liberation

Pansy Wong’s dubious solicitation of political funding

Although Pansy Wong has survived the investigation into her use of travel perks, the NBR is today reporting another political finance potential scandal based on her fundraising for the National Party. It has been revealed that Wong has raised large amounts of money for the National Party in 2007, including $200,000 from one fundraising event where apparently one Chinese businessman paid $50,000 for one of John Key’s ties. All of this money presumably was passed onto the head office of the National Party. Yet the funds are not easily identified in the donations declared by the party to the Electoral Commission for 2008. Why not? Matt Nippert’s article in today’s NBR quotes me discussing the issue. This blog post elaborates on the issues. [Read more below]

 

Review of New Zealand politics in 2009

 

The year 2009 was a hectic one in New Zealand politics, partly because it was the first year of the new National Party Government’s term in office. At a general election in November of the previous year, National had ousted the Labour Party from its three-term tenure in office and formed a single-party minority government with support agreements with the Act Party, the Maori Party and United Future – all of whom gained ministerial roles outside the cabinet. In this first year, the new administration was both ideologically centrist and highly popular, being challenged only on difficult issues relating to the economic recession, political finance controversies over MPs’ expenses and various race relations questions. The following blog post examines these issues via a ‘Review of New Zealand politics in 2009’ which has just been published as a peer-reviewed journal article in the top political science periodical, the European Journal of Political Research (in the December 2010 edition). As well as looking at how the National Government fared in 2009, it also briefly analyses the main issues in politics (such as the economy, social issues, political finance scandals) and the changes in the other parliamentary political parties. [Read more below]

10 pertinent questions (and answers) about axing the MP international travel perk

With salary packages of between $180,000 and $500,000, New Zealand Members of Parliament currently earn more than 99% of their constituents. This gross economic inequality between voters and their representatives is due to a combination of factors, but mostly it reflects the belief of MPs that they are ‘professional politicians’ rather than ‘public servants’ and that they therefore should be compensated with a market-based remuneration in line with those in other professional careers.

A large part of their salary package comes from their many opaque allowances and expenses, which have been surreptitiously added to their incomes over recent decades. The holiday travel subsidy that MPs legislated for themselves – in which they have received up to 90% off international flights, and for which National MP Pansy Wong has just resigned her Cabinet post over – has been one of the most contentious, illogical and flagrant ways in which MPs have attempted to inflate their personal affluence. Yet with the mounting public awareness of the rorts and misuse of taxpayer-funded parliamentary resources, together with recent increasing awareness and concern about economic inequality in New Zealand, there has never been a better time for the public to demand the rollback of MP salaries and perks. And the abolition of the international holiday travel subsidy has been a good place to start, although the devil is very much in the detail of how the perk is axed and how these supposedly minor details are sorted out.

This blog post outlines why the perk had to be axed, but more importantly it highlights the many crucial issues that are involved in the process of reforming the MP perks system. It does so by putting forward “10 pertinent questions” that the public and politicians need to consider, and also attempts to provide some detailed answers to them. In brief, this extensive blog post argues for the holiday perk to be totally axed without compensation, exemptions, or bureaucratic reviews. Former MPs need to be stripped of their entitlement, no new travel scheme should be re-established to replace the rort being axed, and we should avoid falling for the populist proposal that so-called ‘independent bodies’ (such as the Remuneration Authority) should determine MP pay, allowances and perks. [Read more below]

 

Political corruption in New Zealand

Transparency International has once again ranked New Zealand at number one in the world for its lack of corruption. Its corruption perception rating is 9.3 out of 10 (down slightly from 9.4 in 2009), suggesting that the public sector and politics is free of the type of financial dishonesty, bribery, fraud and sleaze that is more commonly found in other western liberal democracies such as Italy, Spain and France. Certainly New Zealand politics has not traditionally been characterised by political corruption scandals. Yet over the last decade there have been a quickly growing number of high profile controversies relating to political money – especially in terms of politician behaviour and electioneering. Thus, an apparent paradox exists whereby New Zealand has experienced an explosion of political finance scandals over recent years, yet the Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) suggests New Zealand is relatively immune from corruption. What is the truth? Do the scandals that have recently dominated domestic politics fall outside the definition of political corruption? Is there more sound and fury than substance in these scandals? Or is the TI CPI missing out on the measurement of the increasing appearance of corruption? I’m currently doing some research on these issues, and this blog post is a chance to briefly raise some of the issues involved. [Read more below]

 

National to entrench backdoor state funding of parties

The illegitimate use of taxpayer funds by parliamentary political parties is set to be legalized and entrenched by the National Government’s proposed – but not widely debated – Parliamentary Services Amendment Bill 2010. This is quite a big deal. After all, the misuse of parliamentary funds by political parties has become the most controversial political finance problem in New Zealand. From the explosive Auditor General’s report on the 2005 general election spending on pledge cards etc, through to the controversy over ministerial credit card expenditure, the use of taxpayer funds by politicians has become one of the key issues in New Zealand politics. Although in the past the National party has been highly critical of the misuse of parliamentary funding by its opponents, it’s now keen to make this misuse worse. On surface appearances the proposed legislation appears to do the opposite – it appears to be clamping down on the use of parliamentary resources for partisan political purposes, but a closer reading of it shows that the key part of the legislation is that it only prohibits such expenditure for the three months prior to an election, leaving the parliamentary parties free to misuse taxpayer funds for approximately 2 years and 9 months of every parliamentary term. The implications of this indirect form of state funding are quite considerable – having the parliamentary parties generously funded by the state is not good for the party system and it’s not good for democracy. By making political parties reliant on parliamentary resources, the corollary is that they are less dependent on civil society; they don’t need to have deep and real connections with different organisations and movement in society; they don’t need to have large or active memberships. The parties increasingly become professionalized and removed from voters. What’s more the lesson from elsewhere is that this leads to – or increases – ideological convergence whereby political are increasingly all the same, and thus voters don’t have a meaningful choice at election time. This is why I put a submission into the Electoral Legislation Select Committee to oppose the bill. My oral submission (via telephone) yesterday was reported by NZPA – see: Bill could allow illegitimate use of taxpayer money: academic. My submission is reproduced below. [Read more below]

Excuses for ministerial misspending: [5] ‘Journalists are just as bad’

‘Blame the messenger’ – that’s the approach of some politicians caught up in the recent ministerial credit card scandal. The defence of those politicians that have been caught misusing their credit cards has too often revolved around some sort of suggestion that political journalists are probably ‘just as bad’ in misusing their employers resources. This blog post outlines some of the criticisms made of political journalists recently over the scandal, and suggests that although journalists should indeed be subject to scrutiny about how well they perform in their role, such attacks on them are merely unacceptable and desperate attempts to evade political responsibility. [Read more below]

Is the New Zealand prime minister paid too much?

Is the New Zealand prime minister paid too much? I think so, and so do voters. But another way to ascertain whether they get too much is to compare their salary with that paid in other democracies. A recent Economist magazine has attempted to compare the remuneration of various countries’ political leaders by taking the politician salary relative to that country’s GDP per capita. Such a exercise thus takes into account the different ‘relative buying powers’ of the various salaries. The calculation shows that New Zealand pays a very generous salary to the prime minister – the sixth highest out of the 22 countries studied. Apparently John Key earns more (relatively) than other leaders like Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard and David Cameron. At $393,000 a year, Key’s basic salary is almost ten times the GDP per person of $46,683. Is this too much? [Read more below]

Excuses for ministerial misspending: [4] “But the corporate sector is worse”

Politicians and commentators have used the rather lame defence of the recently-revealed ministerial credit card rorting by saying that ‘others do it too’ – normally citing the corporate world, where it is argued that the use of company resources for personal expenditure is the norm. But this is problematic because, first, it’s not clear that this is actually the norm in the private sector, and second, the role and ethics of parliamentarians cannot be compared to employees in a regular job. While it might be perfectly reasonable for an worker to ‘game the system’ to maximize their personal financial remuneration, MPs are not workers. [Read more below]

Credit card scandal – why they spend our money

Last weekend's Sunday Star Times ran a story by Kim Knight entitled ‘Credit card scandal – why they spend our money’ which quoted me explaining the apparent increased propensity of New Zealand politicians to be misspending taxpayer money on themselves – i.e to be ‘troughing’, or rorting the system. The blog post below highlights what I was reported as saying and elaborates on my argument that parliamentarians are increasingly ‘career politicians’ largely divorced from any social constituency, and that this affects their orientation towards the remuneration possibilities offered by Parliament and Cabinet. Quite simply, professional politicians are more inclined to be interested in the personal financial rewards and perquisites that come from what they regard as a ‘career’ rather than a ‘duty’. Hence, with a focus on the material comforts and rewards of their ‘job’, it’s hardly surprising that all possible sources of payment are exploited by these ‘professionals’. [Read more below]

Excuses for ministerial misspending: [3] “It wasn’t my fault”

In attempting to explain away their ministerial credit card misspending, one of the most cowardly lines run by politicians has been to blame someone else and say ‘it wasn’t my fault’. Those being blamed by National and Labour ministers and ex-ministers include their own ministerial staff, Ministerial Services, and even the various hotels and vendors that ‘mistakenly’ put charges on the taxpayer credit cards. MP Chris Carter has become the epitome of the ‘it wasn’t my fault’ line. The MP’s current troubles partly stem from the perception that he has been quick to both minimise the seriousness of his misspending and to attempt to shift the blame on to other people. First, he has blamed his staff, saying, ‘My ministerial office was a very busy place. ... Small mistakes were perhaps inevitable, but never excusable’. Essentially Carter thinks that it’s not himself that should be sorry – it’s the staff that stuffed up and should apologise, and he’s not willing to excuse them himself. [Read more below]

Excuses for ministerial misspending: [2] “It was an innocent mistake”

In the current political finance scandal over ministerial credit card misspending, very frequently the offending politicians have claimed that their misspending was all ‘an innocent mistake’. This is especially the case when ministers explain their use of ministerial credit cards to pay for what were very obviously personal items. For example, Judith Tizard has explained that her use of her ministerial credit card for purchasing personal items was because she'd got the card mixed up with her personal one. This was also the case with Phil Heatley, earlier in the year. And Chris Carter claimed his spending was mistaken rather than dishonest. But is this really a legitimate excuse? [Read more below]

Excuses for ministerial misspending: [1] “It was within the rules”

The negative reaction against those ministers and ex-ministers who have been revealed as having misspent taxpayer money with their ministerial credit cards appears to be almost unanimous. This is a good thing – increasingly, the public is learning of the culture of entitlement and extravagance that exists within the Beehive, and hence the vast gulf between the politicians and the rest of us is becoming more obvious. Clearly, the media is doing a relatively good job of holding our representatives to account by exposing the dodgy political financial affairs of our ministers to the disinfectant of sunlight. Yet there are still some voices complaining about the scrutiny being applied to New Zealand’s elite. And although the objection to the scrutiny is mostly coming from the politicians themselves, it’s also coming from a number of outside commentators, party officials, academics, and Establishment types. In order to defend the ‘political class’, these voices are putting themselves up as apologists for the behaviour of our politicians. The following blog posts examine the numerous arguments of those apologists and politicians, and attempts to refute their justifications and excuses for the ministerial misspending. [Read more below]

The Bourgeois Bollinger Labour Party

The main problems that the political left has had with the New Zealand Labour Party in recent years are epitomized by ex-Labour Minister Judith Tizard. She personifies virtually all that was wrong with the Labour Party under Helen Clark’s leadership: arrogant, Establishment-oriented, economically neoliberal, and obsessed with identity politics. The fact that she and many Labour MPs appeared to morph so easily into being the New Establishment is now reflected in many of the revelations coming out of the ministerial credit card documents that have been released. There are just so many examples of the culture of entitlement and extravagance that pervades the ‘political class’, but the one that stands out as the best indictment of the bourgeois nature of the Labour Party is Tizard’s taxpayer-funded purchase of a $155 bottle of Bollinger bubbly. But she wasn’t the only one. As the 7000-document release is slowly processed by the media and public we’re finding out just how bourgeois the previous Labour administration was. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Rob Eddy on United Future's 2008 campaign

 Sometimes the most interesting political parties provide the most boring and bland post-election self-analyses in post-election books – witness the latest Green and Maori party chapters – while the most boring parties can offer relatively interesting and insightful chapters. This is certainly the case with the chapter by Rob Eddy on United Future’s campaign in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. Eddy writes candidly of the challenges and failures of this middle-of-the-road party, and concludes with a surprisingly honest and downbeat prediction about there being no future for United Future. [Read more below]

MP conflicts of interest – their housing investments

John Key’s ‘blind’ trust is currently under intense scrutiny, and rightly so. The financial arrangements of politicians and political parties deserve being examined and analysed by civil society. And while the current ‘Highwater-gate’ scandal is still hard to fully comprehend (see the Standard for the best critiques, and see Tracey Watkins for the best defence of Key), it means that more and more questions are being raised about how the political establishment run both their and our financial affairs. Today, for instance, the National Business Review runs an insightful piece by Rob Hosking on conflicts of interest, using the example of the Clark Labour Government’s encouragement of a property boom, which furthered the financial interest of Labour MPs while putting housing out of reach of the less well off. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – John Pagani on the Progressives' 2008 campaign

Jim Anderton’s Progressive party has found that the more active candidates that it fields in elections, the lower its party vote is. That’s one of the lessons given by Anderton’s former spin doctor, John Pagani, in his chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. Pagani provides a fairly analytical and detailed account of the Progressive campaign, as well as a very strong criticism of the Electoral Commission’s role in policing the Electoral Finance Act. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Damian Edwards on NZ First's 2008 campaign

New Zealand First’s electoral death was one of the major outcomes of the 2008 general election, yet we haven’t seen much analysis of why the party failed (although my attempt can be found here). The party itself is rather secretive and normally rather uncooperative with any such investigation by the media or academics. Partly making up for this lacunae is the very useful chapter by Damian Edwards (an ex-Ministerial Advisor to Winston Peters) on the party’s campaign in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. We find out that the main causes of NZ First’s loss were the media and the Labour Party. And NZ First’s “save your grandma” campaign wasn’t successful enough to get the party over the 5% threshold. [Read more below]

Very few party donations declared for 2009

The Electoral Commission has just published details on its website of the political party declarations of donations received (over $10,000) for 2009. The most obvious observation to be made is the lack of donations declared – only $203,667 in total (which is common for post-election years like 2009). Many parties, including National, submitted ‘nil returns’, while those that did declare donations had very few, and very small donations. The Green Party declared the highest amount of money donated ($147,462 mostly from its MPs), followed by Act ($20,000 from ‘Virtual Bucket’ Ltd?), Progressives ($15,000 from Juken Nissho Ltd, ‘a Japanese owned forestry company operating in New Zealand’) the Maori Party ($11,142 from Pita Sharples), and the Labour Party ($10,063 from Phil Goff). These extremely low amounts reflect the fact that in New Zealand private donations to political parties make up only a small proportion of the overall funding that parties receive. Indirect state funding via parliamentary budgets make up the vast majority of funding. In fact, even in terms of these ‘private donations’ declared to the Electoral Commission, most of the money declared seems to come from MPs themselves, which is quite significant. Most parliamentary parties require their MPs to commit a small proportion of their extremely generous parliamentary salary to the party organisation – normally termed a ‘tithe’, akin to the money that churches require from their members. Essentially, parties like the Greens which demand a tithe of about 10% are able to convert yet another parliamentary-derived resource into state funding for their party organization. And this is why it’s particularly silly for so-called ‘political finance reformers’ to focus so much on regulating private money in politics. As I’ve argued before – see, for example, State funding of political parties is bad for democracy and Myth 14: State funding promotes democracy and strong parties – the current state funding has a much more negative influence on politics, making political parties much more ideological moderate, reliant on their leaders, less interested in recruiting members, and less likely to foster organic relationships with civil society. It means we end up with a ‘political class’ in Parliament that is addicted to state subsidies, building careers, and less interested in changing society in any significant way or offering voters any real choice between them. 

Key to Victory – The impact of the EFA

Throughout the Helen Clark Labour Government’s third term in office, issues of political finance were particularly controversial, culminating with the Electoral Finance Act 2007 (EFA) being widely debated as either a cure or poison for fair elections. But just how much impact did the now-defunct EFA have on the actual 2008 general election campaign? This blog post below is a highly abridged version of the chapter that I wrote entitled ‘The impact of the Electoral Finance Act’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Colin James on the 2008 election

Why was Labour turfed out of office in 2008? Colin James puts down the Government’s electoral decline to Labour’s ‘failure of political management’ in areas such as the Electoral Finance Act and the so-called anti-smacking bill, as well as generally being punished for pushing a heavy socially liberal agenda. Labour also lost the electoral fight to show that it was the toughest on law and order. James says that the victorious National Party got there due to John Key’s ‘bland leading the bland’ strategy, which now results in a managerial ‘government by MBA’. James writes about these issue and others in a chapter entitled ‘2008: The last baby-boomer election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the salient points made in this chapter. [Read more below]

The public funding of boozy political party conferences

The most interesting and bizarre part of the Auditor-General’s report on Phil Heatley’s crooked expenditure of public money has been the declaration that the public should pay for politicians to attend and drink at political party conferences. This is a significant line in the sand being crossed – that the costs of parliamentarians attending extra-parliamentary party events should be funded by the public. This shows just how dodgy the parliamentary rules are. And more than this, the rules have been shown that they are so lax that they can be legitimately interpreted to say that the public should pay the bill when politicians buy fellow party members bottles of alcohol. The only problem that the Auditor-General seemed to have with public money spent on such activity is that Heatley paid for it with the wrong account. [Read more below]

Politicians should be paid to be representatives not careerists

Are New Zealand politicians overpaid? According to a new Massey University survey, Cabinet ministers are indeed grossly over-remunerated. Voters apparently think that ministers should be paid about $135,000 a year instead of receiving the $245,000+ salary they currently get. This blog post examines the detail of the survey, looks at some of the reasons that politicians are held in such low regard, and argues that MPs and ministers should only be paid the average wage. In effect serving in Parliament should be considered a representative honour and duty, not just a career, and therefore parliamentarians shouldn’t be treated as being above – and separate from – society via an extravagant pay packet and lifestyle. [Read more below]

The Heatley scandal and the parliamentary culture of entitlement

Political finance scandals continue to plague New Zealand parliamentary politics in an entirely corrosive yet illuminating way. The latest scandal – the fall of Housing Minister Phil Heatley – once again helps the public understand the nature of the political Establishment in this country. It shows that the ‘class’ of people that run our society are infected with a ‘culture of entitlement’. Each new scandal and revelation shows that, as Matt McCarten has put it, there is ‘an ethical sickness’ in our Parliament. This blog post elaborates on this ethical sickness, by showing how politicians like Heatley epitomize a ‘born to rule’ and hypocritical elite that now pervades Parliament. [Read more below].

Labour’s latest taxpayer-funded electioneering

The Labour Party obviously hasn’t learned much from the severe public ignomany suffered when it was revealed that the party had been paying for its electioneering Pledge Card with public funds while in government. Their latest rort – running a heavily branded bus campaign around the country – is no less electioneering, yet Labour has once again used taxpayer funds to pay for this political advertising. This blog post looks at whether such electioneering can really be called ‘legitimate’, even if the exercise is made to fit into the dodgy Parliamentary Service rules. Regardless of the expenditure’s legal status, few voters will appreciate having to pay for such overt political advertising. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – The YouTube campaign in 2008

The National and Green parties won the battle of YouTube in the New Zealand general election of 2008 according to a chapter entitled ‘2008: The YouTube campaign’ by Rob Salmond in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. The chapter looks ‘at the different ways in which political parties used YouTube to communicate with New Zealanders’, and argues that successful strategies involved putting positive-themed political advertisements on television and using YouTube for the negative, attack-advertising. Unsurprisingly, twice as many YouTube clips were negative, and on average these were watched by 2.5 times more than positive videos. [Read more below]

Greens revealed as the biggest spender in Mt Albert by-election

The Green Party candidate in the recent Mt Albert by-election ran the most expensive campaign, spending an incredible $39,071, or about $15 per vote. Figures just released by the Electoral Commission show that Russel Norman outspent all other candidates in order to come a distant third in the race, with only 2,567 votes. Once again, this shows the Greens to be one of the rich parties, and that it continues to believe its own mistaken mantra that ‘money buys elections’. [Read more below]

Latest political party state funding budgets released

The Parliamentary Service recently published its Annual Report for the year ended 30 June 2009, disclosing (in a rather opaque form) its many services and budgets that it provided to the parliamentary political parties during the last financial year. For example, in one parliamentary budget used by the parties – the so-called ‘Party and Member Support’ budget – the parties spent $14.9m during the 12 months to the end of June, of which National spent $6m, Labour $5.7m, the Greens $1m, and so on. On top of this, the parties collectively spent another $13m on ‘Information Services’ and nearly $11m on travel. Much of these budgets are being spent on highly partisan activities – such as Labour’s recent fake polling – and is therefore essentially a form of indirect state funding. This money is used for hiring specialist staff, publishing, postage of advertising, and so on. In total the Parliamentary Service appears to have spent around $125m during the last financial year. [Read more below]

Bill English, the Auditor General’s report, and corruption management

Bill English has clearly been absolved of the allegations against him in terms of whether he has broken the rules. But there are two wider issues that are raised by a reading of the Auditor General’s report – whether English has acted ethically, and how Ministerial Services came to have such defective rules. I’d argue that that a system of ‘corruption management’ has essentially led to this situation, whereby all political parties – rather than just Bill English – are using the financial resources of the state to maximize their personal and political advantage. [Read more below]

Fixing political finance with a civil society approach

I’d like to think that Jane Clifton of the Listener has been reading my writings on political finance and state regulation of it, as her latest Listener Politics column puts forward very nicely my basic argument that state regulation of money in politics never actually works very well, and that we are better off with a civil society approach to ‘regulating’ the income and expenditure of political parties and interest groups. Of course, I doubt that Clifton has read anything I’ve written, and is instead actually just conveying what is actually a very common sense approach that should be obvious to just about anyone – even if very few politicians seem to comprehend it. [Read more below]

The professionalisation of party campaigning

The 2008 general election campaign was both highly professionalized and bland. More than ever before, the New Zealand parties relied on professional campaign tactics and strategy, with the result that the campaign became highly meaningless for many voters, and because there was little to excite or enthuse the public, voter turnout was one of the lowest in over a hundred years. This is the overarching theme of my chapter entitled ‘Party Strategy and the 2008 Election’ which is part of the recently published book Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig). The blog post below reproduces the theory-based section of my draft chapter – which I subsequently cut out of the final version. This section explores the professionalisation of politics in New Zealand and how this is manifested in the electoral tactics and strategies of political parties. It argues that the modern professionalised nature of the political parties strongly influenced the dynamics of the 2008 campaign, the techniques utilized to sell the parties, and the ideological choices available to voters. [Read more below]

The impact of the Electoral Finance Act on third parties in the 2008 New Zealand election campaign

Throughout the New Zealand Labour Government’s recent three terms in office (1999-2008), issues of political finance were particularly controversial, culminating with the Electoral Finance Act 2007 (EFA) being widely debated as either a cure or poison for fair elections. But just how much impact did the now-defunct EFA have on the actual 2008 general election campaign? In particularly, how did the new regime impact on the electoral participation of civil society via its various interest groups (now commonly referred to in political finance discussions as ‘third parties’)? Did the predictions made in 2007 that the EFA would put ‘democracy under threat’ come to pass?  Certainly during the campaign, many commentators noted that third party organisations were having less input into the campaign debate. Opponents of the EFA  complained that the new rules were stymieing freedom of expression and political debate. Some talked of a ‘litigious bomb waiting to go off’ (Otago Daily Times 2008), while other commentators declared that ‘The EFA’s dampening effect on the current election campaign is so serious, it is anti-democratic’ (Clark and Nicholls 2008). Furthermore, just nine weeks out from election day, the head of the Electoral Commission declared that the uncertainty resulting from the legislation was having a ‘chilling effect on the extent and type of participation in political and campaign activity’ (Electoral Commission 2008a). The commission also made a number of controversial decisions during the campaign that suggested the EFA was indeed affecting the campaign. There were minor controversies about the legality of everything from Tui beer billboard advertising to Act Party leader Rodney Hide’s yellow jacket, with a host of other legal rulings and court cases highlighting the legal uncertainty and complexity of the EFA. Yet it was possibly in the area of civil society’s organised interest groups such as trade unions, sector groups, and business associations that the impact was most strongly felt. Below is a draft paper I've written on this issue, which I'm presenting at an academic conference at the end of September. This paper weighs up the evidence, pinpoints where the EFA had the most impact on civil society, and details some of the Electoral Commission’s more controversial and salient decisions. As usual I welcome your feedback and corrections via email or as comments at the end. [Read more below]

Political advertising in the 2008 NZ election

Which political parties had the best advertising in the last year’s general election? How come the Greens’ had such good advertising but did relatively poorly? What was wrong with Labour’s advertising? What was right about National’s advertising strategy? Did New Zealand First lose representation because of, or despite of, its election advertising and strategy? Did the Electoral Finance Act properly define and understand what a political advertisement is? Claire Robinson answers these questions in her chapter entitled ‘”Vote for me”’: Political Advertising’, published in Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig of the University of Otago Politics department). This blog post is the fifth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book (which I also have a chapter in). [Read more below]

Matt McCarten: “there is an ethical sickness in our Parliament”

Matt McCarten has written the best commentary so far on Philip Field’s conviction for corruption and bribery by linking it very plausibly to the ongoing parliamentary expenses scandal. Field’s corruption springs from the same ‘avaricious political culture of Parliamentary entitlement’ that has infected virtually all contemporary MPs and political parties. McCarten’s whole column is worth reading in full, but it’s the last part that most crucially highlights the fact that the biggest rort is actually due to the parliamentary parties themselves corruptly appropriating taxpayer funds for partisan political activity:

In my opinion there is an ethical sickness in our Parliament when even senior MPs no longer see themselves as the people's servants in public duty, but as political elites who are entitled to the maximum remuneration and perks they can give themselves.  But the rort isn't just restricted to individual benefits. All the parties now collectively fleece the taxpayer to fund their political election machines.  For example, three of the four main candidates in the recent Mt Albert byelection were already MPs and receiving their salaries and expenses right through the campaign.  In addition, the campaign staff were either MPs as well or Parliamentary staff with most of their costs paid.  Even the Prime Minister authorised a Cabinet minister on full pay to manage his candidate's campaign for eight weeks. The salary bill for just that was a good part of $40,000.  This week, a lone MP was convicted in court for corruption. But our whole political system is fraudulent. Party organisations as we used to know them no longer exist in a meaningful way.  List MPs are effectively party organisers and parties are covertly funded by taxpayers through the back door. Every party is guilty of it. This week the senior leaders of every Parliamentary party should have been in the defendant's dock with Field.

David Lange's expose of Philip Field's dodgy political finance

The conviction of ex-MP Philip Field for corruption, reminded me that David Lange had once regarded Field as unscrupulous in terms of political finance back in the 1990s. In a remarkably unusual attack on a fellow party member, Lange wrote the following lengthy expose of Field in one of his newspaper columns, suggesting that he was guilty of illegal electoral practices:

Mr Field returned expenditure of $14,996, accounting for his spending on posters, pamphlets, hoardings and signwriting. He did not declare the costs of advertising two campaign fundraising socials and a campaign rally, or the costs of the food, drink and entertainment which were offered at these events. He made no allowance for the running costs of his campaign van, or for its purchase price or its depreciation.  On the other side of the ledger, he returned a donation of $5000 from the Otara Labour Party Trust, but did not disclose another sum of $15,000 given to him by the same trust.  These matters were referred to the Electoral Office, which referred them to Mr Field. After considering his reply, the Electoral Office decided that it would not refer Mr Field’s return to the police, because it was not satisfied that any offence against the Electoral Act had been committed.  The act broadly has it that campaign spending need be returned if it relates exclusively to the campaign for the return of the candidate (spending which relates to the return of two or more candidates is to be apportioned). Mr Field told the Electoral Office that the advertising left out of his return did not relate exclusively to his campaign.  "The fund-raising social," he declared, "was held to raise funds which were used for a variety of purposes including for the Labour Party as a whole. Proceeds also went towards funding the Mangere Labour Party organisation, including its local committee activities, meetings and levies payable to the party’s head office."  According to the Electoral Office, the undeclared advertising for the campaign rally promoted not only Mr Field’s candidacy but also the launch of Labour’s Pacific Island policy, noting that in respect of the campaign social, the member had stated that this "was also not a function exclusively related to the campaign for my return as the candidate for Mangere".  The costs of the vehicle, Mr Field advised, were not declared because it was purchased while he was not only candidate for Mangere but MP for Otara, and needed the van for his electoral work as well as his election campaign (David Lange, ‘Law Made in an Age When MPs Did Not Behave like Tax Laywers’, Press, p.11, 29 July 1997).

In this, Lange alerted us to the potentially corrupt nature of Field, but also to the difficulties in policing New Zealand’s political finance regulations. The Electoral Commission has very few powers to investigate discrepancies or to check that the parties are following the rules. The system essentially relies on the honesty of the parties and politicians. Lange showed that the Electoral Commission must take the parties at their word on any regulation inconsistencies and problems.

(I see that Poneke has also drawn attention to Lange's disputes with Field).

A critique of the disclosure of MP expenses

The rort of parliamentary expenses for MPs and parties continues, and the latest move to open up the books should be understood as a defensive attempt to quell the growing public concern about political corruption while also confusing the issue and robbing the public of their right to know how politicians spend public money on themselves. The following critique – drawing on a previous critique of the Greens’ disclosure of expenses – argues that there should be maximum transparency for the use of parliamentary funding. Millions of dollars of MP and party expenses are still unaccounted for, which this blog post draws attention to. [Read more below]

Labour's latest taxpayer-funded advertising

The Labour Party continues to exploit its taxpayer funded parliamentary resources for the purpose of blatant party political advertising. With leader Phil Goff doing so poorly in opinion polls, the party is dipping its hand into the public purse to try and improve his profile. The image on the right is the front section of a leaflet that is being dropped into letterboxes all over the country. It promotes "Brand Goff", which is incidentally rather bland - there's not a lot in the leaflet that couldn't also appear in a National "Brand Key" leaflet. His advertising slogan is: "Hard work. Inspiration. And a fierce belief in New Zealand." I'm sure that just about any politician could sign up to such a slogan. But added to the selling of Brand Goff is of course, "Brand Labour", along with its well proportioned party logo on the front. It's hard to believe that anyone could look at such an expensive leaflet and not think that it's basic party electioneering instead of carrying out any sort of parliamentary function. Of course, the leaflet does include a section professing to ask for public feedback, but this too is just a ruse to make it seem more parliamentary while also harvesting elector data for future political direct marketing. [See the full Labour Party leaflet below]

Ministry of Justice political finance submissions due

The Ministry of Justice is inviting public submissions on its ‘Electoral Finance Reform Issues Paper’, and the deadline is tomorrow (Friday 26 June). The Ministry has a poor record of involvement in political finance issues, and this latest exercise continues in that fashion. The Issues Paper is rather substandard in quality, displays a poor understanding of the issues, and is not a particularly adequate basis for beginning an attempted programme of reform. I’ll outline some of the problems with the Issues Paper in a future blog post. I’ll also upload my submission on the paper once I’ve written it – I’ve only just had a chance to read the paper. You can download a PDF of the Issues Paper here, from the Ministry’s Electoral Finance Reform sub-site. Not surprisingly, however, the Ministry don't make it entirely clear that they want submissions to be made in a special purpose submission form and it hasn't exactly been easy to find the actual form - a Word version of the submission form is here.

A critique of the Greens’ political finance disclosure

The Green Party has long posed as the ‘party of political honesty’ and of political finance transparency. Green politicians love to repeat the metaphor that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ for political finance corruption. Yet although they have often demanded somewhat draconian transparency when it comes to the private finances of other parties, when it comes to their own sources of public finance – particularly their reliance on backdoor parliamentary state funding – the Greens prefer opaqueness and obfuscation. It should not be surprising therefore that the Green Party response to increasing public concern about the use by politicians of taxpayer resources and expenses has been worse than useless. Rather than helping ‘open the books’ as the party promised, the Greens have disingenuously attempted to limit public knowledge of MP expenses and parliamentary budgets. Not only has the party only provided very limited information about its use of parliamentary funding, but the model that the Greens have put forward for disclosure actually attempts to quell the growing public concern about political corruption while also confusing the issue and robbing the public of their right to know how politicians spend public money on themselves. The following critique of the Green Party’s recent political finance disclosure argues that there should be maximum transparency for the use of parliamentary funding and that the reason the Greens are doing their best to limit the books being opened is because that party has the most to lose from parliamentary transparency. [Read more below]

MP expenses and corruption in Mt Albert?

In light of the huge scandal in the UK over MP allowances, it’s worth looking at how politicians in New Zealand are misusing their parliamentary entitlements. While much of the British scandal has focused on the pecuniary gain of MPs, in this country it’s more likely that MPs and their political parties misuse their parliamentary allowances more for political gain – essentially converting parliamentary funds into a form of ‘backdoor state funding of political parties’. All the parties in Parliament have access to millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded resources and budgets that they use for party political electioneering. Of course this is especially the case when there’s an actual election going on – as there is currently with the Mt Albert by-election. Hence all the political parties in Parliament will be siphoning off taxpayer resources to Auckland at the moment. Therefore it has to be asked, are all the non-Auckland MPs that are currently flooding into the Mt Albert electorate, doing so via taxpayer funding? Is the Green candidate, and Wellington-based MP, Russel Norman really paying his own way to Auckland and finding his own accommodation during his campaigning? [Read more below]

Labour continues to be the party of big money

The Labour Party received nearly $500,000 in donations of more than $10,000 in 2008 – significantly more than National, which declared a total of about $207,000. This is according to the figures just made public by the Electoral Comission (available here), and dealt with by an article in the Herald today (see: Artists feature in Labour's $500,000 list of election donations). It seems therefore that despite the common myth of the Labour Party being financially poor and the National Party being the party of big wealth, Labour is still just as much a big money party as National. After all Labour has been the biggest spending party for the last few general elections. And if you add up all the declared donations made to the Electoral Commission since it was made mandatory in 2006, you’ll find that Labour and National have received virtually the same amounts. My quick calculations (which I’ll check and update at some stage) show that over the 1996 to 2008 period, Labour has declared donations of about $5,321,000 and National has declared about 5,484,000.

Review of New Zealand politics in 2008

Every year the European Journal of Political Research publishes a political date yearbook which gives a review of politics in a number of western countries. I contribute the section on New Zealand to the journal – last year’s publication on New Zealand politics in 2007 can be read here. Below is the first draft of my review of New Zealand politics in 2008. It still requires a bit of abridging and editing, and as always I’m interested in feedback and suggestions, which you can leave in the comments section or email me (edwards.bryceATgmail.com). [Read more below]

“What happens when Granny turns activist? An examination into the New Zealand Herald campaign against the Electoral Finance Bill”

“Democracy Under Attack” was the heading for the New Zealand Herald’s extraordinary campaign against the Electoral Finance Bill (EFB) before it became law in late 2007. The phrase has almost become iconic, and reflects a significant time in New Zealand politics, when political finance reform was the subject of a bitter, highly partisan and societal debate. That the Herald entered the fray so strongly to campaign against the EFB became – for some – almost as controversial as the bill itself. It’s very useful therefore that there’s been some in depth academic analysis of this issue carried out – which can be downloaded in PDF format here. This very interesting investigation was carried out last year by Hollie Hyndman, who was a University of Otago Politics honours student – and she has kindly allowed it to be uploaded to this blog. The dissertation is an excellent exploration of the dynamics of the Herald’s campaign against the EFB. It doesn’t really seek to give a definitive answer as to whether the Herald’s campaign was warranted and desirable, nor is it passing judgment on the EFB/EFA, but it does contain an incredibly useful debate about all the issues. Hollie gives a very considered account of the Herald’s campaign, applies theory about the role of the media in liberal democracies like New Zealand’s, and interviews Nicky Hager, Therese Arseneau, and Audrey Young about the topic. But importantly, as Hollie says in the abstract, ‘More broadly, the [news]paper’s stance against the EFB is used as a case study for exploring political communication in New Zealand. It provides invaluable insight into media power, the relationship between media and citizens, and the changing role of traditional media in the 21st century’. I’ve included Hollie’s dissertation on this blog because it deserves a wider audience, and because it plays an important role in chronicling and contributing to an understanding of the whole history of the Electoral Finance Act in New Zealand.

Candidate expenditure in 2008

Electorate candidates in 2008 spent a combined total of $2.26m trying to get elected. They also declared receiving donations totaling $1.26m. Winning candidates spent on average $12,836 to get elected. But expenditure varied greatly: Russell Fairbrother spent $19,704 failing to win Napier, while Maurice Williamson won Pakuranga by apparently only spending $1,591. There appears to be quite a discrepancy between what some of these candidates have declared in donations and what they have official spent - for example, Pita Sharples received $35,000 in donations but only spent $8,473, and Allan Peachy received $46,250 but only spent $15,102. This blog post analyses these figures and tries to highlight some of interesting details from them. [Read more below]

Greens spent $1.7m in 2008 election campaign

The Green Party spent a record $1,706,633 fighting the 2008 election, which amounts to $10.83 per vote! Put another way, it cost the Greens $189,626 for each of their nine seats in Parliament. The official party election expenses are out today, and they show that the party that was once a humble grassroots, resource-poor party is now heavily professionalized and is the third highest spending party – once again outspending the Act Party. Its expenditure of $1,706,633 in 2008 was made up of $1,457,744 in private expenditure and $248,889 in state broadcast funding. Compared to previous elections, the Greens’ spending has skyrocketed:

• 1990: virtually nothing
• 1999: $279,168
• 2002: $765,035
• 2005: $792,842
• 2008: $1,706,633

It seems that regardless of the amount the party spends on its campaign – virtually nothing in 1990, or close to two million in 2008 – the party always gets around 6% of the vote. What is interesting is that in 1999 the Greens were receiving a respectable cost per vote of $2.62, but because they have dramatically increased their wealth without increasing their support, in 2008 their cost per vote was $10.83 (which is based on the fact the party received 157,613 party votes). Therefore the Green Party’s 2008 billboard and television advertising campaign – which was one of the most vacuous and professional we’ve seen in New Zealand politics – actually didn’t do the party much good. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how much a political party spends on advertising and how many votes they obtain.

Note: Somewhat disingenuously the Green Party has included a tiny portion ($187,000) of their Parliamentary Service funding in their declaration. While this is explicit admission of their continued use of parliamentary funding for party political electioneering and therefore probably needs to be repaid to Parliamentary Service, it fudges the fact that most of the Green Party’s parliamentary funding is probably spent on party political activity. Just one part of Green annual parliamentary funding, ‘Party & Members Support’ budget is about $864,000.

For more on all these issues, see:
Does political advertising work?
The finances of the Green Party
Have the Greens sold their soul?

Apology to Assoc Prof Andrew Geddis

Recently I wrote a blog post that sought to analyse the now-defunct electoral finance review process that was launched in 2008 after having been initiated by the Labour and Green parties. As well as causing a very healthy and robust discussion throughout the last week while I was on holiday, my analysis was also taken to task by Associate Professor Andrew Geddis of the Law faculty of the University of Otago, primarily because I failed to extend to him the courtesy of discussing my analysis with him before putting in on my blog. In the following blog post I therefore offer a total apology to Andrew and attempt to clear up some of the issues from the original blog post. [Read more below]

Axing the electoral & political finance review

Alongside axing the awful Electoral Finance Act (EFA), the new National Government has also axed the supposedly more credible electoral and political finance review, which included a so-called Expert Panel and Citizens’ Forum. This blog post examines what was behind the review, and why the exercise was always going to be more about window dressing than democracy. Although expert panels and citizens’ forums are not without merit, when compared to similar exercises carried out elsewhere, the planned Labour-Green model for New Zealand was designed to be incredibly weak and undemocratic. What’s more the process by which it was brought about was just as poor as the one that produced the EFA. The National Party campaigned on axing both of these, and is now well within its right to do that. [Read more below]

NZ 2008 election review: Jack Vowles

Prof Jack Vowles used to be New Zealand’s preeminent political sociologist, but has recently left the University of Auckland for the UK’s University of Exeter. He’s still analyzing New Zealand politics, however, and has written a review of ‘The 2008 General Election in New Zealand’ (to be published in an upcoming edition of Electoral Studies). You can download a PDF of the paper from his website. Vowles’ paper is a good solid descriptive account of last year’s election, but it also contains the following more analytical points. [Read more below].

A future for New Zealand First?

The question of whether the New Zealand First party has a future is dealt with in a feature story by David Fisher in the latest Herald on Sunday. Entitled ‘Is he still the fairest?’, the story is not online (although the much shorter news version of it is). I was interviewed for the article, so I thought I’d briefly elaborate on my thoughts about the party’s future in a blog post and give further details of the Herald on Sunday feature. I argue that despite losing its parliamentary representation (due to the undemocratic 5% MMP threshold), NZ First actually had a reasonably impressive election campaign, but has no future.  [Read more below].

Does political advertising work?

Does political advertising work? Governments and political parties spend millions of dollars on paid advertising, but the results are often of dubious effect. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how much a political party spends on advertising and how many votes they obtain (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here). The 2008 mega-professional and expensive Green Party campaign was yet another example of this in action. The party’s taxpayer-funded Buy Kiwi Made advertising campaign has also been a significant failure. [Read more below]

[political finance] The finances of the Green Party

Recently disclosed donations to the Greens totaling $180,000 illustrate that the party now has some significant financial backers. In fact although the Green Party had rather humble early years, it is increasingly well-funded and has even received some surprisingly large donations – including some in the past from controversial British millionaire and conservative environmentalist Edward Goldsmith. Not only is the party becoming more respectable, trimming many of its remaining leftish policies, it’s also becoming more professionalised and generally more representative of its wealthier voters. Yet, more than anything, the party is still totally reliant on its backdoor parliamentary funding to stay afloat. [Read more below]