Clendon David: Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Clendon David: Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:659;Page:8406] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 I am very pleased to continue the generally very agreeable nature of the debate that has been occurring on these last couple of bills and the Greens will be supporting the progress of the Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill to the Commerce Committee. We have some minor reservations but overall it seems to be a very very timely measure for at least two reasons. The first is that we indeed need to protect charities against falling victim to unscrupulous commission agents and perhaps more important we need to maintain public confidence that the money they donate will be substantially committed to the charitable purpose for which it is intended with only a modest and clearly indicated percentage being retained to meet the reasonable costs of collection or the commission. We have already heard some examples of the untenable rates of retention and I think “extortionate” would not be too hard a word to use about some of those examples. 
It is clear that charities of all sorts have not escaped the effects of the global recession. It has become much harder for organisations to raise funds for whatever purpose and competition for that diminishing resource can become intense. There are now over 23000 charities registered with the Charities Commission both small and large and according to the Fundraising Institute of New Zealand larger charities with very strong brands are tending to become larger while smaller charities are tending to move in the opposite direction getting squeezed out. Indeed they are struggling to survive making them much more vulnerable to the depredations of some of these much less scrupulous organisations that might offer them service. 
I was fortunate recently to be invited to the celebration of the reopening of a Plunket room in Sandringham after the group had lost its building to an arson attack some 2 years earlier. The local community did an extraordinarily good job of first extracting some $200000 from the local council and second raising a similar amount in both cash and kind through their own efforts all the while project managing the construction of what is now a superb facility that will serve that community for many years. The success of that particular venture was testimony not only to the hard work and perseverance of that community but also to the fact that they were part of a national organisation and that they counted among their number people with high-level professional and other expertise. This sort of expert professionalism is not always available to charity groups. Although they may have a deep and broad knowledge of the sector they are serving they may not be astute in contracting or managing professional or other assistance. So they along with donors are the most at risk from unreasonably high retention rates from organisations that can be fairly described as little more than rip-off artists. 
This bill proposes to amend the Fair Trading Act to require professional third-party collectors to disclose to potential donors that a proportion of the donation will be retained and this will apply if the proportion retained is more than 20 percent. It goes on to suggest that if the proportion retained is between 20 and 50 percent of the total donation then the collector must simply disclose that a portion has been withheld by them but does not have to disclose the amount. If the proportion retained is more than 50 percent then the collector must disclose the percentage being retained. In common with an earlier speaker the Greens are somewhat sceptical—we question whether those threshold levels are appropriate—but we are very happy to wait and see what submissions come to the select committee and what evidence there is to suggest that those thresholds are appropriate or indeed to set some other level. 
So with that aside we do look forward to this bill progressing. We compliment the member who has presented it. Kia ora.