There is a growing chorus from an array of politicians and the mainstream media for much tighter restrictions on electoral donations. Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger is calling for parties to be publicly funded and private donations to be capped at $1,000. Similarly, Tony Abbott is calling for a ban on company donations, foreign donations and union donations.

This is also essentially the position of the Greens. Richard Di Natale claimed, “What we’re talking about is an end to big money politics, wherever that money comes from”.

But there is nothing progressive about propping up the existing political parties via public funding. It just helps maintain the political status quo, makes politics even more bureaucratic and makes it harder for new left wing parties to emerge.

The Liberal Party is currently in financial trouble because it is not getting the usual amount of cash from its big business mates. Why should working class tax payers have to fork out hundreds of millions of dollars to help maintain the main party of its rich and powerful enemies? Let the Liberals go begging door to door in Toorak and St Ives.

On the other side of politics, public funding of parties like the ALP just strengthens the hand of the MPs and the party apparatus and makes them less accountable to their members and supporters. The ALP is bureaucratic enough already. Why free it even further from the need to have an active and committed membership that has a say in the direction of the party?

The same goes for the Greens. Greatly increased public funding would just give the group of professional managers around Di Natale even greater control, unfettered by pesky members.

But the most reactionary element to these funding proposals is the call for a ban on union donations. This is an attempt to further undermine any working class influence in politics.

The rich and powerful and their media hate the idea that workers should have their own party to defend their class interests against the bosses – a party that workers fund with their own money. The bosses don’t want workers’ organisations such as unions to have any say in politics.

Sure, the unions do this in a highly bureaucratic way today, and socialists fight in the unions to make them more democratic in every aspect of their work. But the Fairfax press, Tony Abbott and Richard Di Natale are not concerned about enhancing the rights of rank and file union members. They want to expunge class from politics.

They pretend to be even handed by also calling for limitations on direct company donations to parties. But the bosses will easily find ways around this (as the NSW Liberals found ways around the ban on donations from property developers).

In any case they will still have their papers, their TV and radio stations and think tanks plus their control of the education system – all of which are much more significant for trying to mould public opinion in their favour than the few millions they give to the Liberal Party.