It is all very well politicians praising “free and fair” elections in Australia, but what does that mean? If restricted to the freedom to nominate for election, enrolments of voters, the conduct of voting, the system of voting, the system of working out electorates and the counting of votes, Australia must rank among the very best in the world.

We only have to look at the US’s Electoral College and gerrymandered electorates drawn by state politicians not an independent commission to see that. Similarly, we can be grateful we do not have Britain’s first-past the post system under which MPs can be elected despite a majority of their constituency being opposed to them. Margaret Thatcher, for example, won thumping majorities on less that 45 per cent of the vote.

But “free and fair elections” means more than that. As the High Court observed in the 1994 Theophanous case, it also requires that there are not unreasonable barriers to the voters being properly informed. The Constitution had an implied requirement that political communication be free, the court said. Without that, the constitutional provisions for representative democracy would fail.

And this is the crunch. Over the past 20 years it has become increasingly easy for big corporate or high-wealth individuals to give to political parties without easy scrutiny. Either the details come out long after the election is over, or they are presented in hard-to-access form, or the donations can be split among state, territory and federal party entities at different times so the totality of what amounts to a political bribe go unnoticed.

Moreover, the amounts of money involved get ever larger.

And the pious hand-wringing of political parties that these donations are merely big corporations and big unions doing a civic duty is rubbish. They give to political parties in the expectation that the political parties will do their bidding. Which they do.

The Museum of Australian Democracy’s survey that the politicians themselves hate this is instructive. It tells us, first, that the present system is corrupt and, secondly that there is hope for reform because the politicians know it and do not like it.

But politicians’ suspicion of media remains. In the survey the thing that politicians most dislike about Australian democracy is being misrepresented by the media (23 per cent). Their own corruption rated half that at 13 per cent.

But again, it depends on what you mean by corruption. If restricted to a brown paper bag full of cash gong to an individual, then we do not have a problem. But if it is a bucketload of cash given by, for example, the Australian Hotels Association to ensure Australia’s evil and life-damaging laxity towards gambling stays in place, or any number of big interests pushing their case to political parties to defend and extend their interests against the public interest, then Australia has a big problem with corruption.

One cannot help ill-informed fools voting against their own interests. As Churchill said, the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with a voter.

But do we have to stack the odds against voters at least having the opportunity to become well-informed, especially when the politicians who have in their command to change things secretly acknowledge the problem?

When are enough of them going to have the spine to acknowledge the need to change things: to get rid of corporate and union donations and severely cap individual donations and to cap electoral spending.

Further, when are they going to understand the cyber threat: misinformation being pushed by foreigners and others with bad motives to influence voters to vote for a disruptive candidate, who otherwise would have little support, without the disruptive candidate even knowing.

Freedom of speech is ensuring that money does not repeat lies, misrepresent and twist truth. Freedom of speech is not having politicians over a barrel with the threat of cutting donations. And now we know the politicians themselves secretly acknowledge it.

When are they going to have the courage to use the keys they have to free themselves of their chains?

Free and fair elections means free flows of information and politicians not being beholden to big donors and being free from the need to raise large sums of money to get elected.