Hodgson Pete: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Hodgson Pete: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:652;Page:1338] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 First of all I want to respond to some of the comments made by the last speaker but one the ACT member John Boscawen. In his contribution to this debate he became somewhat more shrill and somewhat more strident than had other speakers from all around the House. He has a 19-page legal opinion on something or other he has a story about a court case about something or other else that finished at 11.30 this morning and he has clearly spent many long and lonely nights looking hard at this issue. My response to Mr Boscawen is simply to suggest to him that as we go forward to try to get ourselves what the Attorney-General called a durable solution he is going to have to learn to give ground like the rest of us. It is important that we try to get ourselves a resolution that will last beyond this Parliament. I say that to Mr Boscawen because the way that he conducted himself in the speech before last did not fill me with a great deal of hope that he will be able to give ground. I acknowledge his considerable energy his history his background and—I have no doubt—his expertise in these matters. None the less the fact remains that the electoral law is the nearest thing we have to a central constitution and we ought not to kick it around. 
I have two other comments to make and I hope I will not take too long. The first is about free speech. Here we are playing a game. Throughout 2008 and also in the House today some people have said that the Electoral Finance Act is damaging to free speech. It has been said in the press by people other than politicians and it has been said today also that the Electoral Finance Act was self-interested legislation put forward by the Labour Government. Let me respond to that. First of all if the legislation was self-interested—and I am very happy to acknowledge that it did not work well—then the self-interest was to stop the radio waves the television waves and the newspaper columns being dominated by paid speech. You see there is free speech and then there is speech that we pay for. Free speech I would assert is untrammelled by the Electoral Finance Act; one can still write a letter to the editor go on talkback radio carry a placard down Lambton Quay or do some skywriting. All of those things are as able to be done now as they ever were. 
Tim Macindoe 
: But you can’t match an MP’s advertising. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Now I am getting an interjection. But if someone wants to do that to an extraordinary extent by paying for it—and the limits may have been set in the wrong place; they may well have been—then I would assert that free speech is damaged because the free speech of ordinary people would be crowded out. Let us be clear that the Electoral Finance Act did not set out to damage free speech; one could easily argue that it set out to ensure that it would not be crowded out by the paid speech of folk with a lot of money. 
The last thing I want to say is that it is time again—other speakers have said it and I will say it—to put State funding on the agenda. Let us acknowledge that State funding already exists to an extent. Through the broadcasting legislation it is allocated according to law. The law is in reasonable shape—no doubt it can be improved; things can always be improved—but the State funding of political parties beyond that is something we need to actively contemplate. 
We have really two futures. One is a future in which we do not have State funding beyond that which we already have in which we do not pay attention to the findings of the 1986 royal commission on electoral reform in which we do not decide to put taxpayers’ money into registered political parties in a measured amount and in which we have a donations regime and a series of rules around donations that parties will continue to want to frustrate—to frustrate the will of Parliament—simply because that is the easiest way to get hold of some money. 
The second way forward is to have some form of State funding; how the allocation is done what the formula is how it is ramped up according to the needs of small parties etc. are all matters for debate. Then we would have to proscribe the donation of money to political parties except for trivial amounts—maybe $1000 or $10000—so that there was no ability for an individual or a company to give a lot more money. Indeed we could go a step further and say that companies or organisations or trade unions or associations could not give money at all only individuals. That is a possibility; it is certainly a possibility. If members go on a tour through democracies they will find almost every possibility there is in this or that electoral law of this or that jurisdiction. 
I am simply saying to the House that the 1986 royal commission provided an opportunity as did the 1993 legislation that followed. The Electoral Finance Act itself was an opportunity that was not taken up by the then Government—my Government—and now we have another opportunity to engage. We need to do it in a bipartisan way; otherwise the public will simply trade one for the other. But we need to ask ourselves whether we want a future in which donations are quite tightly proscribed and State funding is used to augment the activities of political parties. The quantity is entirely debatable but we need to put the issue on the table. 
I just say again: if we do not we run the risk because this has been the history—this is not a threat; it is just the record of history; I am simply consulting history—that in one way or another some party or another in some election or another will find another way round the donations regime of the day. That has been the pattern. Not only that; it has been the pattern in Australian history for decades and it was resolved only when that country moved to some form of State funding. We do not have to go far to find an example of that. So I ask the House to think of that as an opportunity. It is not something to lay on the Minister. The Minister cannot by himself decide whether the nation is going to have State funding. 
Hon Simon Power 
: That’s right. He’s got narrow shoulders. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: That is right. The Minister has enough to do. He says his shoulders are not quite as broad as that but it is something the political parties may want to think about. If we look at the history of electoral financing of political parties in this jurisdiction and in many others we will find that unless we move to a form of State funding we will be back here again trying to fix a donations regime that some clever person has managed to frustrate. Will we have the will of Parliament frustrated by ourselves as political parties or will we decide to put an end to those decades of activity and give ourselves State funding and attached to that very strict regulations on who might give what sort of money to any political parties? There are some issues for thought.