Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. We won't be agreeing to the proposal and we won't be agreeing to this piece of legislation the Electoral Amendment Bill. This is a piece of legislation that sets out to change the rules around the elections in regard to funding of political parties. Generally in a good state of affairs you would expect that there would be some measure of agreement across the House around the rules of the game and that the Government of the day would seek to enjoy some sort of consensus over these issues. But that certainly is not the approach of this Government or of that Minister Kiritapu Allan who has decided instead to ram through some changes in the face of clear opposition from the National Party and from this side of the House. I just want to read a quote that funnily enough came up in Question No. 10 today a quote from the Prime Minister where she said It will not be the policy of any Government I lead"—she said very gravely at the local government conference—"It won't be the policy of any Government I lead to embark on another substantial reform of local government or governance unless it is sought and unless there is a broad consensus amongst local government about the need for and the direction of change." Well that approach certainly is not being applied by this Government when it comes to electoral reform. They have made no attempt to bring any consensus to the table and they certainly haven't consulted the public on any of these things. It seems the only justification that the Minister came up with is the results of some survey done by a university and I'm not disparaging that but it is hardly rock solid. So what's going on here is that the Government has decided that there are concerns around the funding of parties and money involved in politics. We agree. There are concerns in the public—no question about that. We absolutely agree that the New Zealand electoral system needs to have clear rules that are rigorously enforced to ensure that the public has interest in the way that parties are funded and that elections are carried out. It's quite appropriate that that is reconsidered from time to time and we've seen some prominent cases and they have raised concerns. The difficulty is of course that this bill is not dealing with those issues. The primary issue that is being raised in many of the cases which was raised in the regulatory impact statement of this bill is concern about people splitting donations keeping it just below the threshold and doing multiple donations—that's the allegation. This bill does nothing around that. It doesn't deal with that. It doesn't deal with those issues at all. The Minister is sort of pointing to a problem and then introducing a bill that deals with other matters as if it's some kind of solution to the problem which it isn't.So in the meantime the Government has set up an external working group which is incorrectly—and the Minister again said it was a bipartisan external review. It's not bipartisan. The National Party didn't agree with the members on the independent panel. Some of them have actually made some very strong statements showing a clear prior view of the issues that they're dealing with. There's nothing bipartisan about it. But they've put it up and it's going to be considering broad electoral review after the Government. That's the appropriate way to do it in order to reassure New Zealanders around these issues. We've got no problem with that. But in the meantime while that is still being considered they are trying to ram through this legislation prior to the 2023 election. What is the purpose of it? The broad purpose of it is to make it more difficult for political parties to raise funds—that is the purpose—by doing two things: one by lowering the threshold by which donations are disclosed from $15000 where it has been since 2008. So if you had adjusted it for inflation back then it would be closer to $20000 but it's $15000. They're going to reduce that to $5000. Now secondly they're going to significantly increase the administration required for what are effectively volunteer organisations. So there'll be a lot more information required to be collected—and just think for a moment. There are thousands and thousands of small donations made to political parties and a lot more of them have to be individually itemised and reports drawn up and a whole lot of work done by voluntary organisations. That makes life actually more difficult for what are voluntary organisations. By making it more difficult for political parties to raise funds what is the logical outcome of all that? Because parties need funds to campaign. Democracy needs parties to be funded to campaign to have a contest of ideas to hold the Government of the day to account and to offer the opportunity of change or for Governments to make their case. It costs money. So if it's more and more difficult for parties to raise those funds voluntarily from people in the public the obvious alternative is public taxpayer funding of political parties and that's where this Government is trying to take us. It's where the Green Party certainly wants to take us. And we don't agree with it. We fundamentally don't agree with it. We don't think it is better for taxpayers to be funding parties for political purposes. Now that's what the Government is trying to take us towards and we fundamentally don't agree with it. There's no perfect system for funding political parties anywhere around the world. Certainly if you shifted it from fund-raising in the private sector to taxpayers funding it well there are real consequences for that of course and the most obvious one is that it's very difficult to design a system which doesn't favour incumbent parties parties that are already there against new parties that want to form. It's very difficult to arrange a system that doesn't make it tougher for them. Of course taxpayers are getting sick of paying for all these sorts of things. They pay for more than enough as it is. When it comes to actually making the case for change there is no evidence anywhere in the regulatory impact statement that reducing the threshold of donations being declared from $15000 to $5000 is going to change anything. Is there any evidence that there is undue influence being bought on the New Zealand political scene by people donating between $5000 and $15000 anonymously? Why would people want to do that? Well there's very good reasons why people might want to donate anonymously as outlined in the regulatory impact statement. There are a lot of reasons given particularly concern around people being targeted concern about perceived risk to the safety of the family and employment and business interests and some people are concerned that being associated with a particular party could adversely impact their ability to secure Government contracts. We know that this Government is very vindictive when it comes to people who are critical towards them and people are quite naturally worried about being disclosed as donating to another party in small limits. But you've got to remember of course that a donation of around $15000 would represent less than one half of a percent of the total funds available to be spent or allowed to be spent by a party during an election. So if anybody is seriously saying that somebody donating less than half of one percent of the overall amount that a party could spend is going to influence the policy direction of that party I think it's a very hard argument to justify and there's no evidence of it that's been put forward. What there is concern about is if somebody was able to do multiple donations under that threshold and get away with doing that and then having a very significant donation to a political party and then having an influence—that is a concern. If this bill was setting out to fix that by dealing with those issues more effectively—if indeed there is a problem with the law as it stands at the moment but that's an open question and it's being considered by the courts at the moment and we should probably wait to hear the logical outcome of that—then we would be in support of that but that's not what is being dealt with in this bill. There are some elements just finally of the bill that we do broadly support such as bringing loans into the system. We've got no problem with that. We'd agree with that. But we do not agree with the overall thrust of this bill which is fundamentally about making it more difficult for parties to raise funds to campaign. I think the objective of this Government is clear which is to push us towards taxpayer funding of political parties and we don't agree with that. Ultimately New Zealanders do want to see a robust political system with clear rules and clear accountability but they don't necessarily want to be paying for political parties."