Norman Russel: Member Vacancy — Epsom Electoral District—Hon John BanksText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Member Vacancy — Epsom Electoral District—Hon John Banks[Sitting date: 18 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18640. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green):We are having this debate today because John Banks has effectively been found to be lying about a donation to a political party or rather to himself as part of a local body election. He hid the source of the donation. The reason why that is important is that if our democracy is to be protected it is important that there is transparency about the money that goes to politicians and political parties. That is one of the founding principles of electoral finance rules and all the rules we have around our democracy to try to protect it from the influence of money. What John Banks did is he took donations—large donations—and he lied about them in his donations return in order to try to cover up the source of the donations. Gerry Brownlee has got up in this House and said he thinks John Banks is an honourable man in spite of this. I think it is extraordinary that the Government the National Party—and I assume Gerry Brownlee represents the National Party—thinks it is an honourable thing to do to break the electoral finance laws because that is what John Banks did. He broke one of the founding laws that protect our democracy from the influence of money because it requires political parties and politicians to tell the public within certain rules who gave them the money. That is important.If you think about what the Government does—what does it do day in and day out? It spends $60 million to $70 billion of public money. It makes a whole bunch of rules that have a huge influence on what happens in our society who can make money who cannot and how they do it. So we want to know who is giving money to political parties so that we can see whether those political parties are influenced by those donations. What John Banks did is circumvent those founding electoral finance laws in order to hide the source of the donations. That is why he has had to leave Parliament after the matter has gone to court. You pointed out Mr Assistant Speaker that he has not had a conviction registered against him yet but he has lost the case and the judge will make a decision shortly. That is why Mr Banks had to leave Parliament—because he broke those laws.The National Party has come out in this debate and said that Mr Banks is an honourable man. I think it tells you a lot about the values of the National Party that its members seem to think it is OK to break electoral finance laws and that you are still an honourable person even if you get forced out of the House when you break electoral finance laws.Hon Christopher Finlayson: How’s Jolyon White?Dr RUSSEL NORMAN: Chris Finlayson is speaking out about it but Gerry Brownlee just stood up in this House and said that Mr Banks is an honourable man even though Mr Banks has just been proven to have lied in his donations return and to have hidden the source of the money that was funding his campaign. That is pretty shocking from this Government. I think it says a lot about the values of this Government.John Key of course is implicated in this up to his eyeballs because it was John Key who gifted the seat of Epsom to John Banks in the first place. John Key failed in his duty as Prime Minister when he failed to look at the evidence that was mounting around John Banks the evidence that John Banks had broken the electoral finance law and the evidence that John Banks had been lying. Mr Key of course is on the record in relation to a whole different issue during the Privileges Committee in 2008 which was a very high-profile issue involving Mr Peters and many others when he called on Prime Minister Helen Clark to stand Mr Peters down saying that that was what he would do if he were Prime Minister. Well where are the standards? That is what Mr Key said back in 2008. Then when Mr Banks was found very clearly to have broken the law Mr Key did not even want to look at the police report. He was faced with a very similar situation he would not act and he would not enforce those standards.What I want to draw attention to today are all the bills that have been passed in this House because of the vote of the disgraced John Banks. There is now a series of laws in New Zealand on the statute book only because of the disgraced vote of a disgraced MP who broke the campaign finance laws before he came to this place. Before he even got here he had broken the campaign finance laws and he should never have been in Parliament. Because of that one vote—that dodgy vote that John Key organised with the dodgy deal in Epsom—a series of laws was passed. There was an amendment to the Crown Minerals Act that made it easier to mine our conservation land. Thank you John Banks and the National Party. That amendment undermines the ability of the Minister of Conservation to carry out the protection and preservation of our conservation estate and it gave the Minister of Energy and Resources input into the decisions on mining on conservation land. It also undermined the right of New Zealanders to protest. That was in the Anadarko amendment which restricts people’s protests at sea and criminalises protests at sea. That law exists on the statute book only because of the vote of John Banks the man who should never have been in this Parliament and who broke campaign finance rules before he even stepped back in here again. It was his vote that delivered that law.Then we had the Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill which not only brought back youth rates but extended them to 18 and 19-year-olds. It overturned all the hard work done by the Greens unions and others working with Labour when it was in Government in getting rid of youth rates in 2008. This law is a clear discrimination on the basis of age. That law only got through on the single vote of the disgraced MP John Banks. It would never have happened if John Banks had not been here. There was the Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill—Tau Henare’s bill—which was a solution looking for a problem. The Mixed Ownership Model Bill which is the partial privatisation of electricity companies is perhaps the most destructive legacy of this Government. That bill got through by only a single vote and that was the vote of the disgraced MP John Banks a man who should never have been in this Parliament. The Government even used the vote of John Banks to help pass the Skycity legislation despite the fact that Skycity was involved in Mr Banks’ court case.The fact that Parliament ended up passing these controversial bills and that the National Government was happy to rely on the vote of John Banks to pass all of these controversial bills tells you everything about the values of the National Government. The Prime Minister had a police report sitting on his desk that told the truth about John Banks and the Prime Minister refused to open and read that police report because he knew that if the truth came out Mr Banks would be kicked out of Parliament and Mr Key would not be able to pass all of these pieces of legislation through our House because he would not be able to rely on the disgraced vote of the disgraced MP John Banks. That is the reality of what has happened in this Parliament.It is time to clean up the donations regime and the campaign finance rules. It was important that John Banks got caught and it was important that he got prosecuted and good on Mr McCready. It would not have happened had he not done it because of course the police did not pursue the case but it was a pretty cut and dried case as it turned out. But we do need to clean up the rules. We need to clean up campaign finance rules around donations and spending caps non-party party election activities and the partial public funding of political parties. We also need to look at whether the current set up—the electoral agencies—should be able to enforce campaign finance rules because one of the things we discovered of course was that the police do not seem to want to prosecute these cases which in this case was a pretty straightforward case.Of course this also goes back to amending MMP. We just had a referendum on MMP and the people of New Zealand wanted to keep it by a majority but they also wanted to reform it. The independent umpire went away and made a series of recommendations about how we could fix the anomalies around MMP which is the coat-tailing rule in exchange for lowering the threshold to 4 percent. There were a number of other amendments proposed by the Electoral Commission. The party that blocked progress on reforming MMP was the National Party. The other parties in this House would have been able to deliver a 75 percent majority in order to fix the one thing that everyone was concerned about in MMP which was the coat-tailing rule. The independent umpire the Electoral Commission recommended that we change the coat-tailing rule and lower the threshold to 4 percent and the National Party blocked the progress of it. That is just the facts. The National Party wants to abuse that rule in Epsom with ACT and John Banks as we saw and with others. MMP is a great system but like all good systems it needs to be improved. The independent umpire gave Parliament a series of improvements that it could make and the National Party blocked making progress on those improvements which actually would have led to a better and fairer electoral system.As Andrew Geddis said the National Party is acting in manifest bad faith regarding electoral reform. That is because it is acting in its own petty political vested interest rather than acting for the country as a whole in order to improve our electoral system as the independent umpire the Electoral Commission recommended to this Parliament and the other parties around here except the National Party which blocked progress on implementing the recommendations of that independent umpire. That is why we need to actually implement those recommendations. When there is change of Government in September this year we will implement the recommendations of the Electoral Commission.