Turei Metiria: Electoral Finance Bill Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 3) Electoral Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Turei Metiria: Electoral Finance Bill Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 3) Electoral Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:644;Page:14040] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is pleased with the changes that the House is making to the financing of election campaigns. The Greens respect the fact that there are good reasons for the boundaries this legislation places on the purchase of advertising and other campaign material. We are proud to have severely limited the anonymous donations that political parties can receive for electioneering purposes. We agree that such constraints are necessary in a free and democratic society that values a level playing field and fairer elections. 
It is somewhat ironic that those who purport to be champions of individualism and freedom of speech are the ones opposing the bill because they are opposing the very precepts on which this modern democratic system we participate in was built. They are opposing the principles of equality that their and my forebears sought to honour when they first arrived in this country. My ancestors Susannah and Henry Hawes arrived in Karamea from the ship  
Michelangelo 
 which left Gravesend in 1874. Susannah was a pioneer of the West Coast. She came to this country to build a new life for herself and for her children. We can see in her writings many of which have survived that she had a great deal of hope and enthusiasm for her new life and her new country. She built her life here as part of a migration that sought to escape the inequality of the old country—the inequality of birth wealth and privilege. 
When she arrived here the representative Government had been in place for about 22 years and from the outset the potential for money to corrupt the political process in New Zealand had been both recognised and countered and the need for restraints had begun to be incorporated into law. As early as 1858 a law was passed to prohibit treating bribery of and the undue influence of money on our politicians. Politicians were not to be bought in our young New Zealand. In 1881 just a few years after Susannah’s arrival the first rules to define campaign election spending were passed. They imposed caps on how much money candidates could spend on their campaign. In 1895 the cap was set at £200. 
These early rules that constrained the ways that money would be allowed to influence politics and politicians were integral to the new parliamentary system. Our ancestors knew exactly how the privilege of money and class could interfere with political expression and they quickly created systems to prevent that interference. The clarity of our ancestors’ thinking on that score puts the current debate on this bill to shame. As new arrivals they could have been forgiven for creating a utopian system of unfettered liberties; instead they tried to ensure that their intention of building a new system came to pass—or at least they gave it their best shot. It was to be a system where money class the ownership of property and accidents of gender were not left to become the iron determinants of political engagement. Instead people built a system that elevated the place of opportunity and merit that privileged openness and free speech and above all that sought to make fairness its distinguishing feature. 
The Green Party is proud to uphold that principle. We are proud to have defended it against attacks on it by those who would interfere with its political expression through the privilege of wealth. Over the intervening years our rules have gradually been developed to take into account our growing nation and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The 1986 report from the Royal Commission on the Electoral System was a watershed report on the impacts of money on political campaigning. Its recommendations came 95 years after the first limits on campaign spending. The commission argued and rightly I believe that if there were one area where our community should reasonably tolerate some limitations on the freedom of expression it would be in the systems of how we elect our Government. 
This has been the defining question in the debate over the bill—the question of whether it limits freedom of speech. Yes the bill limits how much can be spent on advertising thus extending the laws that New Zealand has had in place for over a century. We have two interesting examples of the use of money in such a context. We have the current example of the Southern Institute of Technology and its campaign in its newspaper advertisements. Under this bill the institute’s campaign advertisements are not electioneering; they are issues advertising so they are not covered by this bill. 
We also have a changing political process. We have got rid of door-knocking now—that traditional practice. Instead we have very expensive phone spamming by Canadian call centres which will ring 70000 households—just like that—in order to drum up support for a dying campaign. Yes this legislation requires transparency by those who are engaged in the electioneering campaign and the Greens are pleased we were able to expose the rort of 2005 before it could seriously contaminate the election process. This bill helps to protect us against that rort and that kind of corruption. We have obvious examples from other similar jurisdictions overseas where corruption has infected the political system. US democracy has become a commodity that is routinely bought and sold. 
Members should make no mistake: advertising works. In New Zealand the advertising industry is worth more than $2 billion a year. Nobody would spend that kind of money unless it was effective. Democracy in the US in fact relies on marketing for its very existence. Who can stand for election and whose message will prevail depends on the donors and the ongoing flows of cash and donations have come to depend on the elective representatives remembering to pay the piper. It is a form of democracy that has virtually no life at all outside the classic examples where donations determine who gets to stand and who gets to succeed. 
So why do institutions and individuals donate? The driver is a hunger for money by political parties but despite public funding in other comparable jurisdictions the hunger explains the driver only in part because donors want parties and hopefully Governments to be beholden to them and to be preferred over their business competitors. It is a neat cosy arrangement and it grows more blatant. Parties in Australia now openly call for donations that provide access to the Prime Minister or Premier at rates of $10000. It costs less to get to see a Minister. All of the donors want access and some would reasonably argue favours. 
In New Zealand we seem to have accepted that there is a situation of donations to political parties provided that the donation the giver and the receiver are known—that is disclosure is the key for us. The Greens to the best extent we could negotiate have ensured that we have severely restricted the capacity for anonymous donations to be made to political parties so that the public can know more about who is funding their political representatives and their political campaigns and can then assess their policy positions in response. We have exposed the secret trusts to the disinfectant of sunlight. We have exposed the rorts of the 2005 election and we do not want those rorts to happen again. We have closed those loopholes. For parties that are in Government such public scrutiny of funders and policy preferences is critical and the Greens have made that scrutiny by the public easier through the provisions in this legislation. 
The Greens will continue to work for better campaign funding law. This legislation does not do everything right and we need better work done. That is why we have advocated so strongly for a citizens’ assembly. A citizens’ assembly would comprise two people selected from each electorate who would work together as a group with advisers and a secretariat to consider New Zealand’s historical situation and comparable jurisdictions. It would hold public hearings and would work towards developing a new campaign funding law that is about the New Zealand situation. This is what we have been advocating for nearly a year. Such an assembly would enable the citizens of our country to devise election funding rules that meet the changing needs of a society that is sophisticated and technologically savvy but that at heart upholds the founding principles of the parliamentary democracy our forebears brought to this country—principles of transparency equality and fairness. In short we need Kiwi politicians with no strings attached.