Norman Russel William: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Norman Russel William: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
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Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I have already spoken a couple of times on the Electoral Amendment Bill so I will not repeat everything I have said in my previous speeches but there are a few things that I would like to draw members’ attention to. One is the cap on spending. The cap on spending is probably by far and away one of the best elements of our system. We have only to look across the Tasman at the war that goes on there every year to see who can spend the most money and therefore who can be most dependent on corporate donors and give the most favours after the election to the corporates who pay for the parties’ election campaigns. Having an accelerating war over who can spend the most money on election campaigns would be very very bad for our democracy so having a cap on spending is absolutely essential. 
We also need to give some attention to what kind of spending we want to put a cap on. Previously the focus has very much been on advertising because that is the most visible part of it. The definition of “spending” broadened with the Electoral Finance Act and I think that it was actually a good thing to pull in more elements of what really is campaign spending. But the Act still does not cover some key elements. The kind of spending like that on the work that Crosby/Textor does—which is an essential part of the National Party campaign according to the media—is not currently caught. Unless it is the preparation of an election advert under the Electoral Finance Act a lot of the spending that goes on around campaigns is not currently caught by the cap which I think is one of the weaknesses of the law. It also means of course that Parliamentary Service money can be spent employing Crosby/Textor. The public never know because the Parliamentary Service is not covered by the Official Information Act so the public’s money is spent on the National Party campaign to fund Crosby/Textor. I think that kind of spending should be brought within the cap. 
I think the cap needs to increase. The cap is too low. I think that is fair enough; it has not increased over many years. But it needs to cover what is really going on with elections. 
The donations regime is a bit of a war and a counter-war—those who seek to get around the law try to figure out new ways to avoid it. The invention of the Waitemata Trust was clearly an attempt by National to avoid the 1993 electoral law. By putting all the money into the trust and then moving the money from the trust to the National Party nobody knew who was really funding the National Party election campaign. But as Nicky Hager showed in his book  
The Hollow Men 
 the board of the National Party was aware of the identity of the donors. Contrary to what Mr Boscawen said one of the changes in the Electoral Finance Act was basically to make it very difficult to use that mechanism any more. It made it very difficult to launder the money through the trust and then into the party with the public never knowing the source of the money. That was the real progress with the Electoral Finance Act and it is something that we should hang on to. 
The other part about donations that I do not think we have addressed properly is putting a cap on how much any one person or corporation can donate to political parties. It seems to me that the ideal for the funding of political parties is that they are encouraged to maintain large membership bases and to get many small donations from a large group of people. But a party can get around that if it has one donor who gives half a million dollars in the case of Owen Glenn and the Labour Party. That means that a party does not have to go out to lots of different people it can just go to its one big wealthy donor and get a big lump of money. It does not have to be dependent on the community; it does not need a big base. I think that we should cap how much any one person or corporation can give to a political party and should force the parties to go more broadly to seek money and that would be an improvement in the donations regime. 
Another part that we never really progressed in the Electoral Finance Act was the use by the Government of the day of Government advertising. One of the things done in Canada for example is that every Government ad has to be vetted by the Auditor-General at a subcommittee of the Auditor-General to see whether in fact it is an election advert. We discussed this matter in some of the discussions that happened around the Electoral Finance Act. Australia is the classic example of the use of such Government advertising. The Liberal Government used millions of taxpayers’ dollars to promote all its programmes basically as a form of campaigning. It is a problem here in New Zealand as well. 
 We need a system like the one the Canadians have which is that if the Government wants to place an ad then we have an independent group of experts who ask whether it is a campaign ad and whether the Government should be allowed to spend taxpayers’ money on that ad in an election year or in a regulated period. I really think that we need to introduce that factor into it. 
Another part that is missing from all of this of course is the lobby groups. Maybe lobbying cannot be pulled within the Electoral Act but should be more part of an open government package—which I agree totally with Mr Chauvel has to include a fixed date for elections—but we do not know what is going on with the lobby groups. What is their influence in politics? Who are they working for? For example when a lobby group comes to see us we do not know whether it is working for whom it says it is working or whether it has another client who is paying a lot more money and uses some particular client the public likes as the public face for it. When lobby groups come to see us we do not know what they are up to. We do not know who else they are working for or who else is paying them. 
In Canada lobby groups have to register. They have to say who is employing them what pieces of law they are working on and what they are lobbying about. It puts transparency around lobbying which is a key part of the legislative process. Let us be honest about it; the lobby groups play a big role in which laws get passed through this place. I think it is essential that we have transparency around the lobby groups and I would like to see that brought into an open government package. 
One of the things that I think makes transparency around donations particularly important right now is the infrastructure stimulus package. We are about to throw many hundreds of millions of dollars at a whole bunch of contractors. We are going to give them a whole bunch of money. We are giving them a bunch of money to build a whole bunch of roads and various other things. We know that some of those people donate to political parties. The Road Transport Forum declared its donations to Labour and National because it was forced to due to the 2-week rolling disclosure that the Green Party put into the Electoral Finance Act. The Road Transport Forum put 35 grand into Labour and National. 
The issue is that where there are those kinds of connections between contractors who are donating money to political parties and Governments that are allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors it is essential for both the perception and the reality—for the Government’s sake as much as for anyone else’s sake—that there is maximum transparency around who is funding political parties so that nobody can go to the governing party and say that it gave a certain contract to such and such a company because that company had given the Government this donation. It all needs to be transparent so that we know who is funding the parties and so that we can also see what contracts are going out. 
I think that that should be the normal practice but it is particularly important in an era where not only our Government but also other Governments are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at these giant infrastructure projects many of which are being sped up in their allocation process. A lot of the roading projects are being accelerated during this time and the normal processes are not being applied. 
 Finally I will respond to earlier comments about citizens’ assemblies. The thing about a citizens’ assembly is that it is not just about asking the public for submissions. When we ask the public for submissions we get responses from all the interest groups. All the interest groups come in and make their submissions and that is good. That is fine and it is a healthy part of the process but there is something more than that. Ordinary citizens will have a particular perspective on their democracy as well as on their justice system but generally they will not be engaged in the process. They will not make the kinds of submissions the Minister of Justice is talking about. Most people in New Zealand will never make a submission on the Electoral Amendment Bill. They will never have any input into it. 
How do we get the perspective of the ordinary citizen of our country on what electoral finance law should look like? The only way is through a jury process which involves informed decision-making. That is we get a group of randomly selected people together and give them the information so that they can make a decision from the perspective of the man on the Clapham omnibus—or the ordinary citizen of New Zealand because he or she will have a very particular perspective on it. We have seen with citizens’ juries in Canada where they have been used extensively that we get very highly informed and useful contributions. 
I would once again promote citizens’ assemblies as a way for ordinary New Zealanders to have an informed input into this process.