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.
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Enivronmental NGO Silence
North American environmental NGOs are not constrained so much by the conditions imposed by their charitable status, but my their corporate donor base. For the American experience, just review the history of the David Gelbaum affair and the corruption of the Sierra Club. Or read Christine MacDonald's "Green Inc" about how the most prominent and high profile environmental orgs not only accept money from energy and logging corporations but allow the directors of these companies to sit on their boards.
In Canada the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and the David Suzuki Foundation are beneficiaries of serious corporate donations. Suzuki of course, poses as a Great Crusader against climate change, playing to the Green yuppie gallery by his demand that MPs who deny anthropogenic global warming should be jailed---hardly the action of someone inhibited by possible government retaliation from the tax department. Yet he receives donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta's principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees' and Pensioners' Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world, operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants. The Suzuki Foundation's 2005/06 financial report also lists 52 corporate donors including Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal. The latter three benefactors explain Suzuki's silence on the obviously negative environmental impact of mass immigration. The financial industry is fueled by mortgages to home-buyers---70 to 85% of whom are foreign-born.
The Sierra Club of Canada employs the second "solution" offered in this article to circumvent the intention of the law. They set up a dummy organization which they call the "Sierra Club Foundation" as a purely educational group and entice membership to it. Then they use the membership fees in a transparently discreet way to fund their political arm, the Sierra "Club" of Canada, which is blatantly partisan, even to the point of assigning "grades" to the political parties who contest an upcoming federal election. They assigned an "F" to the Conservative Harper government, even though the opposition parties did not actually promise to terminate the Tar Sands project and promised to hike immigration levels by 38% which, in practice, would mean that they would raise GHG emissions by 38%. I gave the Sierra Club an "F" on two counts. One, for their appalling blindness to the relationship of population growth to climate change and immigration to carbon emissions. And two, for tax fraud. There is no "Chinese Wall" between the Sierra Club Foundation and the Sierra Club. Money went from one hand to the other. Meanwhile, over 700 legitimate charity groups were disqualified for doing legitimate charity work in 2007. Groups that provided food banks, hospice care, trauma counselling etc. Many people who gave money to the Sierra Club Foundation believed that it was not to be used for partisan purposes. They were Conservatives, Liberals or New Democratic Party supporters who woke up to read the morning newspaper and found that the organization they donated to was endorsing the party of hyper mass immigration, the Green Party of Elizabeth May. How would you feel if you learned that the SPCA or the animal protection agency you donated to had forwarded your money to the Howard or Rudd government or to any of your political opponents along with their endorsement?
North American environmental NGOs are doing the work that corporations pay them to do. The job of Pied Pipers to green yuppie dupes, decoying them down inconsequential pathways away from the root cause of environmental degradation---mass immigration and rising fertility rates. Best to let them exhaust their members by using them as a fire brigade to put out the brush fires that constantly pop up everywhere. Save this forest, or that river, or this endangered species of the month. Fight symptoms, not causes. After all, corporations can suffer the odd environmental victory. Dedicated parkland can later be ravished with the stroke of a parliamentary pen. What is really important is that environmentalists stay silent while the nation is being flooded with more consumers and cheap labour.
Well, it looks like the environmental NGOs have kept their end of the bargain. Barking dogs that yap at the mailman, but ignore the crook who is robbing the house.
Tim Murray