Hodgson Pete: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Hodgson Pete: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:652;Page:1326] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 Let me be first to agree that the Electoral Finance Act as it is currently on the statute book does cause confusion. It does cause uncertainty and like the previous speaker Amy Adams I found it confusing and uncertain as we rushed to seek the detail of how it might be interpreted. However my contribution today—having made that point—is to speak about the value of electoral law in the first instance and about the importance of process in electoral amendments as the years go by. I have spent 9 years on the Electoral Law Committee. I was on the committee that gave us for better or for worse MMP and I was involved in many other aspects of electoral law during the 1990s. There are some features of the New Zealand electoral system that like other laws in this land reflect the political culture of New Zealand and by their very nature are highly restrictive. The electoral activities of this land are a highly restrictive set of activities and they always have been—how many times we are allowed to vote how old we have to be what we are allowed to say and whether we are allowed to bribe people or “treat” them as we say rather quaintly. These are things that have been in the electoral law for some time. 
Other things have been a feature of our law as well. One of them is that no one should be allowed to attempt to buy a democratic outcome. Using the word “buy” I mean bringing to bear a bunch of money legally gained but privately gained and putting it towards the result of some plebiscite or other. Many countries do not try to avoid that. The American public seem to be inured to the idea that millions and millions are spent on their campaigns despite their various regulatory efforts. In the New Zealand context it has been occasioned through two basic mechanisms. One of them has been to say: “Here is the limit on what you can spend. Here is the limit on what you can spend locally; here is the limit on what might be spent nationally; here is the limit on what can be spent in a by-election.” and so on. 
The other mechanism is to put some constraints on the transparency of donations so that one can receive a donation above a certain amount but only if one declares whom it comes from. The reason for doing that is very very straightforward—that the public seeks some reassurance that there is not some purchasing. Again I use the word “buy” or “purchase” to reflect the idea that money as opposed to thought analysis political wisdom or whatever is being used to channel the viewpoint of a certain political party. That has always been something that has been a stranger to our electoral system. We have spent quite a lot of time ensuring that that is the case. It is always difficult because of what is called financial intermediaries whereby people put money through trusts and the Electoral Finance Act on the statute book at the moment has sought to deal with that. We will not cast aspersions again about who was doing it the most or the least or whatever but in recent times it has been there in response to the fact that some political parties have put money through trusts. 
We have also ensured that people are not providing undue influence by—and this has been around since the 1990s—using some such body as a sponsor. There was a time when certain members of this House used to win their local campaigns under a first past the post system by getting famously well-known or popular groups to sponsor them. That then became if you will deemed to be an interference in the electoral process. Throughout all that time the Electoral Law Committee has sought to resolve these matters across the party lines. 
 I need to just say this gently but I am going to say it rather firmly none the less: there is a body of opinion in the minds of some of us in this House that when the Electoral Finance Act was put together consultation was not up to scratch. I hold a different view. Consultation was attempted endlessly at least in the initial stages when the Electoral Finance Act was put together and some parties in this House chose not to involve themselves. I guess they made their own choice to say that they did not want those new constraints and therefore they would not involve themselves in the consultation. They then claimed—wrongly—that the consultation was not available to them from the outset. That was simply not the case and I want to put that on the record. 
The other thing I want to put on the record is this: the Electoral Finance Act was occasioned by two distinct and separate changes in behaviour in 2005 by one political party which was the National Party. Again I am not using it as a whipping boy and I am not using it with any anger; I am stating the simple logic of the origin of the Electoral Finance Act. The two changes were these. The first was that the electoral season all of a sudden became very long. Until the Electoral Finance Act was put in place there was an agreed and legislated-for 90-day period during which time any expenditure limits would be counted. The Electoral Finance Act extended that from 90 days prior to an election to 1 January in the year an election was due. So that might mean that it would last for 10 or 11 months and indeed in the 2008 calendar year it did last for over 10 months. 
The reason for that was that until that time political parties had more or less not bothered to campaign until the 90-day period had got under way. They might have been organising like hell and they might have been raising money right left and centre but nobody bothered to campaign until the 90-day period started. We could campaign and we all did to a small extent but there was no other significant campaigning before the 2005 election campaign. 
Then in 2005 campaigning began in April. And it began not in a small way; it began in a very large expensive and public way. It was a series of billboards now know generically as the “Iwi/Kiwi” billboards. There were other campaign activities under way at that time as well but there were none so pronounced as that particular campaign. That meant that one particular party because it had an ability to make the expenditure—and bless it for that—decided to break the unspoken rule if you will that there was not really much point in trying to campaign for more than 3 months because maybe the public were not interested. National challenged that. It said that it would campaign in April in May and in June that it would campaign hard and that it would campaign with a lot of expense because it thought that it could get a gap in the polls that would be sufficient to carry it through. 
The other thing that also rather famously happened in the 2005 election which I have banged on about at length—I will not bang on about it with any anger today but will simply restate the facts about it—is that one agency being the Exclusive Brethren decided to put $2.1 million into the campaign. Was that the correct figure? I think it was $2.1 million; if I have got it wrong then I apologise. But it was a very substantial amount of money certainly a very large amount when compared with the cap that large parties such as the National Party or the Labour Party can expend on their party vote campaigns. For us the expenditure limit is in the order of $2.4 million yet this similar-sized sum was put up by one third party. It did not argue for a National victory; it argued against a victory by the Labour Party and the Greens. So in effect the publicity had the same level of influence. And it was done clandestinely. The question was raised many times about whether the National Party knew about it a book was written about it and on the story goes. That was a change in behaviour. It is true that we had the Engineers Union and Federated Farmers doing a little bit of that in earlier times but it was nothing on this scale. 
If we are to go forward as a nation we need to be mindful of that recent history. I commend the current Minister of Justice Simon Power for his approach. I think his approach is simply and straightforwardly commendable and I thank him for that. I hope that the Labour Party will be able to provide good real and useful engagement. I look forward to this bill reaching the select committee; whether I am part of the committee remains to be seen. But I think we need to be mindful of our recent history and we need to be careful that we protect the integrity of our election system for the future because without it we really have nothing resembling a constitution.