KEY POINTS:
After Lawrence Lessig's talk to a room full of librarians, many jump to their feet. The applause is long and loud. The Stanford Law School professor has just told them they are the vanguard in the fight against corruption. Librarians to the barricades. "You are the one profession that hasn't put money at the centre of what you do. You have not been bought out ... you can help us restate the independence that is essential to free society functioning. You can fight for that."
But Lessig, cyberlaw expert and guru of copyrights and wrongs, is deadly serious. After a decade of trying to get people to "wake up from a stupor they were in" regarding the issue of copyright, Lessig changed tack last year. He had realised that despite his best efforts, people, especially politicians, were oblivious to the way copyright law has been hijacked from its purpose. The tool for spreading knowledge is increasingly used to block the spread. To make any headway on rebalancing copyright, Lessig knew he had to deal with something far bigger first - corruption.
He's not talking about bribes of Members of Parliament, or Congress or institutions. The fight is against something more insidious - the influence of vested interests on politicians and the laws they make. It's not just an American problem.
The updated copyright law shows how politicians have been lobbied by the music and movie industry. The new Act contains provisions which override due process.
Food regulations ignore proposals for country of origin labelling, demonstrating the power of trade interests. And pending changes to the Resource Management Act may show how environmental protection gets trampled by construction industry boots.
In Lessig's book, what's at work here is money. The corruption is how it undermines trust in our political process and institutions. Money sours the pitch, creates "an improper dependence" and breaks trust - not just in campaign contributions from vested interests, but also lobbyist efforts which affect the food we eat, the pharmaceuticals we use, and the science we believe to be true.
While Lessig's mission has an American focus, in particular the reform of Congress it has lessons for New Zealand - he was even here last week. In our just-completed government election, Labour campaigned on trust, some campaign donations left a bad smell, and the Electoral Finance Act, designed to deal with such undue influences, was found wanting. With the Act about to get a makeover, what insight does Lessig's anti-corruption crusade have to offer?
His solution to the corrupting influence of pork-barrel spending on the working of Congress is surprising - public financing for all congressional campaigns and transparency of the lobbyist process.
"I agree that it's hard to imagine. That's where the hard work of this movement is going to be - to convince people about it," said Lessig after his keynote to the New Zealand Library Association conference.
Lessig points out the estimated cost of full public funding for Congress - about US$2 billion ($3.5 billion) per election cycle - is not as expensive as it sounds.
"If public funding eliminated just half of the subsidies estimated by the Cato Institute to have been given to private businesses in 2001, it would pay for itself for 80 years."
In Lessig's view, it's not what campaign funding does, but the perception of what it does that's damaging. "The problem with privately funded campaigns is not really because I believe privately funded campaigns change results - they may or may not, but we don't have any good data for that. What we do know is that people believe it changes results."
It's this belief that he says is "deeply corrosive of the respect for, and desire to participate in, the political system".
In this sense, it doesn't really matter whether Winston Peters did nothing wrong in taking donations from the Vela family, or whether Owen Glenn had no ulterior motive in his donations to Labour and New Zealand First. It's the perception - that even if something wasn't amiss, it wasn't a good look - that counts.
Lessig uses the example of Hilary Clinton's vigorous opposition in 1998 to a bill designed to make it impossible for lower-income Americans to discharge their credit card debts. In 2001, when the rejected bill resurfaced, Clinton was a US senator and had received US$140,000 in campaign contributions from credit card companies and financial institutions. Predictably, she voted for what she had previously called "that awful bill". Even though she denied it, people assumed it was the money that effected her flip-flop.
Lessig says while he believes Clinton, that she is not one to get pushed around by money in her campaign, it doesn't matter.
"She has nothing she can say to get out of that perception. What that does is short circuit the democratic debate."
Lessig wants people to see how money, in such circumstances, poisons trust.
"People begin to believe decisions or actions have been guided by something they should not have been - an improper dependence."
Take away the money with publicly funded elections and the picture changes. The ulterior motive gone, and Clinton's reason for changing her vote, for example, would now become part of democratic debate. Which is how it should be.
"In democratic institutions, proper dependence is dependence on the people."
Lessig is not saying money is all bad - just in some circumstances. He advocates incentives to promote proper independence. Independence that ensures political leaders don't let business interests control their decision-making via campaign contributions and pressure from lobbyists.
As he points out, many institutions in our society - courts, doctors, academics, scientists, etc - depend on trust: "They need us to believe that their decisions are based on reason, not their personal or financial interest." Lessig has a string of examples to show that, unfortunately, this isn't always the way.
An American Hospitals Association report citing a new anti-stroke drug mysteriously lost its dissenting section in between the draft and final version of a report on its safety. The association had been given US$11 million by the drugmaker. The United States practice of "detailing", a US$4.8 billion industry in 2005, involves sending out representatives to doctors to give them drug samples and gifts to affect their prescribing choices.
Then there are the years of denial about the adverse health effects of lead in petrol. In the face of such false science - "classic tobacco science" - is it any wonder, asks Lessig, that many parents now distrust public health authorities' views and back out of the public health system on vaccination programmes, in a way that is profoundly destructive to public health.
Lessig asks the librarians to think about "this more basic kind of corruption, this loss of independence and trust in the most basic institutions of our society". He holds them up as an example of that independence. Against the norm, libraries provide free access in a world where metered access is everywhere. And free, too, as in speech, through neutral platforms of access to knowledge in a world where sponsored gateways are, increasingly, the rule. "You support independence and restore trust by reminding us how this improper dependence destroys us."
