations and the respectability attribute might make people feel they were joining something mainstream and important. Goals included getting a reliable income so that the environmental organisation had a more solid foundation. Some organisations became so solid that they could employ people and fund permanent premises. They then frequently ran into problems where the secondary aim of employing people to do their work turned into a dominant need to continue to finance those peoples' salaries. In my opinion a number of big organisations have become little more than government departments because of this.

A few years ago the government overhauled its definition of tax-deductible groups and effectively outlawed independent political activism in tax-deductible environmental (and other) groups. What the government was saying was, 'We are not going to fund our potential enemies' political campaigns.'

This was the point where a lot of organisations should probably have decided to ditch their tax-deductibility status because our environment and wildlife protection are so threatened by government-supported corporate development that environmental activism generally requires opposition to most government programs.

Environmental and Union groups have lost power due to changes in laws affecting their traditional territory

Enviromental lobbying remains a discreet option but I would not think that this was directly tax deductible, albeit one assumes that members could deduct cost of membership if the lobby-group were furthering their income-gaining activities. But, overall, environmental lobbying has few places to go now, since our Federal and State laws are so antipathetic to environmental and wildlife aims, not to mention democracy.

Environmental lobby groups, like unions, have problems continuing to offer what they traditionally offered their members because the laws no longer serve the public. For instance, a union once could afford to fund a worker's legal defense because workers once had substantial rights at law in Australia. These days, unions tend simply to advertise referral to the services of legal firms, which then give the first consultation for free. In turn, the legal firms take up comparatively few individual cases because there is so little basis now upon which to fight them.

Similarly, where environmental groups could once point to planning laws that protected citizens' rights (and indirectly wildlife and vegetation), these democratic laws that served environmentalists are fast disappearing.

An indirect indicator of this situation is that Governments in Australia are eroding the concept of 'citizen' with the term consumer, and 'participatory democracy' is being replaced with commercial 'choice', with consultation reduced to public relations or outsourced to spin-doctors working for state/private partnerships or government corporate bodies, such as Victoria's water corporations (See for instance, a href="http://candobetter.org/node/1236">"Melbourne residents held to ransom on water"and the SEITA tollway projects.

This article is a spin-off from Tax-deductibility and Environmental Groups & NGOs, which talks about the role of candobetter.org and other independent alternative media in representing views and assisting citizens to organise at all levels, for instance on behalf of wildlife and vegetation or in state planning laws, or immigration policies.

Where do you go when government and the media don't care?

Disappointed in government departments and ministers, environmental organisations often try to take their cause to the mainstream press. But this is usually just as problematic in the end. Why? Because the press, like the government, dictates narrower and narrower parameters for what they will designate as 'newsworthy'.

How the press manipulate democratic protest

If you are using the press as a political forum, you need to be aware that the press is now so globally powerful due to its control of the market and market perception, that it controls elections and economies much more than ordinary citizens do. That means that it controls political parties, because parties rely on pleasing the mainstream press in order to get publicity of any kind. New political candidates, many of whom must be better than the politicians now in government, come and go and disappear every year without your ever hearing of them.

NGOs and citizens need to consider that both the opposition and the government represent the interests of the commercial media and that even the ABC has to reflect the interests which the commercial media owners define. For instance it officially preserves the two party system which many of us refer to contemptuously as Tweedledum and Tweedledummer.

A very good, and scary example of this was here:

"The ABC's approach to election coverage focuses on the Government and official Opposition on the basis that one of the two major parties will ultimately form government and thus represent the principal points of view. Whilst not discounting the views or policies of the other parties and independent candidates, coverage in respect to such parties and candidates is determined on the basis of newsworthiness. The Policies also note that the ABC reserves the right to withhold free broadcast time to political parties, including those not currently represented in the Parliament concerned, on the basis of the measure of demonstrated public support for the party." Quote from an official ABC radio response to a complaint in 2009. See: ABC dismisses complaint claiming privatisation not 'newsworthy' in 2009 Queensland elections"

Environmental groups have a similar problem to new political candidates - independents and parties. The problem is that the government and the press tend to use the inability of most environmental and other non-government groups to show that they have thousands of financial supporters as an excuse not to represent their concerns. Both the press and the government, if they were really socially concerned, would act to publish, publicise and help people organise over an important cause. But they don't.

It is usually difficult for NGOs to do their real work or for independent politicians to prepare their policies and simultaneously to find thousands of supporters, especially if they are just starting out. There may be thousands, indeed millions of people who potentially support a cause or a political swing against the status quo, but how do you find those people and how do they find you?

Neither the government nor the press will help you to become strong; they will only react to strength already acquired. Usually that strength can only be built up by groups with a strong commercial basis these days. It wasn't always so. In a small population where economic activity was more localised, people shared geographically common concerns and communicated face to face. These days people tend to form their opinions, even on local issues, from the dominant news-media, rather than asking their neighbours or attending local forums.

It has become so due to the commercialisation of our social infrastructure, the huge scale on which we now operate, and our reliance on government and the mainstream press to tell us what is happening. We rely on these mediums for communication. But they are not communicating on our behalf and the 'information' and 'news' the pass on is chosen according to different priorities than the public good. Clearly the ABC reflects the interests embedded in the status quo and does not seek or respond to public input in any consistant and significant way that might change this.

Hidden commercial interests affect presentation of opinion

The commercial press also have many commercial interests apart from just selling papers or television shows, but it is not easy or indeed possible to know what most of these are at any time. What we must realise is that the commercial press is really like a lot of big interconnected corporations that are advertising products they want you to buy, using articles which will create an environment to increase the market for those products, raise the price of shares on certain commodities and products in the short term (so that they can be bought and sold), and manipulate opinion as to what is really important and what is really happening in the reader's environment. The press - television, radio and newspaper - has to a large degree - substituted a manufactured reality for ordinary interpersonal networking and the individual's forming of an idea of their political, social, economic and biophysical environment.

This manufactured reality which tells us things like 'Most people don't care about wildlife or animal cruelty', 'Most people agree with overpopulation and overdevelopment, considering it reasonable', 'most people benefit somehow from overpriced real-estate', 'it is okay to privatise water and other vital resources' - is actually the direct opposite of what most people think, but how would most people know that? In this way the mainstream press alienates citizens from each other because those citizens believe that few people share what are actually widespread values. Those values become taboo and we are all silenced.