Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker and it's my pleasure to speak on this the Electoral Amendment Bill although National is opposing this bill and we're sad that the Government has chosen to bring about changes to the rules of the game when it comes to the election of parties and the way that democracy operates in New Zealand. They're changing the electoral rules without any notion of bipartisan support when it comes to financing of political parties. They've just decided to use the bare majority that they have available to them and they're changing the rules fundamentally to suit them and we don't think that's a good approach to electoral reform and we don't support it.So what fundamentally are they doing? The biggest change in this legislation is to reduce the public disclosure threshold for donations for New Zealanders who freely decide to give political parties money—they're free to give as much as they like but over particular thresholds their identity needs to be made public. It has for the last 15 or so years been set for party donations—so people donating to the Labour Party or the National Party or the Greens—at $15000 for more than a decade. So over time the value of that money has eroded. And for electorate contests such as in this by-election in Hamilton or in Epsom where I'm based or wherever it's set at $1500. That is because candidates are only allowed to spend $30000 in their electorates so $1500 is a significant portion of that—5 percent. But the $15000 of course is the proportion of the total amount of money that a party can spend which if you stand in all the seats like the National Party does can be over $3 million.So the proposition is somehow that there is something dangerous about somebody donating say $14000 anonymously to a party as part of a $3 million fund-raising exercise and that is supposed to be a problem. So they haven't really identified what the issue is. What they have identified is that they want to make it fundamentally more difficult for parties to raise funds.Now I don't like to upset anybody with stating the obvious but the reality is that political parties need money in order to campaign—it's not a free exercise. You have to buy hoardings you have to get radio broadcasts you need to send letters you need to do a whole bunch of things and it's expensive. I don't know if you people have noticed driving around you'll see hoardings up—they're not cheap. And so it costs a lot of money to campaign—nothing like it costs in the United States of America where they spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on campaigns. Here they're relatively cheap but it does cost money. So that money has to come from somewhere.Now there's a couple of basic choices. Either New Zealanders can volunteer to give money to parties that they support or the alternative proposition is that the State seizes that money and gives it to political parties in order for them to campaign. And the fundamental direction of this bill and the Government policy is to move more and more of the funding of political parties away from voluntary donations to compulsory acquisition by the State of money to give to political parties.Now no system is perfect and I'm not going to stand here and say that the current system is perfect. Of course there are problems in any way that you arrange the funding but the only point I'd make is if you make it a State-funded political parties operation such as the trend and the direction of this legislation well that creates its own problems. Most notably it's great for incumbent parties that have been around and they've got numbers and they get the money. It's much more difficult for newcomers to crack into the system notwithstanding the fact that it actually ultimately makes politicians less accountable because actually persuading somebody to vote for you is quite hard but persuading somebody to give you some money is even harder. And it means you actually have to listen to people and engage with people and to listen to what they have to say and go out meet people have functions fund-raise all those sorts of things which gets very tiring. It's much easier—as the Greens would no doubt argue—just to get the State to pay for it and to get taxpayers to pay for it and then you don't have to be nice to anybody; you can just do whatever you want. And that seems to be the approach taken by the Greens. But that's by the by—we'll let them explain their policy and we'll get to it.So the only point we're making is—and this has been a day of great I suppose constitutional moment where we've had the Government come in and try and entrench a piece of legislation. And they've had to backtrack on that and we've had a bit of a debate about that and hackles were raised about their movement away from constitutional norms.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Come back to the bill.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm just creating the context and the context is one where people are quite rightly suspicious of the way this Government operates when it comes to electoral law and constitutional matters. They've moved away from such principles as equal voting rights they've been fiddling around with the entrenchment. They got caught out and they've backtracked very fast. Here when it comes to the financing of electoral parties and running elections and campaigning they've been brazen. They've just said Well we're going to change the rules to suit us."Now the other way of course that political parties can operate—yes they can raise funds from voluntary people handing over their cash or they can seize it from taxpayers and use it for campaigning. The third option of course is to get people to work for you for free. And that is I suppose the approach that most of the Labour Party takes. They get their union friends to campaign for them and that's fine nothing wrong with that. But it all needs to be associated with how campaigns are funded and accounted for.And so the rules that we have in place should be agreed by everybody and they should be followed because of course it's very important that everybody should have trust and confidence in the political system that we operate. I totally agree with the Minister when she said that it's important that New Zealanders should have confidence in the conduct of the political system and the electoral rules. That's why we have rules and that's why we on this side stick to the rules and why transparency is important and we should have thresholds. And we have thresholds. We've got thresholds exactly where they should be perfectly legitimate political debates and this Government has made no good case for substantially reducing those thresholds. So people listening in might say "Well what's all the fuss about? Why do people worry about being named as donators to particular political parties?" Well I can come up with a couple of good reasons. One is that quite a lot of people operate businesses and quite a lot of those businesses make a living by doing contracts sometimes with Government departments. And they fear if they were to give money to the National Party for example and the Labour Party happens to be in Government at the time they might get in trouble or there might be blowback or they may fail to get the contracts. Now the Government of course will deny this but people are worried about that and they're quite rightly worried about it. So they'd prefer not to have it publicised that they're giving money to the National Party because they fear that the people on the other side might not be pleased and there might be repercussions for them. That is one of the reasons why—Dr Duncan Webb: Point of order. The member is making allegations about the conduct of the Government and Labour Party that suggest an improper motive for their actions which is clearly unparliamentary.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I'll ask Paul Goldsmith to stick to the bill.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you. And that was complete nonsense from the opposite member.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): OK all right. The member will continue without reflecting on the ruling from the Chair.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: I accept your ruling Madam Speaker entirely. The only point I was making was that there were some stories that came from the Gaurav Sharma episode which showed that member—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): No no no. Just as well I'm in a good humour so the member will continue his speech focusing on the Electoral Amendment Bill.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you Madam Speaker. So rounding up in summarising what we have here is a piece of legislation that the Government has introduced. It's about the rules that cover the conduct of how we fund-raise for political parties. We do need to fund-raise. The only question is whether that is done on a voluntary basis by politicians and their parties—particularly the parties—persuading people to support them voluntarily or whether we make it more and more difficult for that to happen. Inevitably the alternative is taxpayers being forced to fund political parties. Now neither is perfect and at the moment we have a bit of a hybrid. There is State funding for political parties for broadcasting but primarily it's fund-raised. The Greens want it all publicly funded Labour seems to be halfway and we're standing up for parties actually not being funded by taxpayers. We haven't seen any good arguments put forward particularly as the Government has set up an independent panel to review all matters relating to electoral reform and they haven't waited for the report from that group. They've just gone out and rushed through legislation that as I say we believe is designed to skew the system in favour of the Government. And of course when we come back to the point that the Minister was making at the start it's all about trying to improve credibility and public confidence in the system and my point is that this doesn't help."