Former South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill has called for Australian governments to follow his state in cracking down on political misinformation by passing truth in political advertising laws.
Mr Weatherill, who is now the executive director of democracy at McKinnon, said penalties could be tied to the public money political parties are handed.
Political parties at state and federal levels receive public money for the number of votes they get during elections over a certain threshold.
"There are no political advertising laws except in South Australia. You can use public funding to publish false and misleading ads during an election campaign," he told an anti-corruption commission's conference in Melbourne on Tuesday.
"In a perfect world, you'd have truth in political advertising in every jurisdiction, if there was a finding you'd engaged in false and misleading advertising, it would have some consequence to your public funding."
Mr Weatherill also floated bringing back pensions for MPs while cracking down on lobbying regulations, therefore stopping politicians from joining the private sector and seeking to influence their former colleagues.
"One option is to have a very heavy-duty ban on ministers post-politics but do something which I'm sure will create a bit of controversy, and that's to give consideration to re-introduce parliamentary pensions," he said.
The Commonwealth and state and territories have different cool down periods before a former minister or their senior staff can engage in lobbying, although most are seen as ineffective by transparency advocates like the Centre for Public Integrity.
Former NSW Labor minister turned Independent Commission Against Corruption commissioner John Hatzistergos branded the impacts of lobbying "deleterious".
He said lobbyists had sought to go over his head to his party's office and the premier to attempt to pull him into line when he was health minister.
"If that's the tactics of these people, they should be exposed," he said.
"I don't have a problem with standing up against them but what I don't like is the insidious impact of some party hack ringing me up and telling me that I should back off because of some person who's important to the party."
Former Victorian ombudsman Deborah Glass called for more consequences for corruption as she referred to numerous examples where ministerial staffers and MPs weren't held to account due to misconduct that failed to reach the state's high legislative threshold for criminal corruption.
"If there are no consequences, then what's the point?" she said.
Ms Glass said there needed to be an appropriate range of penalties when dealing with a spectrum of misconduct which would include things like breaching a member's guide at the less serious end.
"You'd have to be really careful not to try and attack everything with the same blunt hammer," she said.
"I think it would be nice to see a system where there were consequences that mattered to people."
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