NZ Politics Daily: 14 June (liberation)

A storm about political lobbying has been brewing in New Zealand (and elsewhere) for a few years now, and now the Green Party are seeking to make some political gain from it – see: Patrick Gower’s TV3 report, Greens to unmask influence of lobbyists (video). In fact the Greens have been eyeing up the issue of lobbying for some time now, and unsurprisingly they are proposing strong state regulation of this activity. Such a campaign follows on very consistently and naturally from the Greens’ lead on pushing for greater state regulation of political finance and electioneering activity – a campaign that fed into the highly flawed Electoral Finance Act of 2007. Unfortunately we’re now likely to see the same forces and logic at work with the new focus on lobbying. While a debate about the role of lobbyists in the formation of public policy and democracy is a welcome and valuable activity, such a debate is unlikely to take a very nuanced and sophisticated view of the public policy process, but can instead be expected to be a populist and simplistic discussion that is firmly embedded in the current hegemony of ‘more state regulation of political activity’. After all, the Greens have largely inherited the mantle of New Zealand First in this area, campaigning against dark forces, conspiracies, big business, and often with strong xenophobic overtones. It’s interesting that the Greens even seem to have the support today of Whaleoil – see: Agreeing with the Greens on Scum Lobbyists. Hopefully, however, in such a debate we’ll be able to draw on some of lessons from the sometimes futile and sometimes ridiculous attempts to regulate in countries like Australia and Canada. As we saw with the EFA, kneejerk and populist arguments about clamping down on politics can have some disturbing practical impacts. And today, David Farrar asks some basic questions about the Greens’ proposed legislation – see: Lobbyists.

The Te Tai Tokerau by-election is now in full swing, and we’re seeing some interesting debate occurring, and some interesting opinion polls released. The latest poll purports to show that Harawira has 41% support against Labour’s Kelvin Davis’ 40% - see: Claire Trevett and Yvonne Tahana: Labour MP breathing down Hone’s neck. But Harawira has rightly challenged the poll result’s methodology, saying that the Native Affairs Baseline poll relies only on household landlines and is therefore significantly unreliable and biased in an electorate like Te Tai Tokerau. As the Horizon polling company points out, there are major groups of voters – particularly young and poor (the target group for Harawira) – who don’t have landlines:

Horizon Research shows 6.4% of New Zealanders 18+ do not have a landline telephone at home. This rises to 19.6% among 18 to 24 year-olds; 18.8% for those earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year and 12.5% for those earning less than $20,000 a year. 12.9% of business managers and executives no longer have a landline at home, along with 17.2% of students and 14.6% of labourers, agricultural or domestic workers. 13% of those flatting and boarding and 11.6% of one parent families have no landline at home.

Crucially – 3 times as many young voters are without landlines compared to the general population and for poorer households it is twice as many. The issue is well known but polling companies have great difficulty dealing with it because of the expenses of calling cellphones and the difficulty of obtaining numbers - particularly for surveys like this where they need to target a particular demographic and area.

Interestingly, iPredict (which has been very accurate to date) has Harawira with a 58% chance of winning, compared to Davis with only a 24% change of winning.

Nonetheless, as David Farrar points out in his Stuff column, Is it high noon for Hone?, a crucial issue will be whether Maori Party supporters collapse their votes into either Harawira or Davis’ vote now that it’s essentially a two-horse race: ‘Now as it becomes apparent that Tipene can not win, it is very possible that much of his support will transfer to one of the two leading candidates. My view is that is more likely to be Kelvin Davis.’

Also, note today that Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies and Māori Studies have today launched a very interesting new website, Post Treaty Settlements website: www.posttreatysettlements.org.nz There seems to be a diverse range of interesting debate there. [Continue reading below for a full list of the highlights of NZ Politics Daily]

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Te Tai Tokerau byelection