# “Pay $10,000, that gets you dinner”: Sean Kelly on how power is shaping politics

An episode of [7am](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1461999702), 7 Aug 2026, 15 min.

Audio: https://p.podderapp.com/2544644999/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/2fb3740d-3436-44af-8cc0-a91900716aa5/62723a1f-3e96-4fc4-882c-b25e0181da4d/b70db690-a520-4ba9-ac3b-b49f005fcb72/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=70f29d90-2a63-48aa-bf8f-b25e0181da70

In Australian politics, access can be bought, factions can operate beyond public view, and conduct can be deeply troubling without ever meeting the definition of corruption. None of it is especially new, and maybe that’s the problem. Meanwhile, people are becoming more disconnected from the institutions that shape their lives, and less convinced that those institutions are working in their interests. Today, columnist for The Age and SMH Sean Kelly, on the money, secrecy and private power shaping our politics, and what happens when voters stop trusting the system itself. If you enjoy 7am, the best way you can support us is by making a contribution at 7ampodcast.com.au/support. Socials: Stay in touch with us on Instagram Guest: Columnist for The Age and SMH Sean Kelly Photo: AAP Image/Jane Dempster See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM. In
[0:08] Speaker 1: Australian politics, access can be brought, factions can operate beyond
[0:12] Speaker 1: public view, and conduct can be deeply troubling without ever
[0:15] Speaker 1: meeting the definition of corruption. None of this is especially new,
[0:19] Speaker 1: and maybe that's the problem. Meanwhile, people are becoming more
[0:23] Speaker 1: disconnected from the institutions that shape their lives, unless convinced
[0:27] Speaker 1: those same institutions are working in their interests. Today Colonists
[0:32] Speaker 1: for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald Sean Kelly on
[0:35] Speaker 1: the money, secrecy and private power shaping our politics and
[0:39] Speaker 1: what happens when voters stop trusting the system itself. It's
[0:46] Speaker 1: Saturday August eight, Sean, great to see you again. Over
[0:54] Speaker 1: the past few weeks, we've seen private political fundraises, paying
[0:58] Speaker 1: to have dinner with the Prime Minister, a bit of
[1:00] Speaker 1: dinner and point by.
[1:01] Speaker 2: It, I tend lots of functions.
[1:04] Speaker 1: You want to ask that, well, we've seen a premiere
[1:06] Speaker 1: fall over corruption in the construction sector.
[1:09] Speaker 2: I've made the difficult decision to step aside as leader
[1:13] Speaker 2: of the Victorian State Parliamentary Labor Party and as Premier
[1:17] Speaker 2: of Victoria.
[1:18] Speaker 1: And a NIGHTCAC inquiry into a secretive liberal faction.
[1:22] Speaker 3: Christian Ellis, Jeremy Greenwood, Robert Asaff and John Claude Perrete
[1:27] Speaker 3: solicited or accepted political donations, including from prohibited donors in
[1:33] Speaker 3: a mountain.
[1:34] Speaker 1: What connects these stories in your view?
[1:37] Speaker 2: Well, I mean, the first caveat to put on this
[1:40] Speaker 2: is that we of course don't know all of the details,
[1:43] Speaker 2: and some of these things are more still in the
[1:45] Speaker 2: realm of allegation rather than proven fact. But there is
[1:50] Speaker 2: a general theme, which is the impression that people have
[1:55] Speaker 2: that money plays an enormous role in politics, that people
[1:59] Speaker 2: who want to make money, who want to make great
[2:02] Speaker 2: deals of money, often who are desperate to make money,
[2:06] Speaker 2: will find a way either to influence politicians or to
[2:10] Speaker 2: attempt to influence politicians. Those methods of attempting to influence
[2:15] Speaker 2: the political class can take many different forms, but the
[2:19] Speaker 2: first important point about them is that money is involved.
[2:22] Speaker 2: And the second important point to note is that secrecy
[2:27] Speaker 2: plays a very large role.
[2:29] Speaker 1: How much of this problem or perceptions around these problems
[2:33] Speaker 1: is that most of this stuff, if not all of it,
[2:35] Speaker 1: is entirely legal and routine. It might be serious and concerning,
[2:39] Speaker 1: it might not pass the much wanted pub tests. But
[2:42] Speaker 1: it's not necessarily illegal, or it's not even necessarily classified
[2:46] Speaker 1: its corruption.
[2:47] Speaker 2: Right, I think this is a huge problem. I think
[2:50] Speaker 2: it borders on absurdity. So the thing that I always
[2:55] Speaker 2: come back to is that it is commonly accepted in
[2:59] Speaker 2: the political class that you can pay ten thousand dollars
[3:03] Speaker 2: to have dinner with anyone you care to name. Really,
[3:08] Speaker 2: you can have access, private access to the most powerful
[3:11] Speaker 2: people in the country. If you're willing to pay ten
[3:14] Speaker 2: thousand dollars that gets you a dinner. That's I mean,
[3:17] Speaker 2: that is an insane fact. Now, this is on some
[3:22] Speaker 2: level a product of the fact that political parties need
[3:25] Speaker 2: to raise money without public funding for elections, which you
[3:28] Speaker 2: know a lot of people are opposed to. You are
[3:31] Speaker 2: always going to have to raise money in some way.
[3:34] Speaker 2: But nonetheless it did I think it is really striking. Now,
[3:38] Speaker 2: that doesn't mean that what we're talking about here is bribery.
[3:42] Speaker 2: We don't. It doesn't mean that somebody pays ten thousand
[3:45] Speaker 2: dollars and they get an outcome. But it does mean
[3:49] Speaker 2: if politicians go to enough of these types of events
[3:52] Speaker 2: and they have dinners at private mansions, they begin to
[3:56] Speaker 2: swim in the same waters. They hear similar arguments from
[4:00] Speaker 2: a similar group of people, or a group of people
[4:03] Speaker 2: with similar interests along a very long period of time
[4:07] Speaker 2: through their careers, that is going to change the way
[4:10] Speaker 2: you see the world, or at least make it very,
[4:12] Speaker 2: very difficult to hang on to the way that you
[4:13] Speaker 2: originally saw the world. And that's the point. That is
[4:16] Speaker 2: absolutely the point.
[4:17] Speaker 1: The most recent example, I guess, is the ten thousand
[4:20] Speaker 1: dollars dinner that the Prime Minister had at Point Piper, which,
[4:24] Speaker 1: as you've indicated, it's pretty common practice across all political parties.
[4:28] Speaker 1: What can you tell us about this dinner and the
[4:30] Speaker 1: guest list.
[4:31] Speaker 2: Well, the first thing to say is that there's some
[4:33] Speaker 2: debate about exactly the amounts of money involved. The people
[4:39] Speaker 2: who were there include Matt Common, the CEO of Commonwealth
[4:43] Speaker 2: Bank and arguably the most influential CEO in the country
[4:47] Speaker 2: right now. David Murray, the former chair of the Future Fund,
[4:51] Speaker 2: also a CEO once upon a time of Commonwealth Bank,
[4:55] Speaker 2: former Premier Daniel Andrews of Victoria. It was a pretty
[5:00] Speaker 2: pressive guest list, and a lot of this is it's
[5:03] Speaker 2: not so much shadowy as vague I would characterize it
[5:07] Speaker 2: more as a type of aesthetic that governs politics in
[5:10] Speaker 2: the eyes of most people. The artist storian TJ. Clark,
[5:14] Speaker 2: he wrote this article about politics and he says, the
[5:17] Speaker 2: politicians language repels scrutiny. We have got to the point
[5:21] Speaker 2: where we know that they have become so effective at
[5:24] Speaker 2: using language that uses a whole lot of words, but
[5:28] Speaker 2: in the end doesn't mean an enormous amount, and so
[5:31] Speaker 2: we can't ask politicians questions and get answers. And at
[5:34] Speaker 2: the same time, we know that they're operating in this
[5:36] Speaker 2: world in which money flows freely, but we don't have
[5:40] Speaker 2: much access to it. And then there's this third element
[5:42] Speaker 2: which is present on each of the stories you mentioned,
[5:44] Speaker 2: which is the operation of factions in politics. Factions are
[5:49] Speaker 2: always going to be involved in politics. They are at
[5:53] Speaker 2: their base just a group of people who are working
[5:56] Speaker 2: together to try to use the power that lies in numbers.
[6:00] Speaker 2: That is absolutely legitimate. The difficulty of courses that once
[6:02] Speaker 2: upon a time factions were about beliefs and ideologies, and
[6:05] Speaker 2: over time that become mostly about power and promotion and
[6:11] Speaker 2: those three things, if you like. The language that politicians
[6:14] Speaker 2: use to repel us, the secrecy around the internal operations
[6:19] Speaker 2: of political parties and the secrecy around the way that
[6:23] Speaker 2: political parties interact with moneyed interests, all former kind of
[6:28] Speaker 2: whole where we are not allowed to see inside the
[6:32] Speaker 2: workings of politics, and.
[6:35] Speaker 1: It's kind of like the secrecy then breeds into this
[6:38] Speaker 1: narrative that once the secrets are exposed, it then becomes
[6:42] Speaker 1: scandalous and that makes the whole body politics even look
[6:45] Speaker 1: more dodgy in the eyes of the public.
[6:48] Speaker 2: It does absolutely the thing about this dinner that Anthony
[6:51] Speaker 2: Alberinezi held with Felix Lee, there's nothing obviously wrong about it,
[6:57] Speaker 2: but it has these little hints, you know, it has
[6:59] Speaker 2: a hint of alleged murkiness because Felix Lee's father, Philip Lee,
[7:05] Speaker 2: there were questions around the movements of large amounts of
[7:10] Speaker 2: money from China into Australia. There was a little hint
[7:13] Speaker 2: of glamour because he apparently put two point two billion
[7:16] Speaker 2: dollars through Star Casino. These make it kind of more
[7:21] Speaker 2: exciting story, But the truth is that type of thing
[7:25] Speaker 2: is happening all the time, and so it's become the
[7:29] Speaker 2: case that only when you have these other added elements
[7:32] Speaker 2: does it become a new story. And that points to
[7:35] Speaker 2: the ordinariness of the problem. It points to the systemic
[7:38] Speaker 2: nature of the.
[7:39] Speaker 1: Problem, still de cap the faction shaping politics behind the
[7:45] Speaker 1: closed doors. Sean, you mentioned factions. Ikack is exposed in
[7:57] Speaker 1: the workings of a secretive liberal faction, while Labour's National
[8:00] Speaker 1: Conference showed how tightly factional deals can control what actually
[8:04] Speaker 1: happens publicly. What have you noticed about the evolving nature
[8:08] Speaker 1: of factional power and how it's being used in politics.
[8:11] Speaker 2: Now, look, many years ago, before I worked directly in politics,
[8:17] Speaker 2: I went to an event and I think, perhaps ironically,
[8:20] Speaker 2: it was a fundraiser and GoF Whitler was there, and
[8:25] Speaker 2: it was the only conversation.
[8:26] Speaker 1: I ever had with him.
[8:27] Speaker 2: He was very old and I was very young, and
[8:29] Speaker 2: he said to me, factions, factions are killing the party.
[8:33] Speaker 2: Once upon a time there was a division between factions
[8:37] Speaker 2: and always about their view of politics and their view
[8:40] Speaker 2: of the world. And so within the Labor Party you
[8:42] Speaker 2: had the left wing faction pushing for a more left
[8:45] Speaker 2: wing view of the world. It was pushing not in
[8:47] Speaker 2: a pure sense, but for a kind of socialist view
[8:50] Speaker 2: of the way things should be. And then there was
[8:52] Speaker 2: the right wing of the party, which had a more
[8:54] Speaker 2: pragmatic view of politics, perhaps a more conservative view of
[8:58] Speaker 2: the economy, and they wouldn't it out. And that battle
[9:02] Speaker 2: for principle, that battle for different views of the world
[9:06] Speaker 2: has with time been lost. You know, it is widely
[9:10] Speaker 2: said the factions have turned into vehicles for promotion, They've
[9:15] Speaker 2: turned into vehicles for careers. This is why I come
[9:18] Speaker 2: back to this question of the aesthetic. So ordinary Australians
[9:22] Speaker 2: aren't paying attention to this dinner that Anthony Albanize he had,
[9:25] Speaker 2: and they're not paying attention to the fundraisers that all
[9:28] Speaker 2: of the political parties have, but they are getting an
[9:31] Speaker 2: overall sense of politics. They're getting an overall sense of
[9:33] Speaker 2: politics that opens the door for somebody like Donald Trump
[9:37] Speaker 2: to come in. That opens the doors like Pauline Hanson
[9:39] Speaker 2: to come in, which is ironic because Pauline Hanson, we know,
[9:43] Speaker 2: is absolutely tied up with Gina Reinhart. You know, there's
[9:47] Speaker 2: no purity on behalf of one nation here, quite the opposite.
[9:51] Speaker 2: But how to ordinary people navigate through politics. It's a
[9:54] Speaker 2: matter of glancing every now and then at the news.
[9:58] Speaker 2: The overall sense you have, theesthetic and the sense Donald
[10:02] Speaker 2: Trump and Pauline Hansen they are not trying to repel,
[10:06] Speaker 2: meaning in fact, they are often giving you a very
[10:08] Speaker 2: very good sense of what they stand for and what
[10:10] Speaker 2: they want to do.
[10:11] Speaker 1: And so even.
[10:12] Speaker 2: Though they are absolutely tied up with money as much
[10:14] Speaker 2: as anybody else, there is this sense that they are
[10:17] Speaker 2: immune from the overall operation of influence and elites in
[10:25] Speaker 2: this country and every other country. To a fairly large extent.
[10:28] Speaker 2: That is on the major political parties for allowing that
[10:31] Speaker 2: impression to grow over time.
[10:33] Speaker 1: And that impression makes them seem more authentic, and therein
[10:36] Speaker 1: lies the political opportunity for the populace right and other
[10:40] Speaker 1: populist movements exactly Sean. We're often told Australians need a
[10:44] Speaker 1: better understanding of how democracy and its institutions work. How
[10:48] Speaker 1: much does that matter when people don't believe those institutions
[10:51] Speaker 1: so even working for them in the first place.
[10:54] Speaker 2: Right, I mean, this is absolutely the number the problem.
[10:57] Speaker 2: So there were these two interesting facts that came out
[10:59] Speaker 2: of the last fortnight. One was a survey from the
[11:02] Speaker 2: Reserve Bank of Australia that was about trust in the
[11:05] Speaker 2: bank and understanding of the Australians. About half of Australians
[11:10] Speaker 2: really do not understand or misunderstand the relationship between interest
[11:15] Speaker 2: rates and inflation, the relationship between interest rates and economic activity,
[11:20] Speaker 2: which is remarkable considering how much of our public debate
[11:22] Speaker 2: that's consumed over the last few years.
[11:24] Speaker 1: And how much it affects people's lives exactly.
[11:27] Speaker 2: We know that people's trust in institutions in democracy has
[11:30] Speaker 2: been declining. The Reserve Bank's own survey of trust shows
[11:36] Speaker 2: I think the average was five point five out of ten,
[11:39] Speaker 2: and I think this means that there is the potential
[11:43] Speaker 2: for people's approach, attitude to institutions and the way we
[11:48] Speaker 2: are governed to really spiral. The problem has been that politics,
[11:52] Speaker 2: for several decades now has moved too far in the
[11:56] Speaker 2: direction of giving advantage to those who are already have advantage.
[12:01] Speaker 2: There is a sense that governments have become a drift
[12:05] Speaker 2: from voters, and that is a substantive sense in the
[12:09] Speaker 2: quality of lives that people feel they are able to
[12:12] Speaker 2: lead and the quality of ambitions that people feel they
[12:15] Speaker 2: are able to have. That is what governments need to
[12:18] Speaker 2: address first and foremost. But you cannot separate that from
[12:23] Speaker 2: the influence perceived and actual that people with great deals
[12:28] Speaker 2: of money, businesses with great deals of power have on
[12:33] Speaker 2: our politics.
[12:34] Speaker 1: And finally, sean to all of this, has the political
[12:37] Speaker 1: class actually come to rely on the community's ignorance of
[12:41] Speaker 1: how our democratic institutions and systems work in order to
[12:45] Speaker 1: exploit that lack of knowledge and create a well for themselves.
[12:48] Speaker 1: Where then get away with this type of thing without
[12:50] Speaker 1: proper scrutiny.
[12:51] Speaker 2: Because it's a good question, Daniel, it's a complex one.
[12:54] Speaker 2: I don't want to say any of these things are
[12:57] Speaker 2: quite that conscious, are quite that deliberate. I think what
[13:01] Speaker 2: happens instead is that a set of assumptions grow up
[13:05] Speaker 2: over time. Political parties need to raise money, they get
[13:08] Speaker 2: in an arms race, they have to win elections. They
[13:10] Speaker 2: try to find the most effective ways of raising money.
[13:13] Speaker 2: They fall into these habits. They end up mixing with
[13:16] Speaker 2: a certain class of people, a certain type of very
[13:19] Speaker 2: powerful business. Those things, over time, reshape the assumptions of politicians.
[13:24] Speaker 2: They reshape the assumptions of how politics is done. All
[13:27] Speaker 2: of this is fairly organic. Nobody is setting out to
[13:32] Speaker 2: create this system. But that is why it is so
[13:35] Speaker 2: hard to unpick. And I should add labor has made
[13:38] Speaker 2: some moves over the past couple of years to change
[13:41] Speaker 2: some of the laws around donations, we will have something
[13:44] Speaker 2: that is closer to real time donation disclosure. There have
[13:48] Speaker 2: been various caps placed in the main part. While these
[13:52] Speaker 2: things could go further, these are good things. They are
[13:54] Speaker 2: some significant changes. Whether they make a really significant difference
[13:58] Speaker 2: to our politics over time, obviously we will only be
[14:02] Speaker 2: able to tell as we see the operation of those
[14:04] Speaker 2: laws which kick in in earnest next year.
[14:07] Speaker 1: Well, dear listener, if you haven't subscribed to seven AM's
[14:11] Speaker 1: Instagram or YouTube channel, please do just to check out
[14:13] Speaker 1: Shawn's wonderful jumper Sean. Thank you for joining us once.
[14:18] Speaker 2: Again, Thanks very much, Daniel.
[14:31] Speaker 1: Seven Am is a daily show from Solstice Media. Is
[14:34] Speaker 1: made by Atticus Basto, Chris Dangate, Crystal Color, Renee Auckland,
[14:39] Speaker 1: Ruby Jones, Travis Evans, Zolvechio and me Daniel James. Our
[14:45] Speaker 1: theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of
[14:48] Speaker 1: envelop Portio. And if you'd like to support seven am
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[15:03] Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, have yourself a great way Kit,

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