The money spent by New Zealand political parties is often remarked upon as being increasingly extravagant. Although it is true that financial resources are becoming increasingly central to the functioning of NZ political parties, it also needs to be noted that the amounts are still relatively low in New Zealand. For example, despite the centrality of advertising and its ever-increasing employment, political parties still spend fairly small amounts of money on advertisements relative to their commercial counterparts. Disregarding money donated to the parties’ election campaign funds, the overall picture is that the main two parties have routine incomes of about $2m, while most of the smaller parties have something less than half or a quarter of this amount. Those figures cannot be considered high. For instance, with a budget of about $2.5m, the Labour Party probably spends about the same as a small primary school. In comparison, the three main German parties have incomes of about NZ$240m, NZ$210m and NZ$40m even without counting state funding (Linton, 1994: p.22). [Read more below]
Despite the centrality of advertising and its ever-increasing employment, by advertising industry standards the political parties do not spend a great deal of money on election advertising. Certainly political parties still spend fairly low amounts of money on advertisements relative to their commercial counterparts. Prebble has argued that most parties’ 1996 campaigns were extraordinarily cheap by international standards, pointing out that ‘McDonalds spend more money on TV ads in a month than the biggest parties spent in their total expenses on everything’ (quoted in Scherer, 28 Jan 1997). Likewise, United leader Clive Matthewson has been quoted as saying that ‘Kellogg’s, Nestle and Unilever spent far more on television in a week than his party’s $93,000 allocation over four weeks’ (National Business Review, 23 Aug 1996). It needs to be pointed out that an estimated total of $1.4 billion was spent on advertising in 1998 (Barclay, 2 May 1999: p.A6). Of this, according to AC Nielsen, Lever Rexona New Zealand Ltd spends $32.7m on television advertising, Telecom $28.9m, New Zealand Lotteries Commission $21.3m and McDonald’s $17m (Barclay, 2 May 1999: p.A6).
The amounts that New Zealand political parties spend are therefore, in the context of total advertising spending, fairly insignificant. Even in the last week of the high-spending 1999 general election, the biggest spending political party, National, was ranked as only the 17th biggest spender of the week, spending $177,969. The Chief Electoral Office spent considerably more, buying $420,700 worth of advertising (National Business Review, Dec 1999). Combined spending on campaign advertising for the 2002 election was still relatively small at $7,674,990, or about $3.78 per party vote cast. This compares well against Australian political party spending of about NZ$5 per vote in federal elections (Forrest and Marks, 1999: p.100).
Bibliography
Barclay, Chris (1999) ‘Blockbuster TV Ads Setting New Pace’, Sunday Star-Times, A6, 2 May 1999.
Forrest, James and Marks, Gary N (1999) ‘The Mass Media, Election Campaigning and Voter Response’, Party Politics, 5(1): 99-114.
Linton, Martin (1994) Money and Votes, London: IPPR.
National Business Review (1999) ‘Television Ad Spend’, NBR, 27, December 1999.
Scherer, Karyn (1997) ‘Records Mislead – Act’, Evening Post, 28 January 1997.
