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:11029. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour):I just want to take a brief call on Part 2 and in particular the new “Return of electoral donations and expenses” in schedule 2. I just want to reflect on a couple of elements of this new return form. As with the rest of the bill the Labour Party certainly supports the changes that are beingmade here. In particular obviously this reinforces the fact that any donation that exceeds $1500 now has to be declared and that is obviously a useful and important change. The donation form then goes on to talk about what has to be said about the donor who is making that donation of a greater value than $1500. The things that need to be written down are the name of the donor; the address of the donor; the amount of the donation or in the case of aggregated donations the total amount; and the date the donation was received or in the case of the aggregated donations the date that each donation was received.As I discussed in my contribution on Part 1 of this bill the Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) it is useful to put these new clauses alongside the practice that has come up in the past and see why such change is needed. Let us take the example of the donation from Skycity in 2010 to John Banks’ mayoral campaign. How would Mr Banks go about filling out this form? The name of the donor—well John Banks knew the name of the donor Skycity because he went to a meeting at Skycity where he met the chief executive of Skycity and that person handed him an envelope with Skycity’s logo on the outside with a cheque for $15000 from a Skycity bank account. So I think we can tick off the first of the requirements under the new Part A in schedule 2 of the Act set out in schedule 1 which is the name of the donor. It was Skycity.The address of the donor is the second requirement. We can make an assumption that Mr Banks would have known where he was. That is a big assumption because he does have some issues—Denis O’Rourke: In a helicopter.GRANT ROBERTSON: —that is right—remembering exactly where he was. He did not go there in a helicopter Mr O’Rourke—Hon Tau Henare: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am just wondering whether I could get a steer from you. Currently the Hon John Banks and so on and so forth is before the courts over this matter so I am just wondering whether we are not covered by the sub judice blah blah blah.GRANT ROBERTSON: That is a perfect legal term.Hon Tau Henare: The last bit was “blah blah blah”.GRANT ROBERTSON: Speaking to the point of order—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I will hear Grant Robertson.GRANT ROBERTSON: This matter arose yesterday as well during the Committee stage I think it was and it was clarified. I was just looking for the Speaker’s ruling. It was a ruling from Speaker Terris and it made clear that reference can still be made to the matters that are concerned but not any judgment on it.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): The point of order is a valid one in that we need to be very careful about what we do. It is my understanding that certainly a private prosecution is taking place and the subject matter pertaining to that is off limits. There is a police complaint I think that the member was referring to as well which at this stage has not moved to a court proceeding. But the member’s point is well made and we need to be very conscious that we do not transgress into areas that are sub judice so I will continue to monitor the member.GRANT ROBERTSON: As I said we were looking at a practical example here of new Part A in schedule 2. So we have the name of the donor established. That is Skycity. Could Mr Banks have reasonably known where he was? Well as we have said he does have some issues with that but it is a very large tower in the middle of Auckland and I reckon he would have got there so he could have fulfilled the second criteria the address of the donor.The amount of the donation—there is no doubt here whatsoever. Skycity in its statement in the police report is very clear it gave $15000 to both mayoral campaignsto that of Len Brown and that of John Banks. So there was no confusion there about the amount of money that was on the cheque. They communicated that. The treasurer of Team Banksie was able to write back a receipt to Skycity for the amount of $15000. So Mr Banks would be able to fulfil the third criteria the amount of the donation.The date the donation was received—this is an interesting one because the donation was clearly received on a particular day. Could Mr Banks reasonably be expected to remember what date that was? I am going to cut him some slack here because we have seen some fading in his memory over time and he may not have known what day it was. However the people at Skycity certainly did and when they requested that receipt they no doubt would have communicated to Mr Banks the fact that he had received a donation.So there we are: in those four criteria for donations that exceed $1500 we can now see that John Banks should have been able to fill out a form that said “Yes I got $15000.” and he failed to do that. What is not at issue in any current proceedings is the question of whether or not the police found that Mr Banks had signed a false return. They actually said in their report that Mr Banks did do that. The difficulty they have was that the time had elapsed within which they were allowed to mount a prosecution. There is actually no doubt about that. This form change is a good thing but it just highlights the fact that if someone like Mr Banks wanted to come along and rort the Local Electoral Act which is exactly what he did that was open to him. These law changes will thankfully mean that people like Mr Banks cannot get away with that any more.Part 2 agreed to.