Hipkins Chris: Electoral Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Electoral Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 11 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16480. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I would like to turn to the sections of the Electoral Amendment Bill that deal with donations to political parties and donations to candidates.Paul Foster-Bell: What about the leaders’ campaign?CHRIS HIPKINS: If the member would just hold his tongue for a moment I could elucidate for him the aspects of this that I wish to talk about. I want particularly to talk about contributions to candidates and political parties or donations to candidates and political parties that are made up of contributions. To put this into context this would be a situation where one person goes around and collects from a number of their friends a whole lot of cheques and then presents those in a bundle to a political party. There are a number of ways they could do this. They could for example host a dinner. They could host a dinner and they could collect from all of the people who attend their dinner—Kris Faafoi: This is a hypothetical right?CHRIS HIPKINS: —it is a hypothetical—some very large cheques. Let us say $5000—let us just say that they take $5000 from each of their friends who attend the dinner and they say that that is the ticket price for attending the dinner. They bundle all those up and they donate those to a political party. What is very clear from this legislation is the principle—let us say that they held it in 2010. Back then for instance the disclosure threshold was $10000. What is very clear from the law both in the provisions of this bill and in the principal Act the Electoral Act 1993 which it amends is that if any one person paid for more than two tickets then they would have to be declared separately. They would have to be itemised out because the bill is very clear that contributions have to be identified. The people contributing to that have to be identified as well not just the person who is making the overall donation but the people who are contributing individually to that if it exceeds the threshold. So anybody in say 2010 buying more than two tickets at $5000 each to a dinner would have to declare it. It would have to be declared.I want to know whether in fact the Government is willing to live up to that because it is very clear that exactly that happened. A dinner happened in 2010 where people paid $5000 per head to attend. Any person paying for more than two tickets—any person paying for more than two tickets—would have had to be declared to the Electoral Commission. If they were not then there was a clear breach of the electoral law. The law has been broken—the law has been broken—because nobody other than the person who collected the donations was declared on the National Party’s return of electoral expenses. So if the National Party knows that one person paid for more than two tickets it is clear that it has willingly and knowingly broken the electoral law. If somebody for example bought a table at that dinner and their name was not declared alongside the name of the principal donor then the National Party has knowingly and willingly broken the electoral law.Of course this matters. This matters because we have a situation where we have a Prime Minister—who is also the leader of the National Party of course—who believes that anybody who tries to conceal where their money is coming from is being tricky. Well the same standard applies to the Prime Minister. He is being very tricky when he tries to duck for cover and says that he is not going to reveal where the National Party gets its money from but he thinks that the Labour Party should reveal where every cent that it gets is coming from. That is an absolute double standard. It is a very tricky double standard.I want to know whether the National Party is going to live up to its commitments and the values that this bill represents because this bill and the clauses around contributions to candidate and party campaigns are very clear. It is about transparency and it is about making sure that the public of New Zealand know where political parties are getting their money from. But we do not know where the money that the National Party gets is coming from. So John Key on the one hand says that he thinks anybody who tries to conceal where their money is coming from is being tricky even if in fact they do front up in the end and say where the money has come from. If they front up and they say where the money has come from John Key still wants to attack them and fling mud at them but he is not willing to front up and say where the National Party’s money is coming from. That is a clear double standard. I want to see the Prime Minister live up to his own standards—something that thus far he has proven unwilling to do.The principle here again is transparency. It is a level of transparency that the Prime Minister is not willing to live up to. Under these rules—Part 1 clause 46 for example which deals with the return of candidate donations—it is clear that where somebody submits a donation that is made up of contributions and any one of those contributions exceeds $1500 the person making the donation has to identify the name of each contributor the address of the contributor the amount that they have contributed and the date on which the donation funded from the contributions was made. That same principle applies to donations made to political parties. Therefore if somebody knowingly submitted to the National Party a donation of let us say over $100000 and that person knew that any individual contributor had contributed more than $10000 to that overall donation then they must have listed down the name address contact details etc. of each contributor who gave more than $10000 to that donation. If they have not done so then they have clearly broken the law.I want to know from National Party members whether in fact that is the case. I want to have an absolute guarantee from National Party members that no single contributor—no single person attending that dinner—paid for more than two tickets because if they did pay for more two tickets the National Party has knowingly and willingly been a party to the breaking of electoral law. I look forward to full disclosure from National Party members and absolute assurance that nobody paid for more than two tickets because if they are not willing to give that it clearly means something is not right. It clearly means that they are now aware that they have broken the electoral law and what are they going to do to put that right? If no National Party member is willing to stand up in the Chamber and give us an absolute assurance that nobody attending that dinner paid for more than two tickets everyone in New Zealand has an absolute right to ask why that is. Why is it that no one from the National Party is willing to give an absolute assurance that nobody paid for more than two tickets? If National Party members are not willing to do that they are clearly not willing to stand up and say the party did not break the law because they know that it would not be true—because they know that it would not be true. In the absence of that reassurance in this Chamber the public of New Zealand are left with no other conclusion than that the National Party has broken the law.The National Party broke the law and now National Party members are not willing to front up. Not only are they not willing to front up and adhere—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Order! I am listening very carefully to the member and he has really launched into what might be a general debate when he should be talking about the principles of the bill. By all means he can make comparative illustrations but he has gone beyond that.CHRIS HIPKINS: In that case I will talk about the penalties for knowingly participating in breaching this law because there are penalties in this bill for people who knowingly file false returns and knowingly do not submit the information that they are due. If anyone in the National Party was involved in that then the penalties that they would be subject to are clearly spelt out in this legislation—clearly spelt out in this legislation. That is of course probably one of the reasons I think in the case of candidate donations—if it was a candidate donation it would be $40000. That would be the penalty that they would be liable for. I am not entirely sure where the section is—a party secretary who without reasonable excuse knowingly filed false information would be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $40000.Clearly if the National Party again under this bill was aware that one person paid for more than two tickets to that dinner then it is now liable under this bill for a fine not exceeding $40000. I am not surprised that no one from the National Party is willing to open themselves up to that by basically standing up and giving the reassurance that in fact the National Party did not breach the law because increasingly there is evidence to suggest that that may well have happened and they are not willing to deny that. So I am looking forward to the rest of this debate. I am looking forward to hearing those reassurances from National Party members although of course I will not be holding my breath. I will not be holding my breath because it is clear that John Key and the National Party are not willing to adhere to the standards that they have set for others. They are not willing to adhere to those standards themselves.