There are still no declarations from National or the other parties, including United Future, although perhaps we can expect to see them in the next couple of days.

This is appallingly murky and suggests that Labour was treating voters with disdain. Many voters punished Labour for, among other things, its negative campaign. So as it turns out its attempt to circumvent the donation rules didn’t affect the outcome of the election significantly, but it was still undemocratic and disrespectful.

Hopefully with the election now behind us and the large donations from the gambling and unsustainable fishing industries already in the pocket other parties can now turn their bipartisan attention to developing a cleaner and more open set of rules for fund-raising and donations.

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.

• A fixed election date
• Annual limit of $35,000 on donations to parties from any one person or entity
• The true identity of the source of any party donation above $1000 must be disclosed
• Citizens Assembly on campaign finance
• International treaties to be voted on by Parliament rather than just signed by cabinet.

The bit I think is most powerful is the plan to make cabinet minutes public:

People have a right to know what has been decided by Government, not just when it is announced with Government spin, but soon after Cabinet has signed it off.

The Green Party will:

1. Ensure that Cabinet minutes and decisions are published on the internet within one month of each Cabinet meeting unless there is a pressing reason not to publish (for example, the release of information that would risk our national security or is commercially confidential)
   1. When decisions or minutes are withheld, require the fact that information is being withheld, and the reason for that, to be publicly provided.
   2. Ensure that there is the ability to request a judicial review by an in-camera (closed) court, which can see the full minutes
   3. Ensure that information withheld is published as soon as the risk subsides.

That would dramatically improve the perceived accountability of a powerful body that constitutionally often sits outside the purview of parliamentary accountability.

It is of course a serious issue for more than just the ‘money for policy‘ reasons.  New Zealand’s fisheries are desperately depleted by commercial fishing and the government needs to take urgent action to protect one of our most important environmental and economic assets.  The suggestion that some politicians are making decisions on this issue for other, less ethical reasons is deeply troubling.

Image Credit: Mark Frauenfelder at Thumb Tack Press

A box of documents sent to the newspaper this week shows that Vela interests made donations to NZ First as early as 1999. Mr Meurant suggested to Mr Vela that this provided the opportunity to give “input” into policy areas in which the family had business interests.

Mr Meurant sought money from Vela interests to travel as required in his taxpayer-paid job to liaise with Mr Peters, and for when he was “required to provide NZ First with material for debates in Parliament”.

He wanted help from Mr Vela “when required to show my face in Parliament to thrash out policy positions which I will have already developed with your people on taxation, fishing, thoroughbred with Winston’s bunch”.

I’m sure Peters will rightly argue that this latest evidence has not been tested in a court, but on the face of it is appears damning. Labour has stood by Peters throughout this ongoing and evolving scandal and it seems clear that he and his NZ First party is Labour’s first cab off the rank this election if it is afforded that choice. That adds increased weight to the argument that Labour voters have to use their party vote tactically to decide weather they want Peters and company at the cabinet table, or Jeanette and the Greens.

All power to Viv Goldsmith, Labour’s candidate in East Coast Bays, for speaking out against the fiction that school fees are “donations”…

Ms Goldsmith, a teacher herself, says she mails off her request for fees to the minister each time she gets one and challenged people at the election rally to do likewise.

Sadly she’s ranked 67 on Labour’s list and standing in East Coast Bays’ Murray McCully, who has a majority of 7,000 votes.  And she doesn’t have a lot of support from her party:

However, her party bosses might not be so pleased she’s drawn attention to the embarrassing fact that after nine years in power, Labour has still not stamped out the thinly veiled extortion too often associated with this “voluntary” giving.

The Human Rights Commission’s Report on Human Rights in New Zealand notes that:

The Education Act 1989 stipulates that every person who is not a foreign student or attending a private or integrated school is entitled to free enrolment and free education at any state school from the ages of five to 19. That is, state schools may not charge fees.

However most schools in New Zealand now charge set fees (that are legally only donations).  Consumer Magazine found three years ago that of the of the 119 schools that responded its survey,  only four (decile one schools) indicated they wouldn’t be asking parents for a donation. Metiria has been arguing that we need to take a two-pronged approach to the problem.

First we need to increase school funding by progressively increasing operational funding to schools to meet the full cost of funding for every student, and increasing the overall funding of TFEA so that programmes in schools are adequately funded.

Second we need to enforce the current law that prohibits schools from demanding fees by extending the requirement of ERO reports to include an assessment of fees and donations.

Rudman notes that Labour has grizzled and grumped about school fees/donations but they continue to be charged and grow in size. And National’s approach has been even worse:

Anne Tolley [National's education spokesperson, claimed] Ms Goldsmith’s refusal to pay the “voluntary” charge was “selfish and irresponsible”.

Some of the anecdotes I’ve heard over the years remind me of stories of certain churches which shame their congregations into giving by reading out the size of family “donations” at Sunday worship.

Interestingly Winston’s $80,000 donation from the Spencer Trust now shows up on the party donation returns to the Electoral Commission for 2007. And when you go to look for it you also get to see the $230,000 that the Labour Party took from lawyers representing undisclosed clients and the $500,000 that the National Party took from anonymous sources including the Ruahine and Waitamata trusts. 

An integral part of the Electoral Finance Act was to let the public know who was funding parties’ campaign before the election took place.   The public is now running out of time to find out who is financing Labour and National this election and decide whether it is going to effect their votes.

A new report, released today, says there will be a 75 percent increase in freight over the next 25 years but predicts little – if any – difference in the way freight is moved around: 70 percent on roads, 15 percent on rail, and 15 percent on coastal shipping.

“Without a substantial re-prioritisation in the way Government spends our transport budget, the number of trucks clogging our roads will nearly double,” Green Party Co-Leader Russel Norman warns.

Then their belief in a sensible public interest policy is probably not helped by learning the Road Transport Forum’s Trust is making donations to both the Labour Party ($20,000) and National Party ($30,000), laying as the Dominion Post noted, ‘each way bets’. For many people it’s fairly evident that we need to respond to peak oil and climate change with significant long term rather than piecemeal changes to our transport and freight systems. It doesn’t help our democratic trust to see big business donating to parties that consistently to do the opposite.

So far the Road Transport Trust is the only big business lobby group to openly declare, thanks to the Electoral Finance Act, that it is funding the major parties’ political campaigns.  As I noted recently we are six weeks out from an election and we still do not know where the majority National and Labour’s $2 million dollar election campaigns are coming from.  The public should be entitled to this information before they vote.

That, when added to all the donation received from the same source in the preceding 12 months exceeds $20,000 a return of party donation exceeding $20,000 must be filed within 10 working days.

That’s section 54 of the Electoral Finance Act. The other parties are saying that (except for the last ten days) no one has made any donations totalling $20,000 or more, other than two to National and one to Act. Unusual?

The real issue is not big money, it is transparency. Every party will have it’s large donors but the public has a right to know who they are.

Section 98 of the Electoral Finance Act allows parties to spend up to $1,000,000 plus $20,000 for each electorate contested by a candidate for that party. That’s a potential total of $2.4 million if a party stands candidates in every seat. Are Labour and National, who both spent close to or more than their entire $2.4 million allocation last election, planning to spend the same amount again this time around, raised purely though cake stalls and movie fund-raisers. Or are they planning to run much smaller, cheaper campaigns this time around? Or are they borrowing and expecting some big donations in the next few weeks?

And what about some of the small parties? We are already learning in detail about NZ First’s interesting accounting procedures, but does United Future have enough small donors to fund an entire nationwide election campaign without any big donations? United Future has declared no donations over $10,000 in 2006 or 2007 either so its reserves could well be running low. Its last large donation was $12,000 in 2005 from a Sky City casino.

This is precisely the reason that the EFA was needed. We can debate all day about the efficacy (or not) of that particular piece of legislation. I’d rather not bother. Because for me, the key principle behind that Act, whether or not the Act actually succeeds in achieving it, is transparency.

If we know who gave how much to whom and when, and it is all a matter of pulic record, then we can, as voters, decide for ourselves how bad a particular situation smells.

The problem with the current NZ First crisis is that we don’t have all the facts. We can all smell smoke, but we’re having a hard time finding the real fire. People from all quarters, including the Greens, are asking tough questions about Winston and his money handling.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that only the Greens had the courage to make the money-racing-NZ First connection in the House. Everyone else had to limit their speculation to the money-Glenn-Tauranga issue. I wonder why that is?  

Rather than re-hashing the EFA debate, which I suspect the politicians are likely to do soon anyway, I’d prefer to start with first principles and debate whether or not my readers believe that donations to political parties should be a fully transparent matter of public record, and if not, why not?

Winston’s crew were up and down one after another again today to spout off at their leader’s prowess. Ron Mark was batting questions down implied even any hint of potential corruption. The PM was backing him all the way. John Key had his especially thick woollen mittens on when he asked some rather lame questions – not of Peters, but of Clark. If they both acted in concert to sink him – he would be gone most likely.

The problem of course is that neither Labour nor National wants to let their sharks take a bite until they’ve got proof that the blood in the water is a corpse not just a flesh wound.  Because they both might still need that fish after the election. (In fact Labour’s reticence may be even more genuine than that.  They seem to have found Peters a very loyal and capable Minister in the last 2 and half years, a better performer in the house than many of their own, and a good safe investment for the price of not much more than a few baubles.)

In the meantime there was Sue Bradford:

Sue Bradford: Does the Prime Minister have confidence that the Minister for Racing acts at all times with the interests of the whole racing sector at heart, or does she have any sense, as some in the racing industry do, that his actions tend to favour those at the high end of the industry, which, incidentally, is the same end from which New Zealand First has received substantial donations?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: Obviously, I do not have any independent information about where donations come from, but I can say to the member that I have had absolutely no advice or, indeed, even any suggestion of the issue of preference that she has raised.

Metiria:

Metiria Turei: Does the Prime Minister think that the Government’s failure to get the numbers to progress sustainability measures like the Marine Reserves Bill and the Fisheries Amendment Bill may have anything to do with the large financial contribution to the party of her Minister of Foreign Affairs from Vela Fishing, which is involved in serious-

Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. That is the very implication that I raised in my point of order-that the Minister is involved in corrupt practice. I ask that that question be ruled out of order.

[...a long debate about a the point of order before Metiria is invited to reframe the question...]

Metiria Turei: Does the Prime Minister think that the Government’s failure to get the numbers to progress sustainability measures like the Marine Reserves Bill and the Fisheries Amendment Bill through the House may have anything to do with the relationship between her Minister of Foreign Affairs and other fishing interests, particularly, for example, those of Vela Fisheries, which is involved in seriously unsustainable fishing practices, including the fishing of orange roughy, tuna, and Antarctic tooth fish?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: If I were for a moment to accept that, in respect of New Zealand First, I would have to accept it in respect of every party that was unsympathetic to those particular law changes-not least, of course, the New Zealand National Party.

And Russel:

Dr Russel Norman: Do any of the Prime Minister’s Ministers receive donations from industries they are meant to be regulating and taxing; and does she expect any Minister, including her Minister of Racing, who finds himself or herself negotiating tax breaks for party donors to bring that to her attention?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I do think there was in that question exactly the implication that Mr Mark objected to before. I can say, in respect of Ministers, that they are not expected to receive donations from industry, at all. But I will also make the obvious point that when a Minister is appointed in charge of a portfolio, there is a legitimate expectation from sectors relating to that portfolio that they will be able to put a case to that Minister-whether it is fisheries, forests, agriculture, health, racing, or whatever-so that they can have their requests considered. That is the normal business of Government.

The normal course of business of course, but I think what Russel was asking was did the PM see a difference between putting a case and putting a case and an envelope?

Three months from election day, 300,000 New Zealanders who are mainly young and poor haven’t bothered to enrol. If even a third of these marginalised people saw a reason to enrol they would change the outcome of this election. The Electoral Enrolment Centre is launching a campaign next month targeting 110,000 people between 18 and 20 not enrolled. But these numbers could be improved if businesses that employ many of these people offer a hand.

The five main fast-food companies in New Zealand employ more than 20,000 young workers. If they handed every employee an enrolment form, they would do more to help democracy in a few days than everyone else’s efforts this year.

Large secret donations clearly have a staining influence on politics.  For instance, no matter what you think of Winston Peters, it’s very rarely indeed that it he gets outright caught in an lie, as he appears to have been done now. Money makes people do funny things.

Owen Glenn could probably have won himself a lot more long-term respect and good will in his bid to be an honorary consul general if he had spent his $100,000 (not to mention the other half a million) on getting otherwise disenfranchised kiwis on the electoral roll.

Glenn and his desire for recognition made me think though that should the Green Party find itself in a position to dole out consulships, with it’s many small donors and its tradition of sharing leadership responsibilities, it would probably need to have co-honorary consuls to be shared among all donors who wanted to be recognised in return for a donation.  Maybe each donor could get to be honorary consul general of a principality for an hour or so each?