Robertson Grant: Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11020. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour):It is a pleasure to rise and speak in the Committee stage of Part 1 of the Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2). Just picking up where my colleague Andrew Little left off the Labour Party is pleased to be able to support a piece of legislation which within Part 1 has the goal of limiting the amount or value of anonymous donations; refining the definition of “anonymous” and “donation”; enhancing the obligations of candidates for the disclosure reporting and recording of electoral donations; and introducing penalties for non-compliance for those matters. This is the kind of transparency that has been missing from local electoral law. Sitting alongside that is the importance of making this consistent with the Electoral Act 1993. I think that is welcomed by all members of the House because there havebeen serious issues in this area that need to be addressed. In fact the driving force behind some of the changes here is the issues that have arisen in this House and elsewhere around donations to local body election campaigns. I think it is important to illustrate why the changes in Part 1 are important by aligning them with specific and real situations.In that regard I want to talk about the definition of “anonymous” and the definition of “donation” because we have certainly seen in the past the grey area of this being exploited. I think the obvious situation that we have to refer to here is Mr John Banks and his situation in the Auckland mayoral election campaign of 2010. I want to specifically refer here to the question of the definition of “anonymous” and “donation”.I wonder whether members of the Committee would consider the following type of donation to be one that could be regarded as anonymous. This is where an entity—in this case Skycity—agreed to make a donation to a mayoral campaign for John Banks. I have in front of me here the formal written statements of a staff member of Skycity and of the chief executive of Skycity Nigel Morrison. Mr Morrison recalls attending a meeting with John Banks in his office and this is what he said in his statement: “This meeting lasted only about 10 minutes during which time I handed to John Banks the cheque in a SKYCITY envelope”. That is what it says. That is what it says in the witness statement from Nigel Morrison the chief executive of Skycity. He handed Mr Banks a cheque in a Skycity envelope. John Banks declared that donation as anonymous. He said he did not know who gave him a $15000 cheque. A $15000 cheque was handed to him in a Skycity envelope. It will have been one of those white envelopes—those DLE envelopes—with the Skycity logo on the left-hand bottom corner. I am sure that will be the envelope that Mr Banks received the cheque in. Nigel Morrison said that in a sworn affidavit to the police.Another staff member from Skycity also indicated that his organisation had received a receipt from Team Banksie—a receipt from Team Banksie—for the said $15000 cheque. So let us just be absolutely clear here. The situation we have got is that a $15000 cheque is handed to Mr Banks in a Skycity envelope his treasurer from Team Banksie receipts that and Mr Banks declares it as anonymous—Mr Banks declares that donation as anonymous. That is the kind of cover-up the kind of evasion of the law that we on this side of the House have come to expect from Mr Banks and that is why this law is needed.However the problem we have got is that John Banks has not been fully held to account for that. John Banks has not been fully held to account because although the police were able to find him guilty of having breached the law in one particular part of his donation regimes—that is the fact that he signed a false return—the time period in which he was able to be convicted for that had expired. So although they said that he absolutely broke the law in that regard the time period for that conviction has expired. John Key of course had said that he would sack John Banks if it was discovered that he had broken the law but he backed off from that very very quickly once he realised that and refused to read the police report.The other part of Mr Banks’ donation that is relevant to Part 1 here is whether or not Mr Banks knowingly signed off on a false return. The police in the end said that they were unable to come to a decision as to whether Mr Banks had knowingly done that. If Mr Banks had knowingly done that then he would be subject to a conviction with a prison term of up to 2 years and I think the people in the Chamber know what that means—that would mean that Mr Banks could no longer serve as an MP. So it is certainly in the interests of the Government not to see that go to its full fruition. One of the reasons I suspect that the police were unable to decide whether Mr Banks had knowingly signed a false return for that donation is because of what Mr Banks mighthave said to them when he was interviewed. I am in receipt of the police file on Mr Banks’ case under the Local Electoral Act and all of the witness statements for that case have been provided to me bar one. The one witness statement that is missing is John Banks’. I am holding the police report about their interview with John Banks. Here it is.Andrew Little: Oh one of those again.GRANT ROBERTSON: Yes one of those.Andrew Little: Seen those before somewhere.GRANT ROBERTSON: Yes it is very familiar. It is blacked out here and on the back page as well. So Mr Banks who said he had nothing to fear and nothing to hide has hidden this because he is very afraid of what it says. He is very afraid that what it will show is that of course those donations were not anonymous. He knew about the donations he was getting.I have been able in this call so far to refer only to the Skycity donation. There are Kim Dotcom donations—two of them at $25000 each. Mr Dotcom has given extensive evidence in this inquiry to indicate that he was very well aware he was giving those donations to Mr Banks. Mr Banks came in a helicopter to his mansion and indicated that he would be gratefully receiving of this $50000. He specifically asked for the donation to be split into two $25000 amounts and he did that because he had a number of other $25000 donations. So what he was doing was using the provisions of the Local Electoral Act as they were at that time. He said: “If you give me this in a $25000 lot I can put it alongside all the other donations of $25000 and magically claim that I don’t know who they came from.”That is why these changes are required—because people like John Banks are prepared to exploit any loophole in the law that they can find. They are prepared to do anything that is possible not to be upfront with New Zealanders. It is very important to know that it is John Banks—a person who is thoroughly disgraced and discredited a person who is now in court on these matters—who is propping up this National Government. He is the person propping up this Government. He is the person who has exploited the Local Electoral Act beyond what any reasonable person would believe that these sections should allow. The idea that he could declare these donations as anonymous is not just ridiculous I would allege that it is also corrupt. He has done this knowingly. We cannot see what Mr Banks said to the police but Mr Banks has done this knowingly. He knew he did this. He used the Local Electoral Act in the form it was in to ensure that New Zealanders could not see who had donated to him. That is bad enough but then he covered it up and he has covered it up day after day.Today I stand here waiting for Mr Banks to allow the release of his witness statement because if he said he had nothing to fear and nothing to hide then he should release that witness statement. I know why he does not want it released. It is because it will show that he has lied to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister said that if he found that out John Banks was gone. But the Prime Minister knows he cannot do that because his Government is propped up by disgraced MPs—MPs like John Banks who has knowingly breached the Local Electoral Act.We on the Labour Party side of the House do support this bill. We believe that it is high time that local electoral matters were made clearer that they were made consistent with the Electoral Act. But although we support this bill we cannot support the fact that the Government continues to be propped up by somebody who used the loopholes in the Local Electoral Act and who deliberately misled New Zealanders and the New Zealand public about the donations he received. That is unacceptable and the changes to this Act are high time coming so that people like John Banks cannot get away with it.