Roche Denise: Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2130. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 It is my great pleasure to take this call on behalf of the Green Party. New Zealanders are very generous people. According to a report commissioned by Philanthropy New Zealand it is estimated that ordinary New Zealanders donated $1.5462 billion last year. Individual people actually gave just over that amount personally. In total what was given was $2.6 billion and that includes the grants from trusts foundations and businesses that have also been making donations. It all adds up to about 1.35 percent of our national GDP given to charities. According to the Charities Commission there are 23000 registered charities in New Zealand. That is just the registered ones; that is not including the ones like the National Council of Women which has been denied registration because of the narrow definition of “charitable purpose”. So it is without a doubt that New Zealanders are generous.  
The Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill emerged 2 years ago because there was concern that there was a lack of clarity about how much of that personal giving was being siphoned off to professional fund-raisers while donors remained unaware. The stated purpose of the bill is to increase transparency and public accountability of third-party businesses that collect funds on behalf of registered charities. I actually have not been able to find out how much of the $1.5 billion that was donated personally last year was donated through professional fund-raisers. However I hazard a guess that quite a few of those 23000 charities use them.  
I am sure everyone is aware that the Greens do support transparency and accountability and we would certainly like a lot more of it. I have a bill in the ballot at the moment that is around creating transparency for donations in local elections which might be a help.  
We do believe that those who give money to charities need to be assured that the money they give is used for the purposes that it was given for. We are pleased to see the progression of this bill and like other speakers I pay tribute to the Commerce Committee members and chairs who have guided the progression of this bill. As we have seen it progress through the House and especially at the select committee significant adjustments have been made to this bill so that this legislation is less prescriptive than it was on its first reading.  
We are aware that some charities and community organisations do spend a proportion of the funds that they raise to raise funds and we acknowledge that when those donations are regular payments the cost of fund-raising reduces over time. As an example I pay a regular fortnightly donation to Greenpeace New Zealand and I am pretty sure that over the last 5 years that donation has accrued and more than covered the cost of the worker who hit me up for that donation in the first place.  
On the whole we support the provisions of this bill that give discretion to the Minister of Consumer Affairs and the Governor-General through an Order in Council to check how much of a fee a specific professional fund-raiser is receiving when they are acting for specific charities. We believe this is a better solution to the complexities that were identified during the select committee process. Those complexities included trying to figure out what percentage of a donation would trigger either a partial or a full disclosure of what percentage of the donation was being kept by the professional fund-raisers. So we welcome the bill’s move to shift responsibility for examining the detail of those arrangements to the Minister.  
The legislation is timely. In the charitable and not-for-profit sector especially for those that provide social services the Government has already signalled that it wants to reduce costs and claw back on contracts. At the same time there are savage cuts to our public services. In this environment it is likely that in the near future New Zealanders will be called on to maintain that high level of giving. Some charities may rely on professional fund-raisers to help them raise the money they need to provide the services that the Government falls short on. It is these circumstances that also fuel the addiction that many organisations have to money gained from pokie trusts and that is another bill that is up later.