Norman Russel William: General Debate 
Norman Russel William: General Debate 
[Volume:648;Page:17340] 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 One of the key issues that has come up again today is the nexus between democracy and money. This has been an extremely troubling nexus for many many years in Westminster System parliaments. The problem is twofold. On the one hand parties that represent large corporations with access to a lot of money are much more likely to get large amounts of money into their coffers and hence be able to run better election campaigns. The other side of it is that if money comes into different parties’ accounts it is very difficult for us to know how it influences the things they do when they are in Government particularly if we do not know that the money is coming into their accounts. 
This is the problem with secret donations and the secret donations regime that we have in New Zealand. Currently someone can give up to $10000 to a New Zealand political party and nobody has to know even under the new law. The problem with that is quite simply this: how does a member of the public looking at it from the outside know that the decision making of that party if it gets into Government is not influenced by its donors? How do people know that the tax breaks the party gives or the grants it makes have not been influenced by the donations it has received? Under our system the public has no way of knowing and that is exactly the problem. The nexus between democracy and money means that the voters of this country have no idea how the Government’s decision making is being influenced by money. 
There was a further problem before and that was the trusts that the National Party used at the last election campaign. The Electoral Finance Act for all its benefits and problems got rid of the ability to use trusts which is a really really positive thing. I think even some members of the National Party were pleased to see the trusts go because they made National look pretty bad. But we have not got rid of the $10000 limit which is a problem. The Green Party thinks there should be a $1000 limit on non-identified donations. If someone makes a donation over $1000 then the identity of the donor should have to be identified to the public so that people know who is funding political parties. We also think there should be a cap on individual donations. People should not be able to give $500000 to a political party because that kind of sum has a tremendous impact on political parties. There should be a cap on how much any individual or corporation can actually give to political parties. 
We also think there needs to be some kind of partial public funding of political parties. One of the tragedies of the Electoral Finance Act is that we did not get partial public funding—or any kind of public funding. That creates the problem whereby political parties are dependent on private donors which is one of the key problems with our system. We also think—and the Electoral Finance Act did provide for this—there has to be some limits on non - political party actors. If there are not those limits then the caps on other spending just do not work. We have seen that overseas. The Canadians have limits and the British have limits on third-party spending; we have to have those caps. 
Most of all the Greens really want people to decide all of this. The Greens have been promoters of citizens’ assemblies. A citizens’ assembly is where randomly selected members of the public are called together to be consulted if nothing more about important matters that political parties are not the right ones to make decisions about. How on earth can we be the right ones to make decisions about the funding of political parties when we are political parties? We have a fundamental conflict of interest. The best people to make these decisions are members of citizens’ assemblies whereby as has been done in Canada on a number of occasions people randomly chosen from each electorate come together to consider the questions that need to be considered and make recommendations. Having a citizens’ assembly instead of this assembly make key decisions or at the very least recommendations around how we should organise our political funding system seems to me the most sensible way to do it; it has been used extensively overseas. 
I also say—and I realised this today—that apparently Matthew Hooton who is of course a big National Party supporter has now come out in favour of partial public funding. I would hope that that would make National members rethink. The problem of public funding has come up today because of the relationship between New Zealand First and the racing industry its position on sustainable fisheries and all the rest of it. I will not revisit that now but I will say that surely it is in all of our interests to have transparency about this matter so that all these allegations are not swirling around New Zealand First as they are at the moment. Would it not be so much better if all of this was transparent and we knew who was funding New Zealand First the National Party the Labour Party and the Greens? If the information was all out there it would make things heaps better.