Australia Right-Wing Demanding Full Disclosure Of NGOs

by Bob Burton

(IPS) CANBERRA -- The Australian government is considering proposals by a conservative think-tank to force non-government organizations (NGOs) to disclose much greater levels of detail about their internal operations, personnel and international affiliates in the name of 'transparency'.

But critics say this would make NGOs vulnerable to political harassment.

The modest centrepiece of the $35,000 consultancy report by the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is that the Australian government create a single website to detail the financial and consultative links between the government and NGOs.

The IPA proposal would require government agencies with or considering formal consultative roles with NGOs to request these bodies to disclose international affiliates, decision-making processes and off-shore funding.

This, the IPA report says is to ensure that fundraising and "solicitation materials are accurate, truthful, and not misleading."

Co-author of the report and Research Fellow at the IPA, John Roskam, insists that while the organization has been an outspoken critic of environmental, human rights and development groups, its motivation is simply about increasing transparency of relationships between government and NGOs.

"Nowhere do we say governments should not talk to these NGOs. We are simply saying that if you give them a special position it should be revealed," he said.

But Clive Hamilton, executive director of the think-tank Australia Institute, believes that the IPA has toned down its anti-NGO rhetoric in the report to ease the way for the government to adopt increased scrutiny of NGOs.

"It is a Trojan Horse. When I first read it I thought, 'well what they are actually asking for is superficially appealing,'" he said.

"But then when I looked at it I thought ... they are basically attempting to use this audit of relationships by the government as a means of getting far more disclosure than you could get any other way or, in many cases, which is unreasonable," he said.

Earlier this month the Australia Institute released a report, 'Silencing Dissent', which found that overwhelmingly NGOs feared that speaking out against government policy jeopardised their government funding or made them vulnerable to other forms of political harassment.

The consultancy project with the government was the brainchild of IPA Senior Fellow, Gary Johns, who won a Fulbright Scholarship to the United States in 2002 to study regulating NGOs.

Johns, a former Labor Party minister, based himself at the Washington D.C. headquarters of a conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

For over twenty years U.S. conservative groups have mounted a campaign to 'defund the left' advocating an end to government funding of most non-profit groups, changing tax legislation to penalise groups perceived as left-wing and lobbying the Internal Revenue Service to investigate specific activist groups.

In 1995 one of the most powerful conservative activists, Grover Norquist, told a journalist "we will hunt liberal groups down one by one and extinguish their funding sources."

But the IPA report co-author Roskam, who has worked as senior adviser to conservative state and federal governments as well as a stint as the manager for external Affairs for the mining giant Rio Tinto, denies that the group is seeking to emulate American conservatives 'defund the left' campaign.

"While people are concerned that the IPA is perceived to be a right wing think-tank and a right think-tank is driving the agenda, we simply see it as the IPA bringing to Australia an agenda that is literally worldwide," he said.

Bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union, he insists, are also addressing the issue of NGOs.

The IPA's proposal for disclosure of fundraising materials is a distant echo of blunter proposals in the United States.

A submission in 2003 to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service by Public Interest Watch (PIW), a corporate-sponsored group, proposed that advocacy organizations eligible for tax-deductible status should be required to submit copies of all fundraising materials with their annual returns.

The reason, PIW explained, was that it would make it easier to initiate timely legal actions against groups for "libel, trade libel, and tortious interference with existing or prospective contractual relations."

In Australia too, the government has flagged its concern about non-profit advocacy groups.

Last year Treasurer Peter Costello, released draft charities legislation that proposed formalising that if an organization had seeking 'to change the law or government policy' as a dominant purpose it would be deemed as a 'disqualifying purpose'.

For many groups the status that allows donors to claim gifts as a tax-deduction is important for grants from foundations and larger donors. The bill provoked uproar prompting Costello to drop the legislation earlier this year.

However, a December 2003 advisory note the Board of Taxation, which oversees the activities of the Australian Tax Office, made clear that if it "receives information which, upon further examination, confirms the advocacy role as dominant, it is likely that the status will be revoked."

The executive director of the Australian Council For Overseas Aid, Graham Tupper, sees no problem with the proposal for a website listing membership of committee or NGOs being transparent but notes that the IPA hardly practices what it preaches.

"The IPA itself is an NGO but it doesn't fully disclose its own financial supporters or its international affiliates," he said.

Neither the minister for family and community services, Kay Patterson, whose department sponsored the report, or AusAid, the government agency that funds oversees aid projects involving NGOs, responded to requests for comment on the IPA proposal.

Any implementation of the proposal, Roskam said, would be through one of the departments of treasury, finance or that of the prime minister's -- the most powerful government agencies. For the IPA early indications are promising.

"Our understanding is that they are considering it as we speak," said Roskam.