Williams Poto: Public Collections and Solicitations (Disclosure of Payment) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Public Collections and Solicitations (Disclosure of Payment) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5769. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Firstly may I commend Matt Doocey for getting his first member’s bill into the House out of the ballot. It is a special day for you and I want to acknowledge that.I want to say that we support the bill to select committee but there are one or two things that we are not entirely sure of and that we are hoping through the passage of this bill—if it does actually go through to select committee tonight—will be resolved over the course of this discussion.First is the question of what the purpose of this bill is. I am not entirely sure that the general policy statement actually outlines exactly what that member across the other side of the Househas just disclosed to us. The policy statement says that the bill seeks to bring transparency to public collectors who are paid to solicit donations or signatures to ensure that the public is fully informed as to all the relevant information when signing paying or donating to any cause.I am not sure that this is actually a huge issue in the community sector because this bill does not actually relate to registered charities. Registered charities will be exempt from this bill and they would be the lion’s share surely of the charities out there soliciting donations. Every lunchtime just about on Lambton Quay there will be someone with a bucket or a charity stall set up on a table or someone looking for signatures on a petition or for a particular cause who would not be covered by this member’s bill. So I am not entirely sure about whom is going to be captured within this bill and whom it is particularly that this bill is wanting to actually incorporate within it. So I am really looking forward to that discussion at some point about finding out who the intended groups or people are who are supposed to have the issue of these “chuggers”—these donations that are solicited by people who do not declare their status in terms of whether or not they are a paid employee. We are talking about 26000 registered charities in this country that will be exempt from this bill.Just on the issue of “chuggers” I suspect that the bill is designed to reduce the impact of those charity muggers or “chuggers” as they are called. But as I say where we most often encounter them when we are talking about some charities—and I will name a couple: perhaps Greenpeace or Oxfam or Save the Children; some quite large charities—by and large they are registered charities so they will not be covered by this bill.Those who are employed to collect the donations or signatures and are paid commission will need to disclose that before the signature or the donation is made. How will that apply if somebody is dropping a coin into a bucket on a stand in a shopping mall? Will the person who is actually collecting the donation be then required to chase after the person who has made the donation into the bucket to tell them to make that disclosure about whether they are a paid employee or on commission? It seems like a little bit of overkill.I have actually spoken to not only the Heart Foundation as Matt Doocey has but to many other community organisations to ask their opinion of this bill and most of them are saying that it is not going to apply to them. One of the responses that I got was: “Does this member of Parliament not have anything better to do with his time?”.I got a very interesting response from Surf Life Saving New Zealand which said that all of the “chuggers” that we see on the streets are all working for legitimate charities and the significant players are already ahead of the game due to previous bad publicity. So rather than pay for the services of the “chuggers” from the funding they collect on the street they fund them from other sources which allows them to legitimately make the claim that 100 percent of what the donor pays goes directly to the charity. So there are already mechanisms in place for charities to use to facilitate the fact that they can get around the provisions of this bill.But there is another issue at stake here and that is the reputation of charities. The reputation of charities can be called into question if the public now has to have disclosure statements from them. That would be an unintended consequence and I do not know whether the member has actually thought that issue through. Charities being required to disclose does put a negative slant on the reputation of charities. One or two charities have indicated to me that they are a little disquieted about that.Let us look at the organisation that is responsible for the professionalisation I guess of fund-raisers and that is the Fundraising Institute of New Zealand. What it has to say is very interesting. It says that there is the old concern about the public having the right to be informed about where their donations are going to and the overall cost of fund-raising and that it is trying very hard to professionalise the profession of fund-raising. Fund-raising is a difficult and complex profession. It is something that I have been involved in throughout my community career and reputation is everything. Relationship is everything. Any bill or any discussion that gets in the way of that relationship particularly if you are trying to build trust with people over the long term has an impact on your ability to fund-raise successfully. So while the Fundraising Institute is looking seriously at increasing the professionalism of fund-raisers this bill seeks to do the complete opposite by throwing into doubt the professionalism of the fund-raising fraternity.Let us face it: there are many many organisations that would not be able to fund the services that they currently undertake unless they have the services of professional fund-raisers. Professional fund-raisers are not to be dismissed. They are a very important vital part of the community sector and many organisations that are partially funded by Government for example rely on professional fund-raisers to make up the shortfall.While we are on the matter of registered charities at the beginning of this speech I said that there were about 26000 registered charities in this country. Unfortunately what has happened over a very short period of time is that many of these charities through perhaps not filing annual returns or perhaps not completing information for charity services have been deregistered. In fact I think somewhere in the region of over 1000 have been deregistered since the beginning of the year.I wonder about this Government’s intention to continue to support the charitable sector if on the one hand they are criticising the ability of professional fund-raisers to actually raise sufficient funds for charities to continue to do the good work that they do and then on the other hand they are deregistering charities which means it is impossible for them to get Government contracts and also to secure funding. It seems very counterintuitive to me. Anyway on that note we will be looking forward to more discussion on this and to resolving many of those issues. Thank you. We support this bill to the select committee.