Actually, when you come to think of it, the problem is not what they do with all that moolah, but what they do for it. And, again, because you are a simple person, you understand that if you give somebody money, you’d expect that person to do something for you. That’s the way the world works: your friend fixes a door hinge for you, so you buy him a drink; your wife helps out a neighbour and gets a sponge cake for a thank you; you drop your son’s friend off to school and his father takes you to the football a few times a year.

So you can only imagine what you would be prepared to do if someone actually gave you $95 million. You strongly suspect the folk in government must be feeling grateful to those who gave them all that money. Look, we said you are no genius and have only a vague idea what a government could do to thank those donors, but you feel they will get something for their contributions and you will miss out.

It’s actually worse than that. It isn’t just that they get something that you don’t: they get something at your expense and that of others like you. In other words, each of you pays a small amount of the reward which those donors receive. You pay it in small cutbacks in benefits to which you are entitled; in the rundown of your children’s school, in the roads that, in the old days, used to be free; in a dozen little helpings that enable the top ten per cent of the population to recoup a profit on the donation they have made to the political party.

via Big bucks for political parties: How Australia’s politicians are selling us out