Roche Denise: Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1672. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. It is my pleasure to rise on behalf of the Greens to support the Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill. Donations are the lifeblood of the charitable and not-for-profit sector and many of New Zealand’s 23000 or so registered charities and a fair few of the ones that are denied registration because of the narrow definition of “charitable purpose” in the Charities Act rely on the goodwill and philanthropy of ordinary New Zealanders digging into their pockets to keep them afloat. The Greens have welcomed this bill because as funding rounds with local authorities and contracts with the Government get clawed back and become more difficult more and more charities have moved to professional fund-raisers. These third-party fund-raisers undertake the appeals for the charity either through collections or through telemarketing and either charge a straight fee or as is more prevalent take a percentage of all the donations that are pledged. Like many in this House we have felt concerned about the lack of clarity over these arrangements. We have been concerned that good-natured philanthropic New Zealanders did not know how much of their donations were being diverted to a private company when most donors give to charity thinking that the intention is for the charity to use their money for the purposes of the charity’s activities. 
We the Greens are great believers in transparency in all things and so of course we have supported this bill. However we have been concerned about how this bill would develop as originally it suggested that donors would get to know exactly how much of their donation was being diverted to a fund-raising company only if that company was retaining more than 50 percent of the donation that they pledged and that the donor would know that a proportion was being diverted to the company only if the company was taking between 20 percent and 50 percent of the donations. 
We note the report from the Commerce Committee which heard the submissions on the bill and its comment that there is some complexity involved in setting a threshold that would trigger that transparency and we do welcome the bill’s move to shift the responsibility of the detail around a bit either through amendments in this House as the bill proceeds through to the Committee of the whole House or through the Minister. These complexities include the fact that some large charitable organisations do spend more money on fund-raising initially as they sign people up on automatic payment forms and that is recouped later on as time progresses and I note that several members have already mentioned this. I know that this happens with Greenpeace New Zealand. It does not use third-party fund-raisers and as a good prudent safeguard it actually keeps an eye on the wages it spends on fund-raisers compared with the amount of funds it is fund-raising. 
To my mind it is a great shame that we have to have a bill like this at all and that good and worthy charitable organisations are forced to rely on the services of some potentially unscrupulous fund-raisers to make ends meet. We recognise that in times of recession the generosity of New Zealanders is under pressure and that not-for-profit organisations are competing for the charity dollar. So it is doubly disturbing that unscrupulous fund-raising companies do exist. That pressure also forces good worthy charities into the arms of the Devil. As the charity dollar reduces and Government funding dries up more and more not-for-profit organisations face the prospect of becoming addicted to funding that is generated through the addiction of others. They start to rely on grants from those pub charities or if they are lucky—and it is a lottery excuse the pun—from Skycity. I just note here that Skycity casinos allocate only 2.5 percent of their profits from gambling to community grants compared with pub pokie machines which are required by law to allocate 37.1 percent for community purposes—despite this and the fact that the Prime Minister said yesterday during question time that pokies in casinos are three times more addictive that the ones in pubs. 
The trouble with the unscrupulous fund-raising companies is that they bring all fund-raising into disrepute and that is why we welcome this bill. We also note that there is more work to be done on the thresholds and around regulation and we agree with the honourable member Rajen Prasad that there is more conversation to be had. In the meantime however the Green Party will be supporting this bill. No reira tena koutou katoa.