Woolerton R Doug: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee 
Woolerton R Doug: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:644;Page:13664] 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
:  
I did not actually intend to speak on this part but I feel I have to. I have to tell people who are listening about all of these people in New Zealand who are rising up against this bill. I will talk about something I read in the newspaper. I am not slagging off John Boscawen or anything like that but to get the 5000 people to the march in Auckland that the whole of New Zealand was worried about he had to enlist the services of a secretary. Then he had to enlist the services of telephone survey people—from a foreign telemarketing organisation—and have them ring 82000 Aucklanders to get 5000 to a march. That is what he had to do. 
Let me tell members what the National Party had to do in order to get even a modicum of dissent over this bill. Through its membership it had to put out an email campaign the likes of which we have never seen before. It put out through an email campaign to all its members a directive telling every member to go to another member etc.—like a pyramid-selling scheme—in order to bring awareness of this bill to the forefront. This was to raise National members’ anger against this bill. 
But do members here know what? It has not done that. Outside the National Party and outside the 5000 people who went to John Boscawen’s meeting after 82000 phone calls numerous ads in the newspaper and numerous radio ads the public of New Zealand is actually reasonably relaxed about this bill. I have had people say to me—National Party people mainly because I still know a lot of them from the old days—“Doug you’ll rue the day that you voted for this bill.” Well I can tell members that we do not give a damn that those National Party people have been rarked up. National Party people do not vote for us. A few might after this election I might add but by and large National Party people do not vote for us. 
So National members have been rarking up their own people and John Boscawen has been working diligently to get 5000 people to a march. This has all been organised to a degree that the New Zealand union movement could only envy. The union movement would envy the organisation the money and the friends enlisted to get this level of concern in New Zealand about this bill. 
I tell members that average New Zealanders are not concerned about this bill. They do not want their elections bought and they do not want their elections corrupted by people who have a really strange view of the world—people who are mainly intent on pushing their own views. 
I can tell members that John Boscawen came to see me; I invited him to come to have a chat. I will not quote what he said to me but it is suffice for the Committee to know that he really means what he says and that he does not understand the electoral system completely. So intent is he on spending in excess of the limits prescribed by this bill that he said he would set up his own political party in order to achieve that. I said: “Great! That is precisely what the bill intends. If people want to participate as citizens they spend so much—no problem. If they want to spend more than that they register as a third party. If they want to extend all those limits they list as a political party.” That is what the bill intended yet so intent is he that he sees it as his cunning little plan—he says so in the newspaper. 
The bill allows what John Boscawen intends. The bill understands that people will want to spend different amounts of money. But in the future such people will be known; they will not be able to run some sort of subversive campaign to help another political party break its spending limits.