Turei Metiria: Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turei Metiria: Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10724] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Aotearoa New Zealand prides itself on being a fair and equitable country. It is a country that we love and work very hard to protect. Our community often fails to engage with that protection for a myriad of reasons. None the less we continue as a country to strive for a better fairer and more prosperous nation where everybody gets a fair go. We continue to strive for honest and open politics and for good government that respects all people. The year 2007 saw a highly contentious and quite radical in some respects reform of New Zealand’s electoral finance laws the Electoral Finance Act. It was not—and I have heard this being talked about tonight—a process that was particularly well handled politically or in the debate that surrounded the reform. The Green Party supported the legislation then because it made a significant step towards fixing some of the glaring holes that the 2005 election campaign showed up. Those glaring holes were extremely serious. In my view they showed how easily the democratic process in Aotearoa could be manipulated and distorted. Those holes showed very clearly that politics in Aotearoa was and to some extent still is very vulnerable to the excessive influence of wealthy players in the political realm. 
I do not need to tell the story. We have books films and a wide variety of writing that sets out that story. But I need to restate the problems because the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill is designed to fix them yet it fails. Amongst the problems was an initially secret $1 million intervention in the campaign by the Exclusive Brethren church. It campaigned for the National Party and against the Greens and Labour without the spending falling within the National Party’s election cap. Some argue that the electoral process worked fine then because the scam was eventually exposed but it was not the electoral process that exposed the scam; it was the very hard work of Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons. It was only because of their skills and determination to get to the truth of the matter that the Exclusive Brethren’s secret was exposed. Only Rod Donald’s determination exposed the link between the Exclusive Brethren campaign and the National Party. The public have good cause to thank Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald for their efforts in shedding light on the ease with which our elections can be bought and sold. 
Other issues arose that showed glaring holes in our electoral law. In 2005 alone the National Party received over $1.7 million in unidentified donations from secret trusts and Labour received over $300000 in anonymous donations. National’s board was aware of the identities of the donors even though their identities were hidden from the public by the use of secretive trusts. And of course we had the $120000 illegal broadcasting overspend by the National Party. No prosecutions arose from any of those matters. Aotearoa does not have a sufficiently robust regime to protect the democratic process from the threat posed by secretive wealthy political players. The 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System stated that it is not fair if some in the community can use their relative wealth to exercise disproportionate influence in determining who is to govern and what policies are to be pursued. 
The Green Party will be opposing this legislation for this very important reason: there is no cap on the election spending by third parties in this bill. Under National’s legislation the Exclusive Brethren or anyone else for that matter can run an election campaign opposing a political party and can use an unlimited amount of money. Let us look at the political environment here in election campaigns to understand why this is so important. Political parties have a spending cap of around $2 million in an election campaign. Political parties have a broadcasting allocation for use on TV and radio and they cannot use any other money but that allocation for TV and radio advertising. These caps are designed to provide a kind of level playing field so that wealthy political parties cannot completely swamp smaller or less wealthy political parties. To an extent these rules even out access to airtime so that the public has more even access to the policies and programmes of the political parties campaigning in the election. That is a sound principle. Our elections should be a contest of ideas not of wallets. The Green Party supports having a level playing field for political parties in an election campaign. 
What happens if other non-political parties—third parties or parallel campaigners—can campaign without having an upper spending limit? First it opens the door very widely to corruption in New Zealand politics. Political parties that have access to wealthy donors—corporate or individual—can funnel those donations to a third party which can then spend as much money as it likes in negative campaigning. Thousands of dollars can be spent on pamphlets and letters delivered to every household in the country. Enormous commercial billboards can bought up in bulk to display adverts attacking a political party for months at a time. Whole armies of people can be employed to get out on to the street and campaign against a political party that happens to be out of favour with that wealthy group. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can be spent on a campaign to attack a party. That means that a political party can funnel its funds to a third party so that that political party can avoid its spending cap. If one has money then one can corrupt the system. 
What is the response of the political parties that are constrained? Well it depends. If it is the case that the wealthy interests are campaigning against one’s political opponents then one might think that that is fine. If not political parties especially the smaller ones struggle to contest misleading or false information and struggle to get their message out to the public. Whatever side one is on—whether one benefits from that corruption—one simply cannot argue that that is fair. Some would argue that people do not pay any attention to advertising. I have heard this argument before and it is clearly untrue. Otherwise we would not have an advertising industry in Aotearoa with an annual turnover of $2 billion. Advertising works; that is why it is done. In this bill there are no limits on how much advertising a third party can buy in order to influence the outcome of an election. 
There are some good things in this bill; it is not all bad. We are pleased that the parallel campaigners will have to register with the Electoral Commission if they expect to spend more than $12000. No New Zealander should ever be in the position of having to hunt down a third party identity because it like the Exclusive Brethren has actively hidden its identity from the public. As I explained transparency is necessary but is not sufficient to combat the opportunity for corruption that an unlimited spending cap provides. 
We are pleased about the retention of the donations regime that we argued for in 2007. It does not go as far as we would like it to but it is a step in the right direction. Political parties should be transparent about their donations. It is worth noting that in a donations disclosure to the Electoral Commission this week of donations over $10000 we saw that ACT got one the Progressive party got one the Maori Party got one Labour got one the Greens got nine and National got none. Is that not interesting? I am not convinced about that somehow. We would like to see the threshold of donations lowered so that there is considerably more transparency about who has donated to a political party. 
We are very pleased to see that the offence and penalty regime has not changed. It is critical that we have a strong offence and penalty regime in our electoral law because if the fines are too low that simply rewards the wealthy players who would rather pay the fine because a breach of the rules enables them to achieve their preferred electoral outcome which no doubt would be of considerable value to them. I will say this again because I believe it: Aotearoa prides itself on being a fair and equitable country. It is a country that we love and work hard to protect. Despite the occasional tripping up we continue to strive for a better fairer and more prosperous nation where everyone gets a fair go. We continue to strive for honest and open politics and for good government that hears all people and protects our environment. For decisions as critical as whom we elect as our most senior public decision makers the utmost fairness the most stringent rules and the clearest most transparent processes are necessary. I look forward to working for that in the select committee. Thank you.