Little AndrewJAMI-LEE ROSS (Botany): My comments are probably best directed to the Minister of Justice but I understand I can speak about this under this appropriation. I am interested to know what work in the appropriations is being carried out relating to a decision of the Cabinet Social Wellbeing Committee back in March where the committee agreed in principle to a comprehensive review of national electoral law subject to reporting back to the committee around scope and processes for the review and the financial implications. I note in the Cabinet committee paper it talked about how resourcing for agencies to deal with issues relating to funding for their activities and reducing or raising awareness of foreign interference risks will be taken into account when determining agency resources. Presumably that has happened under this particular Estimates of appropriation. I note that when the Minister was preparing this report which is a response to the Justice Committee's inquiry into the general election and foreign interference that particular inquiry did receive advice from the director-general of intelligence and security. The director-general in talking about electoral issues and possible areas for Government to consider when it comes to funding of reviews indicated that whilst political donations are legally sanctioned as a form of participation in New Zealand politics the Security Intelligence Service has become concerned when some aspect of the donation is obscured or is channelled in a way that prevents scrutiny of the origin of the donation. So what I want to ask the Minister and what I want to raise as an issue is what work is being done to tackle more fully the issues raised by the Justice Committee the issues raised by the director-general of intelligence and security and the issues raised by academics like Canterbury University Professor Anne-Marie Brady who all are pointing to the fact that we do have significant foreign interference risks in this country and the fact that our political donations regime is not scrutinised enough in the media. I asked the Minister again if he has concerns about these types of donations. In the media was an Inner Mongolia donation: $150000 that came from a company owned by a non - English-speaking individual an Inner Mongolian. The $150000 came to a political party and on the surface of that there's no real connection with New Zealand money. Journalists looked into it. They found that there were significant connections back to the Chinese Communist Party and that donation for all intents and purposes was a foreign donation but it slipped through the cracks.I have before me here 60000-odd line items of donations that are from the National Party. It was given to me in error. I call it a leak. It's the type of information that only party secretaries and chief financial officers and auditors tend to see. It's line-by-line individual information. It's the very information that people complained about in the inquiry that is not public enough. Earlier today I was threatened with injunctive action if I attempted to table this in the Parliament. I think the lawyers making those threats probably should go across to the Victoria University law school and take a paper on the 1688 Bill of Rights for Parliament and free speech in the Parliament because if members of Parliament want to speak about information that they've been leaked or provided albeit in error they're able to. But I was asked extremely seriously not to release this information because it is—every single line—items of donations from the National Party for the past couple of years. But what it shows in there and why I think the Minister needs to tell the committee more about what he's doing is that when we have in documents like this where you can see—and in here there's hundreds of thousands of dollars linked to the National Party's Chinese group. When we have information here where we see donations like the Inner Mongolia donation where we see backdoor loopholes where foreign money can enter this country by way of a company and then go to a political party and for all intents and purposes is foreign donations are we going to be serious about cleaning this up? There are more investigations out there. Good on them. I accept there are questions I'm having to answer through a system as well. But there is serious information here. I'm not going to table this. I'll take the high road. I don't like threats of legal injunctions. I do have free speech in this Parliament but I'll take the high road in this particular case. But when will the Government do more about this issue?Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I know that this is an opportunity for the committee to examine the Estimates and to be debating those in this Chamber. But nevertheless the member has raised some serious issues. Let me just see if I can kind of rapidly chop through them. First of all as a consequence of the Justice Committee's inquiry into the previous general election some changes were made to our electoral law particularly in relation to foreign donations. So we now prohibit foreign donations. We have put in place a number of measures that party general secretaries have to comply with. So really the onus is on them.In terms of the very beginning of that member's contribution he referred to the commitments publicly made by myself on behalf of my party and that is that if we're in a position to do so following the election we intend to conduct a ground-up review of our electoral laws the Electoral Act 1993 with a view to rewriting that law to make it consistent with expectations and obligations that we would expect in the 21st century. I expect that a very early issue that will be dealt with is our donations regime and the transparency regime we have around donations to political parties. So that is a political commitment. It's not a Government decision but that is a matter that no doubt will be debated through the election campaign. It will be a question that voters can consider when they're casting their vote.On the issue of compliance with the law at the moment the Electoral Commission has the preliminary role of evaluating complaints about breaches of the law. They set a very low threshold before they refer the matter to the police and the police can then decide whether they investigate or they refer it to the Serious Fraud Office. It's not for me or for this House because of the relationship of comity with other branches of Government to cut across investigations. I make no comment on any extant investigation. I do make this comment: that the law as it is at the moment allows donations to be made to political parties. There is a threshold over which donations must be disclosed and reported and then concomitantly under that threshold there is no obligation to disclose or report. It would be unfortunate if those making donations below the threshold on the understanding that there was no obligation to disclose then had that donation disclosed against the spirit of the legislation. Equally I think the concern that the member is raising is that there are those who seek to circumvent or to obfuscate the requirements of the legislation and in effect defeat the spirit of it that way. Both in my view are equally culpable and we shouldn't allow either to happen. But it's for that reason and I think growing public concern about our donations regime and the transparency regime that we currently have in our law that has driven the need for a proper full ground-up review of our electoral law to see that it meets modern standards.