Cory Corbett
Independent

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Cory Corbett is what you might call “aggressively independent”. His website states, over and over, that he’s not affiliated with any political party, isn’t corporate-sponsored, and isn’t even part of a group ticket for Independents. His resume is impressively broad – he’s worked with the Red Cross, Department of Health and Human Services, and on community Arts projects – but he’s quick to disclaim any glory, describing his achievements as merely part of collaborative efforts. He sees any potential Senate contribution to be as a facilitator and team player, someone who knows that lasting change comes from collaboration, not ego.

Most of all, he emphasises that he is a Victorian, interested in helping his state. This is evident in many of his policies, which rather makes me wonder why he’s having a punt for federal politics and not looking towards the next state election. Nonetheless, Corbett has been able to widen his focus to encompass national issues, and he’s making a lot of sense.

Corbett takes aim at the influence of lobbyists on elected representatives, calling for complete transparency. This would take the form of Lobbyists Register, recording who’s actively in the game of buying influence, and open diaries for MPs and Senators to show what meetings they’re taking with said lobby groups. Corbett also wants elected representatives leaving Parliament to be subject to a two year wait before taking plum jobs connected with their former areas of responsibility.

While Australia might not be at the mercy of lobbyists the way the US has been, it’s certainly true that access gets results, and money buys access. Groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby, the Minerals Council, and Advance Australia exert a tremendous amount of influence over political decision-making – and let’s not forget the perennial trembling finger of accusation pointed by the Liberal Party at GetUp! For all we see in terms of big budget tv ad buys, or sneaky little leaflets slipped into our letterboxes, the vast majority of these groups’ efforts take place behind closed doors in meeting we rarely, if ever, learn about. Corbett is one of the few candidates in this election calling for across-the-board transparency, and it’s a refreshing and welcome change.

The next group Corbett takes aim at are multinationals who pay little, if anything, in taxes, and send billions in profits offshore. He calls for these companies to pay their fair share, and for that revenue to be invested in Medicare, renewable energy, and affordable housing.

No argument here. We currently have a system so broken that an average income worker pays more tax than a corporation raking in billions of dollars of profit. The fact that Corbett wants to see any revenue gained invested in programs ultimately designed to better Australian society as a whole shows he understands that it’s not enough simply to complain about a bad situation. Solutions, or at least the beginnings of solutions, are needed.

On healthcare, Corbett wants to see Medicare expanded to cover dental, mental, and allied health provision, and more funding for women’s health programs. The massive cost blow-out is presumably met by the tax on multinationals he proposes.

While he’s at it, Corbett wants a crackdown on private hospitals siphoning money offshore. This appears to refer to the buy-up of Australian private hospitals by Healthscope (owned by offshire firm Brookfield), and its policy of charging exorbitant fees, including for simply walking in the door to seek treatment. This is an issue that’s had very little news coverage; it’s both surprising and pleasing to see that Corbett is across this particular aspect of healthcare.

Gambling ads need to go, says Corbett, declaring that he would push for nothing less than a total ban across both TV and social media. Honestly, I can’t see it happening, but I wish him luck with this one.

Finally we get to “law and order” issues, and here’s where I have a bit of a problem with Corbett’s policies. On the one hand, he advocates for youth programs aimed at preventing an inevitable slide into criminal behaviour. This could mean anything from sports clubs to skills training to the kind of horrifically abusive “boot camps” that occasionally make the news when their terrible treatment of kids is exposed. Corbett doesn’t specify what he means, but I’m going to hope – based on his healthcare policies – that he means more productive and supportive programs.

But then there are these.

Hold parents/guardians legally responsible for repeat violent offenders.

Put more police on the streets and reopen local stations.

These are temptingly easy measures to reach for when trying to deal with any kind of youth crime, but they are basically blunt instruments wielded to fix a problem that really requires more precise tools.

Throwing a parent or guardian in jail because their kid has been involved in violent crime solves nothing. It doesn’t take into account the parents’ own behaviour (such as one parent being the victim of family violence), the young person’s school experience, or the very real potential for a penalised parent to punish their child for getting them into trouble. It clogs up the legal system, and it doesn’t address any underlying issues. It’s a band-aid with pretty flowers on it that makes you feel better until you look at the gaping wound underneath.

As for more police on the streets … again, it’s just a cosmetic solution. For a start, there simply aren’t the numbers. Recruitment is dropping, so to even start to put more police out there, you have to attract people to join up in the first place. And it’s reactionary. It works from the assumption that the best way to deal with the question of youth crime is by punishing it, not preventing it.

I am, however, all for reopening closed police stations. There is a real problem with police response times, and not having local staffed stations is a big contributor to that. There are also any number of other, non-emergency functions that police serve for the community that are made more difficult. (Yes, I’m aware that this runs into the low recruitment problem.)

Ultimately, though, all these policies have one crucial flaw. They’re not federal responsibilities. Unless Corbett’s plans include some kind of joint federal-state initiative, they add up to not much at all.

Corbett also has an entire suite of policies aimed specifically at Victoria – although his Small Business Empowerment & Workforce Engagement Program could be applied elsewhere.

Sadly, his transport policies don’t show the same community focus as, say, his healthcare or anti-lobbying initiatives. Here, Corbett is unashamedly a free-market capitalist, calling for deregulation and privatisation of everything from freight to ride-share to toll-roads. He wants taxi and ride-share fares to be completely free of price-fixing, and for private companies to bid for public transport routes.These measures, he claims, will drive down prices.

Here’s the problem – Melbourne already tried to privatise its public transport, and it failed miserably. Our current public transport system, neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring, is the result of the attempt to privatise and the resultant scramble by the state government to prop up a network full of gaping holes where companies didn’t liaise with each other over timetables, promised innovations never happened, and – crucially – prices didn’t go down.

There’s also that pesky federal-state divide again. Yes, joint initiatives can happen (like the Metro Tunnel or the proposed Airport Rail Link), but the federal government doesn’t set taxi fares or tolls. That’s entirely a state government responsibility.

With Corbett then, we have a mixed bag. Strong on accountability, actually providing a solution to the dual problem of multinational tax avoidance and budget constraints on healthcare and renewable energy – but also rather distressingly wedded to free market ideology that has been proven, in practice, not to work.

All in all, Corbett might find a more sympathetic ear to his ideas if he were to run for the Victorian State government. As it stands, you could do worse than put him above some of the more extreme parties running for office. He may not be able to privatise public transport in Victoria, but at least he’d be a voice aiming to clean Parliament up a bit.