Turei Metiria: Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Turei Metiria: Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:669;Page:16460] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I will start where my colleague Mr Hodgson ended because the process has been a comparatively good one in dealing with quite fractious electoral law matters. 
It seems to me having been involved in the first Electoral Finance Act process a few years ago that this is actually part of the same process and is just unfinished business. If there had been enough time to deal with the issues we raised then—and we dealt with them in a very fractious and combative manner but if we had been allowed to go through the process such that we had a bit more time to then deal with those issues—we would have probably ended up in exactly the same place. When a highly reactive often emotional approach is taken to develop legislation on a very technical and often principled-based issue like electoral law it is a real difficulty to find the best form of electoral law to provide the best protection for the community and for political parties. So in some ways I see this bill as the end result of a process that was really just unfinished business. We would quite likely have ended up here if we had had the time to go through this properly. 
Of course the difficulty was that as Lianne Dalziel explained the 2005 election was a very unusual election in some respects because of the Exclusive Brethren attack. I acknowledge my late colleague Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons who exposed the Exclusive Brethren campaign and the relationship between the Exclusive Brethren and the National Party in that million-dollar campaign. If it had not been for Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons chasing down those people they would not have had their role in the campaign exposed to the extent that it was. That is the history out of which this legislation has been born. It has taken 5 years for us to work through to get reasonable electoral law. 
But the issues are even older than the 2005 election. In 1986 the Royal Commission on the Electoral System said it was not fair if some people in the community used their relative wealth to exercise disproportionate influence in determining who was to govern and what policies were to be pursued. It advised in 1986 that there should be a cap on third parties campaigning in an election. It was 20 years later in 2005 or just after that one of the bigger parties finally saw the validity of that statement—because there was no cap until after 2005. Finally one of the bigger parties saw the validity of that statement because it was subject to a million-dollar uncapped campaign against it. So it was not until it actually felt the pain of that attack that it realised the royal commission had it right. We should have many years before instituted a process of caps on third parties. 
The political consensus we now have which is very good and very valuable that there should be caps on all political players during election campaigns is excellent but it should not have required the 2005 attack campaign to make parties especially National and Labour understand the importance of having electoral law based on sound principles from the start. We had a 20-year gap and the 2005 election before that principle was made apparent to the two older parties. Only then did they feel that they could support what was the only principled and rational change—to have the third-party cap. 
We cannot allow our electoral law to be developed in that kind of way. We should not wait for crises to happen; we should have an electoral law system that is based on principle. A rational approach to a principled and values-based system that supports the public’s right to a fair electoral process has to be the basis of our decisions. Although in the bill we are instituting those caps with a largely across-the-board political consensus which is great we have failed in the bill to apply the same kind of principle or to learn the lesson from 2005 and the 20-year delay in reaching that consensus when it comes to donations and the right of the public to know who is funding political parties. 
This bill makes it easier for political parties to hide from the public those who are giving them money. That is a recipe for corruption. It does not mean that parties are behaving corruptly but it keeps open the door for that possibility. How many more years will we have to wait before some other crisis happens for one of the older parties to understand it is really important that the public know who is giving money to a political party so they can feel confident that no one is giving money to political parties in exchange for policy? That is the inherent evil that we should be trying to prevent. People should not give money in secret to political parties in exchange for policy deals should that political party be successful in an election. 
The public need to know who is funding their political representatives but this legislation will make it much harder for the public to know. That is bad law it is bad principle it is irrational and it fails the test of ensuring that our electoral law is fair and transparent and provides the public with an electoral system in which they can have some faith and confidence that it is fair. So it is just difficult very difficult that in one area we can see that lessons were learnt from the failure to act in the past on a principled basis but at the same time we let the same legislation follow the exact same path of failing to understand that principle in electoral law is absolutely critical. 
The process has been better this time round. We have slightly better law this time round than we did last time and on that basis the Green Party will be supporting the bill. But there remains a genuine and ongoing concern that the bill makes it harder by preventing the public from having the right to know who is funding political parties. That therefore keeps open the door to further corrupt practice in the future and it will require another crisis before we can finally close that door once and for all. Kia ora.