by frog
Brian Rudman in the Herald seems fairly impressed with the Greens’ Open Government policy. He suggests that the Electoral Finance Act seems anecdotally to be having the effect of reducing the impact of big secret donor funded advertising during the campaign.
On Monday, the Greens called for even tougher funding rules as part of its open government policy. They want the source of any donation over $1000 named, and a cap of $35,000 on any one donor or entity.
They want a register of lobbyists and who their clients and lobbying methods are. They also want partial state funding as “insurance against … parties becoming captured by wealthy vested interests …”
It’s time we took these ideas seriously.
Earlier on Rudman draws attention to Peter Dunne’s previous links with tobacco donors:
Mr Dunne told Agenda the money was for a very pleasant lunch on an old country pub on a private trip and that “we’ve never been offered tobacco company money”. Asked if he would take it if offered, he replied “If people want to give us funding we accept funding on a no-strings-attached basis.”
It’s the same message delivered by every party – except, perhaps, the Greens, who are made of sterner stuff than the rest.
I’ve highlighted before that it seems likely most parties, not just New Zealand First, are hiding the source of their funding, even under the new Electoral Finance Act. (Labour, for instance, still has declared no major donors at all this year.) The public needs much greater transparency around political funding so that voters can assess for themselves whether it is an issue that will influence their vote.
Published in Justice & Democracy by frog on Wed, November 5th, 2008
Tags: , donations, Electoral Finance Act, open government, peter dunne
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Alright, tell me why the status quo is so wrong? The amount of funding that a political party will get has zero influence on how people vote; as others have said, ACT has the highest amount of spending, yet they perform poorly.
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john-ston Says:
November 5th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
>> Alright, tell me why the status quo is so wrong? The amount of funding that a political party will get has zero influence on how people vote; as others have said, ACT has the highest amount of spending, yet they perform poorly.
ACT used to get about 9 seats, when they had huge levels of funding. In 2005 they got much less money, and only mamaged 2 seats. So it seems that funding does effect their success – it’s just that it takes more money the get votes for a party with their policies than for other parties.
The classic example of a party that got quite a few votes with very little money was New Zealand First in 2002, and we now know that they were lying about their finances – they had much more that they admitted.
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No John-ston, the amount of money that a party can spend on its campaign is but ONE influence on an election outcome … a necessary but not-sufficient condition for getting votes.
The second part of it is, given that the money is NECESSARY, the strings attached to it by potential donors become snares that bind the politicians to the money providers. Wealth gains power.
This can be understood better by examining the odd nature of some corporate donation patterns, they give to BOTH sides. They aren’t favoring one approach or the other, they are buying influence over whatever approach is used.
Which leads to the statistics that you might be examining. Most donors in that category don’t care who wins as long as the b@5tard stays bought.
Necessary but not sufficient also makes clear that there are some pigs so ugly that there’s no amount of lipstick that will get the voters turned on about them. ACT finds itself in that situation.
BJ
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I doubt that any company that donates, say. $20,000 to each of the major parties thinks that they have ‘bought’ anything or any one! I think they may be doing it in the belief that they are helping to support democracy.
The place where things are bought are around dinner tables, theatre seats, hospitality suites, and other such machinations, and they are not of politicians, who have little real influence over anything, but of Public Servants. Ask Telecom or Contact or NZRFU or any of the other ‘big’ businesses in New Zealand who has been ‘entertained’ by them in the last year; I bet you get a shock! All these companies have highly paid people on staff whose sole job is to ‘liaise with’ government agencies.
These liaison people may have discussions with politicians – to ‘explain’ to them the intricacies of something coming toward them. They may drop a ‘little something’ off – like the latest mobile phone or team jersey. Most of them having worked in the Beehive, they have access to ‘appropriate’ people, but their key asset is the access they have to CEOs and Policy Directors; the people who frame the words that Cabinet and Politicians consider, and then implement the decisions, often with significant purchases of goods and/or services. This is the New Zealand political lobby!
Yes, I know that Public Servants are not supposed to accept things from outsiders. But come on! This nice man and his wife invited me and my wife, and a few (dozen) others to have dinner and go to the theatre with them! How can that be defined as “accepting’” something from a supplier?
Parties who do not have the ability to raise enough money to sustain themselves shouldn’t exist. The only other option is to have ALL POLITICAL PARTIES equally funded by the state; in which case I’ll start a party and get my funding thank you very much. My party will be called “the antidisestablishmentarianism party” (yes, it is a word, look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary) and we will fight our cause to the death. Party membership will cost $1.13, including GST. I think I can get at least 1,000 members in a week, as I’ll be offering to make their payment for them as a gift, all they will need to do is fill out the form.
Bottom line – regulation of freedom of expression doesn’t work and never will. Allow our society to develop its norms through evolution and we will soon have a country to be proud of again, right now, we seem to have a lot to regret!
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Strings – $20k isn’t much. It gets you a chance to have a couple minute yak with the pollie and not much more. It gets your calls returned and you get input to the process, not dominance. That’s an order of magnitude more expensive. If you think it doesn’t happen you clearly haven’t spent enough time watching USAian politics.
If it takes a lot of people giving little donations, it is democracy friendly. Wealthy guys have exactly as much say as those of us in the cheap seats.
Not more.
BJ
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More and more money has flooded into the Green Party – mainly from business – over the last few elections. Yet in every election – 1990, 1999, 2002, 2005, the party gets somewhere around 5% to 7% of the vote. This occurs despite whether hardly any money is spent or nearly a million dollars in the last Green campaign. This shows the complicated nature of money in elections, and the fact that often there are absolutely no correlations between how much parties spend and how well they do. For more on this see this comprehensive account of the Green Party finances: http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2008/10/political-fin-1.html
Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
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BJ, what I said was :
“I doubt that any company that donates, say. $20,000 to each of the major parties thinks that they have ‘bought’ anything or any one! ”
That second word was doubt, and was heartfelt. It’s the ‘other stuff’ that gets you input and influence.
In the USA, the role of lobbyist is well defined and understood. Here, it’s not supposed to happen. However, here it’s easier than you might thing, just pick the right small party, pay your dues and edge your way into influence – then go out and lobby everyone you see to vote for your party!
lol
In New Zealand there is a clear reality, the more you give – the less acknowledgement and influence you get! Just look what you get for giving $500,000 and an interest free loan of another $100,000 – ignored, especially in public!
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Bryce, please let us in on how you know that business is flooding money into the Greens.
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labour may well have no major donors at all this year.
i’ve heard no labour ads on the radio.
i’ve seen 3 different labour ads on tv, only one repeated on prime time, the others were one late at night & one a couple of times during the afternoon.
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