Electoral Amendment Bill

Mr SPEAKER Link to this

I call John Boscawen, and in calling him I point out that there was confusion when he rose to take the call previously. I am going to allocate him 10 minutes, if he wishes to take it, for his contribution.

JOHN BOSCAWEN (ACT) Link to this

I will repeat just part of what I said on Thursday night. Just under 15 months ago, on Saturday, 1 December 2007, I organised a protest march against the Electoral Finance Bill in Queen Street, Auckland. I am told that the police estimated that around 5,000 people protested on that day, and if that is correct then it was the largest political protest in New Zealand for some years. It was one of just six protest marches against the bill that were organised in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Tauranga.

When I organised the protest march I had no inclination whatsoever that less than a year later I would be elected to this Parliament as a member and that I would be standing now to speak against the Electoral Finance Act and voting for its repeal.

I acknowledge the 5,000 people who protested that day, and the many thousands of others who protested in one form or another, whether it was by protesting in other centres, writing letters to members of Parliament, or sending emails, or in whatever way.

For each of the protest marches I organised—with the exception of the one at Parliament in Wellington—I was particularly careful to make them apolitical. Although a number of sitting MPs and would-be MPs attended those protests, I was very careful not to allow any existing members of Parliament to speak. I wanted the protests to be apolitical. Free speech is an apolitical issue.

I was approached by a member from the office of the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Hon John Key, and asked whether if Mr Key was to attend the protest I would allow him to speak. Although I appreciated Mr Key’s support, I indicated to his office that I was not prepared to allow him to speak if he attended the march but that I would read a statement from him. I intend to start this first reading debate by repeating the statement Mr Key gave me on that day and that I read to the 5,000 people assembled in Queen Street.

Mr Key said: “Within 2 weeks Helen Clark’s Labour Government will force the Electoral Finance Bill on to the people of New Zealand. They plan to steamroll this bill into law by a slim majority of Parliament before Christmas. National simply does not have the votes to stop it. Labour has turned its back on the convention that significant changes to our election laws should have bipartisan political support and public backing. The electoral bill has neither. It stifles free speech for 1 year in 3 and it is cynically designed to protect incumbency. Labour is not listening; National is. Today I give you this assurance: if I have the privilege to be the next Prime Minister I will overturn this law. I will set about building a proper political consensus for fair changes to our election laws. I will listen to what people like you and many thousands of others are saying. You are fighting for a principle. You are fighting for the most important principle: you are fighting for democracy. I salute you. John Key.”

I congratulate the Hon John Key and I congratulate members of the National Party, because this is yet another commitment that John Key made prior to the election that he is fulfilling. The ACT Party will be voting for the Electoral Amendment Bill.

Just a couple of weeks after that protest march on 1 December I stood up in the gallery, as members of the public are now, and I looked down on the third reading debate of the Electoral Finance Bill. Many speeches that day impressed me. I recall particularly the speeches of the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister; the deputy leader of the National Party, now the Deputy Prime Minister, the Hon Bill English; and Rodney Hide. But one speech impressed me more than others—it is etched in my memory—which was from Hone Harawira. He started his speech by saying: “Yes, folks, money talks, but nothing talks quite like the truth.” The truth has finally spoken.

When the Hon Phil Goff was elected leader of the Labour Party last November the first thing he did—in fact, on the day he was elected—was to move to distance himself from the previous administration, distance himself from the Electoral Finance Act, and acknowledge the mistake that both he and his party made. I congratulate him and I congratulate the Labour Party, because the Electoral Finance Act was all about incumbency. It was about protecting people who are already in power. It is not surprising that Labour is now supporting the repeal of the Electoral Finance Act. It is not surprising at all, because it was designed to keep Labour in power. It was designed to keep an existing Government in power, and it is a credit to National that it is not going to use the same rules to allow it to be more easily elected in 3 years’ time.

In a democracy, free speech is one of our most basic rights and privileges. The right to speak out and to criticise a Government or, for that matter, to speak in favour of a Government is one of our most basic, fundamental human rights. Generations of New Zealanders have gone to war to protect our rights and those freedoms. I ask members to take a look around this Chamber at the various battles and wars that are depicted around us—for example Passchendaele and Gallipoli. You see, free speech is not an issue for party politics; it is an issue of concern for all New Zealanders.

Notwithstanding widespread public opposition, the Labour Government, with the support of the Greens, passed the Electoral Finance Act and placed restrictions on ordinary New Zealanders to speak out and criticise the Government. Those restrictions went far beyond what the Human Rights Commission considered reasonable. The Labour Government did that for the worst possible reason. Fearing that the Labour Government might lose the last election, it placed restrictions on the rights of people to criticise it, in a, thankfully, failed attempt to be re-elected. Even worse, at the same time as it was placing restrictions on the rights of ordinary New Zealanders to speak out against it, it altered the law to allow itself to spend even more of taxpayers’ money on promoting its own policies. I refer in particular to Labour’s so-called pledge card. The Labour Government passed a law to make legal in 2008 that which was illegal in 2005, and it repeatedly ignored the submissions of the Human Rights Commission.

The problems with the Electoral Finance Act go right back to the very beginning. Incredibly, the former Labour Government sought to regulate every form of political speech. Anyone who wanted to make any sort of political comment whatsoever was required, as a minimum, before saying anything, to sign a declaration before a justice of the peace or, alternatively, to register as a third party before the Electoral Commission. Members listening to this speech, and members of the public, will find that very hard to believe, but it is actually true.

Notwithstanding the sacrifices that have been made by New Zealanders in two World Wars, the Government proposed that people had to sign a declaration before a justice of the peace. It is like Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake.” How arrogant is that!

The Government said to New Zealanders: “If you’re not happy with that, you have to object.” And thank goodness over 500 New Zealanders and New Zealand organisations did just that. I was one of them, and thankfully so was the Human Rights Commission, which gave a damning indictment on the original electoral finance legislation and the Labour Government. The commission concluded by saying: “The bill, in its current form, represents a dramatic assault on two fundamental human rights New Zealanders cherish: freedom of expression and the right of informed citizens to participate in the election process.” It concluded by saying that the bill was inherently flawed and should be withdrawn. Anticipating—correctly, as it happened—that the commission would be ignored, it went on to say that if the Government was not going to listen to it, and not going to withdraw the bill and start again, as the commission recommended, then the Government had to make four essential changes. The commission repeated that advice on 18 October, when its officials appeared before the select committee in person.

My time is coming to an end, but I am expecting to speak on the second and third readings of this bill. In those speeches I intend to outline how the previous Government continued, and repeatedly continued, to ignore the recommendations and advice of the Human Rights Commission, and totally misrepresented the position of that commission to the public of New Zealand. But, in the end, that did the Labour Government no good. The people of New Zealand saw through what it was trying to do, and voted it out of power. Thank you very much.

RAHUI KATENE (Māori Party—Te Tai Tonga) Link to this

I stand to speak on behalf of the Māori Party, fuelled by the burning passion that comes from the rapid journey from selection to election as a member of Parliament. In the 84 working days between my selection as the Māori Party candidate for Te Tai Tonga and election day, I became intimately aware of the intricacies and anomalies of the Electoral Finance Act 2007. As part of the latest intake to Parliament—the class of 2008—the machinations of electoral finance law became a vital component of my learning about the art of political campaigning. Suddenly, my every waking moment was spent in appointing a financial agent. The Electoral Commission became the source of authority for every question that came up in my campaign, and, as a practising lawyer, I agreed with its concerns that parts of this Act were almost impossible to interpret. Yet, ironically, the original 2007 Act was intended to promote public and political confidence in the administration of elections, and to encourage participation in parliamentary democracy.

It is hard to encourage confidence in an Act that even the Electoral Commission struggled with. These issues of accountability, transparency, and integrity are of paramount importance to iwi Māori. The pursuit of tikanga such as accountability, transparency, and integrity give expression to kaupapa such as rangatiratanga, or chieftainship, and kaitiakitanga—the sustainable protection of taonga. We have supported donation disclosure in the electoral finance regime, therefore, as a transparent act, and we are pleased that the existing provisions of the Act relating to the donations of political parties and constituency candidates will be retained in this new interim regime.

It is all about walking the talk. It is about fully participating in a democracy, and making a commitment to honourable behaviour. In every aspect of our lives, we consider that maintaining integrity and transparency is second nature. It is about being upfront, being honest, and giving substance to the kōrero. Pēnā ki te tangihanga, ka tae ā-tinana tātou te Māori ki te marae kia kitea te tūturu o te whanaungatanga ki te tūpāpāku. Like that which we do in tangihanga, we as Māori will always attend the marae in person to show our respect, our support, and our connection to the deceased. We do so to make real our expression of sympathy, and to give physical form to the emotions we seek to convey.

It is because we hold these values in such high regard that the Māori Party welcomed the provisions within the Electoral Finance Act 2007 that were established to provide greater accountability on the part of candidates, parties, and others engaged in electoral activities, in order to minimise the perception of corruption. We have all lived through the tales of political parties that seek out dubious trusts or lawyers’ accounts to obscure the actual identity of donors. We welcome, therefore, the decision to retain the rules around donations, including anonymous donations and overseas donations. Although we support the retention of the provisions that relate to donations and penalties, we believe that the current rules could be simpler and more transparent. It is in this regard that the Māori Party is pleased to support this bill, and the interim regime, as merely the first stage of the reform of electoral finance law.

That the law needs reforming is without a scrap of doubt. The opportunity to reframe a replacement law, from all reports, appears to have been unanimously supported across the House. That is a very solid foundation from which to move forward. The Māori Party is a firm believer in the concept of kotahitanga, wherein all people are encouraged to make a contribution, to have their opinions heard, and to then reach a consensus together.

The politics around electioneering, and the performance of political parties in an election campaign, are issues with which New Zealanders have a particular fascination every 3 years. As a relatively new party in this Parliament, the Māori Party has always been extremely interested in inspiring participation in the operations of our democracy. We believe that the exercise of democratic participation is of such crucial importance to a healthy nation that discussing improvements in the performance of the system is a worthwhile activity for all citizens. We think that it is vital that people own electoral participation in a democracy. They must be intimately involved in guiding Parliament as to how this can operate. This is an aspect that the Public Service Association has been particularly vocal about, with its national secretary calling for an electoral process that is robust, fair, and transparent. No Parliament should ever be so arrogant as to make changes to the nature of democracy without consulting the people first.

So we are pleased that an extensive timetable is proposed for the second stage of the reform, including the release of a discussion document on electoral finance, a minimum period of at least 6 months for the bill to be at the select committee, and a commitment that consultation with all parliamentary parties will take place at every stage of the reform process. Such commitment to obtaining buy-in is a very clear way to invest in the type of broad-based support that is required. We are adamant that electoral finance laws must not be designed and determined by politicians and parties in isolation from the people.

We know that the levels of political participation and engagement are consistently lower in Māori electorates than in general electorates. In the last election the actual turnout in the Māori electorates, at 62 percent, was disappointingly low compared with the figure of 80 percent in the general seats. What is more, the Māori electorate with the highest turnout, Waiariki, with a turnout of 64.54 percent, was still considerably lower than the general electorate with the lowest turnout—Manukau East, with 71.55 percent. In the last election the Māori roll turnout was the lowest in any election since 1981, apart from 2002 when it was just 57 percent.

Why is the issue of turnout so important? It is because political engagement is vital in the successful running of a diverse and representative democracy. In 2008, 2.38 million New Zealanders elected 122 people to represent their views and interests. Quite frankly, if there were significant numbers of other New Zealanders—specifically, Māori—turning out to vote, then we could not pretend to be a representative Parliament, or, as some might like to think, a microcosm of society itself.

These are complex issues, and it is because of this issue being so important that the Māori Party negotiated and achieved a commitment in its confidence and supply agreement with National to establish a group to consider constitutional issues, including Māori representation. This group will be established by no later than early 2010, and it is a key mechanism by which we think some of the issues around Māori involvement in democratic participation will be addressed. But if we could sound one clear word of warning in respect of the second stage of electoral reform, it would be that the Government should think very carefully about how to excite Māori participation in any discussion around the adequacy of electoral administration policy.

We support the retention of donation disclosure and the regulations around the penalties. We are pleased that the administration of electoral legislation remains with the party secretary or the candidate, rather than appointing an additional layer by electing a financial agent. But, most of all, we are so pleased that the inordinate number of rules and regulations is to be managed. We are pleased that the ridiculous attention to the meticulous is to be removed, and we are hopeful that this will open up the doors to a far wider involvement of all New Zealanders in the electoral system. High on the list of the positives has to be the fact that the bill returns us to the point where all election expenditure is to be regulated in the 3-month period through to polling day.

Finally, we signal our readiness to be fully involved in subsequent processes to engage in further electoral finance reform, in order to ensure that a far more efficient and responsive electoral system is in place in 2011. We will support this bill.

Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future) Link to this

The introduction of the Electoral Amendment Bill brings to a close a rather sad chapter in our recent political history with regard to electoral law, but it does not remove the issues that originally gave rise to the first bill. Like other parties, United Future will support the introduction and passage of this bill, and we will participate willingly in the process of consultation that the Minister has referred to, as a way of resolving the issues and ensuring that we have robust, viable, and widely supported electoral law in place for the next general election.

I make this point at the outset: we voted for the bill until its final reading, when we bowed to the weight of public opinion, as representatives of public opinion, and voted against the bill. It remains one of my biggest regrets in my time in the House that we did not withdraw our support for the Electoral Finance Bill at an earlier stage, and that we took so long as a party to heed the public message.

When the 2005 election was over and all of the revelations about the activities of nefarious groups and others were laid bare, it became vital that our electoral law be amended in order to do a couple of things: to introduce greater transparency into the funding of political campaigns, and to introduce greater transparency and accountability into those organisations that chose to participate in the electoral process. There had always been a sort of gentleman’s agreement previously about the way in which these matters had been carried out, and it was only the excesses of the anonymous campaigns associated with the 2005 election that brought the issues starkly to a head.

On the face of it, it is absurd that there are constraints on the behaviour of political parties during election campaigns—financial constraints and other constraints—about what they can and cannot do and within which period they can and cannot do it. However, prior to the passing of the Electoral Finance Act there were no such constraints on other organisations seeking to influence the outcome of an election by exercising their right to free speech.

I think the essential failure of the Electoral Finance Act, aside from the complexity of the definitions it introduced, was that it went too far in drawing that line. I do not think anyone argues that there should be a position whereby political parties are constrained in what they can say and do, while any organisation acting on their behalf, either deliberately or just coincidentally, suffers no constraint. The question is what that level of responsibility should be.

In the case of the Electoral Finance Act, I think three major issues of difference emerged. The first concerned the regulated period and the fact that the clock began to tick on 1 January in an election year, whether or not that election was held in the first half of the year or the latter half of the year. Also, the constraints that applied to both political parties and other groups were so tight as to make their effective participation extremely difficult and, in some cases, virtually unobtainable or unachievable.

The second problem was the range of definitions that the Act introduced as to what constituted a political advertisement or a political message. Members have spoken already of the many calls made to the Electoral Commission and the Chief Electoral Officer, the resort to legal advice, the hours spent poring over the documents trying to figure out what was on and was not on, and the risk we faced all along that someone was going to get caught and made an example of, which meant we would all then be subject to the discipline of that process. That made the organisation and management of the election last year far more complex than it needed to be.

So we ended up with two things, actually. First, a lot of the messages from political parties were couched in such vague and general terms as to almost be non-messages, not because they did not have policy to advance but because they did not want to fall foul of the provisions of the Electoral Finance Act. So people being asked to make an electoral choice were often trying to figure out what it was precisely that the parties were saying to them and how those messages were being conveyed.

The second consequence was an even more ironic one. A member earlier referred, quite properly, to the concern about the fact that there should be no great advantage to incumbency—that political parties should not be able to organise the electoral process in such a way that it would suit the parties currently represented in this Parliament. Ironically, that is exactly what the Electoral Finance Act did. One thing members of Parliament are very good at, across this House, is working out where they can draw the line between what is a parliamentary activity and what is a party political activity. That line has been redrawn several times over the last 18 months. So the ambition of the Act to try to level the playing field actually failed. We all became much better at knowing how to manipulate the system and stay within the law.

At the same time as that was going on, we had an Electoral Commission that was under-resourced, that was unwilling to step into the breach and give clear and definitive advice, and that gave parties the option all the time of basically saying: “Try it and see. If you can get away with it, well and good. If there is a complaint lodged against your activity, then perhaps you have to review it.” Wherever one sits on the political spectrum, that is a hopeless way to run an election. It creates uncertainty, and it creates a whole level of bureaucracy that is simply ridiculous.

The previous speaker, Rahui Katene, referred to financial agents. I still fail to see why members of Parliament need to nominate a financial agent. It is our heads that are on the block and our signatures that are on the form. If we fail to declare our expenditure properly, accurately, and legally, then we are the ones to be held accountable. Under the Electoral Finance Act, an electoral agent, financial agent, or party secretary is held accountable for our failings. I still think that is wrong. I thought it was wrong when the original bill went through Parliament, and I think it is equally cumbersome and wrong today. I hope that in the review we try to streamline the procedures for administration, so that those of us who put ourselves forward for election accept the full responsibility of doing so when it comes to accounting for our behaviour during the electoral period.

The most precious thing in any democracy—and we often hear references to this country as the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world—is the ability for people to participate freely in the electoral process without coercion or limitation, and for the free and open expression of a range of political and other opinions.

Whether it was intended or not—and I am inclined to think it was more an error than an intent—the consequence of the Electoral Finance Act, none the less, was that very severe restrictions were placed on the ability of people to go about their normal way of life during an election period. There were fears that Internet conversations would be caught, and no one seemed able to give a definitive ruling on that. There were the ludicrous sorts of efforts we saw to my right of parading clothing like some mannequin on display all the time to tempt the provisions of the Act. There were cars written with party slogans, and right down the bottom in language one could not see—but it was there in order to comply with the Act—was the financial authorisation. Even bumper stickers, which people hardly see anyway, had to carry a financial authorisation. New Zealand became obsessed with the minutiae and the detail, rather than what the election campaign was all about.

I am glad that this bill is progressing. I am very pleased that we will take time to consider it properly in terms of a replacement, and I think that the important thing that the Minister needs to bring to that is a sense of open-mindedness, of willingness to engage, and of seeing that the electoral system is the property not just of the politicians but, fundamentally, of the people of this country. They make the call on election day. As we say in the prayer at the start of this Parliament, we are their servants; we are not their masters. It is about time the law reflected that.

As I said at the beginning, this bill is the end of a very sorry chapter in our history. The issues need to be addressed, and I hope that this repeal provides the opportunity for a thorough and proper reconsideration, and for good legislation to emerge in the future.

CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) Link to this

I would like to make a contribution to this debate, and I begin by congratulating the Minister of Justice on his portfolio. It is a distinguished warrant to hold in the history of this country. When members on this side look into our party’s history, we think of the names Palmer, Finlay, and Mason. We are very proud of those figures and the contributions they made to the job of Minister of Justice when they performed it. I know that the current Minister looks more to the tenure of Hanan for his inspiration, and I think it is good for the lawyers in the House to know a little bit about the history of those who went before them in their roles. I wish Mr Power well in his role, and I assure him that Labour will take a constructively critical approach to his tenure in the portfolio.

In terms of the speeches that have gone before on this legislation, I also commend the Minister on the tone of his contribution. It is good to hear that an open-minded and multi-partisan approach is to be taken on the fresh look at electoral law that is intended to apply at the election that must be held no later than the end of 2011. I certainly join other members who have expressed the hope that those undertakings, so refreshingly given by the Minister, will pan out over the legislative process, because it is obviously important that we get this question right.

I must say that I was sad to hear some of the other contributions that have been made in the debate, particularly that of the Attorney-General, Mr Finlayson. I was hopeful that we might manage to avoid extreme partisanship in this debate because of the tone that was struck by the Minister of Justice. Indeed, from listening to Mr Finlayson’s speech, if one were an uninformed listener it would be very easy to form the impression that the party currently occupying the Treasury benches was somehow the traditional guardian of the rule of law in this country. That would forget the very many abuses of important freedoms under National Party leaders from Holland right through to Muldoon. If one thinks about a number of those examples, one can see that the picture that Mr Finlayson tried to paint is unfortunately a false one. There was the administrative disaster that was the 1978 election, when over Labour’s protests the electoral roll was allowed to become badly out of date, with chaotic consequences. There was the National Party’s implacable opposition to the enactment of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in 1990. There was the unfortunate decision prior to the 1993 election to make enrolment harder. This was opposed by Labour, and it obviously had a disproportionate effect on lower-income voters who might have been expected to vote for this party.

It would be very wrong to accept the picture painted by Mr Finlayson. Perhaps his partisanship is unsurprising given some of the hysterical contributions to the debate he has made concerning this legislation. I was looking at Hansard, and I saw his references to the Labour Party as “excrescence” and “lower than vermin” in the general debate on 28 August last year.

AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) Link to this

I rise to speak in support of the Electoral Amendment Bill, and, having lived through the best part of 2008 with the Electoral Finance Act as a millstone around my neck—as so many of the members in this House will have found—I am very pleased to now have the opportunity to stand in this House and say it has to go. Its legacy, in my opinion, will be a year of chaos, confusion, and lost opportunities. Long before I had thought of standing as a political candidate at the election I was, like many other New Zealanders, a vocal opponent of the Electoral Finance Act. I took that stance because I was concerned it would act as a serious impediment to full and open debate in 1 year out of every 3 years. And can members guess what? It did. Even the Electoral Commission has talked about the chilling effect the Act had on political participation.

When the New Zealand Law Society told the previous Government of its concerns about the Act and the restrictions it would put on people’s ability to participate in political debate, the Labour Government should have listened to the society, instead of continuing to ram through its own agenda. One of the bizarre effects of the Act meant that from the moment I was selected in May 2008 that Act applied to me retrospectively, and, suddenly, everything that I had spent over the previous 5 months from 1 January might have somehow been considered to be within the inexplicable scope of what now became election advertising. If we consider the way the Act extended the definition of electoral advertising, I do find it somewhat surprising that the Green Party supported it, given that the Act had the strange effect of making it financially impossible for electorates such as my own to reuse existing hoarding frames, and making us use new timber instead for that purpose. If the electoral advertising rules were unclear and hard to work with, the third-party rules were just as obscure, taking up unnecessary volumes of court time and money.

A fair and workable system of electoral rules is fundamental in any democracy; the Act is neither. It is anti-democratic, and it shuts down legitimate public debate in 1 year out of every 3 years. Furthermore, it meant that the general public at the 2008 election got less information from and about political candidates than they otherwise might have got and probably deserved to get, because of the necessity for each candidate to take an overly cautious financial approach due to the inherent interpretation problems with regard to the Act.

I end by saying I am hardly surprised to hear the Opposition now agrees that the Act should be repealed, given that in the end it failed to deliver the result the Opposition anticipated it would. What we need instead is a fair, considered, multiparty approach to our election rules. I am very pleased to see that is now what we will get.

Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) Link to this

Let me be first to agree that the Electoral Finance Act as it is currently on the statute book does cause confusion. It does cause uncertainty, and like the previous speaker, Amy Adams, I found it confusing and uncertain as we rushed to seek the detail of how it might be interpreted. However, my contribution today—having made that point—is to speak about the value of electoral law, in the first instance, and about the importance of process in electoral amendments as the years go by. I have spent 9 years on the Electoral Law Committee. I was on the committee that gave us, for better or for worse, MMP, and I was involved in many other aspects of electoral law during the 1990s. There are some features of the New Zealand electoral system that, like other laws in this land, reflect the political culture of New Zealand, and by their very nature are highly restrictive. The electoral activities of this land are a highly restrictive set of activities, and they always have been—how many times we are allowed to vote, how old we have to be, what we are allowed to say, and whether we are allowed to bribe people or “treat” them, as we say rather quaintly. These are things that have been in the electoral law for some time.

Other things have been a feature of our law as well. One of them is that no one should be allowed to attempt to buy a democratic outcome. Using the word “buy” I mean bringing to bear a bunch of money legally gained, but privately gained, and putting it towards the result of some plebiscite or other. Many countries do not try to avoid that. The American public seem to be inured to the idea that millions and millions are spent on their campaigns, despite their various regulatory efforts. In the New Zealand context it has been occasioned through two basic mechanisms. One of them has been to say: “Here is the limit on what you can spend. Here is the limit on what you can spend locally; here is the limit on what might be spent nationally; here is the limit on what can be spent in a by-election.”, and so on.

The other mechanism is to put some constraints on the transparency of donations so that one can receive a donation above a certain amount, but only if one declares whom it comes from. The reason for doing that is very, very straightforward—that the public seeks some reassurance that there is not some purchasing. Again, I use the word “buy” or “purchase” to reflect the idea that money, as opposed to thought, analysis, political wisdom, or whatever, is being used to channel the viewpoint of a certain political party. That has always been something that has been a stranger to our electoral system. We have spent quite a lot of time ensuring that that is the case. It is always difficult, because of what is called financial intermediaries whereby people put money through trusts, and the Electoral Finance Act on the statute book at the moment has sought to deal with that. We will not cast aspersions again about who was doing it the most, or the least, or whatever, but in recent times it has been there in response to the fact that some political parties have put money through trusts.

We have also ensured that people are not providing undue influence by—and this has been around since the 1990s—using some such body as a sponsor. There was a time when certain members of this House used to win their local campaigns under a first past the post system by getting famously well-known or popular groups to sponsor them. That then became, if you will, deemed to be an interference in the electoral process. Throughout all that time the Electoral Law Committee has sought to resolve these matters across the party lines.

I need to just say this gently, but I am going to say it rather firmly none the less: there is a body of opinion in the minds of some of us in this House that when the Electoral Finance Act was put together, consultation was not up to scratch. I hold a different view. Consultation was attempted endlessly, at least in the initial stages when the Electoral Finance Act was put together, and some parties in this House chose not to involve themselves. I guess they made their own choice to say that they did not want those new constraints and, therefore, they would not involve themselves in the consultation. They then claimed—wrongly—that the consultation was not available to them from the outset. That was simply not the case, and I want to put that on the record.

The other thing I want to put on the record is this: the Electoral Finance Act was occasioned by two distinct and separate changes in behaviour in 2005 by one political party, which was the National Party. Again, I am not using it as a whipping boy and I am not using it with any anger; I am stating the simple logic of the origin of the Electoral Finance Act. The two changes were these. The first was that the electoral season, all of a sudden, became very long. Until the Electoral Finance Act was put in place, there was an agreed and legislated-for 90-day period during which time any expenditure limits would be counted. The Electoral Finance Act extended that, from 90 days prior to an election, to 1 January in the year an election was due. So that might mean that it would last for 10 or 11 months, and indeed, in the 2008 calendar year, it did last for over 10 months.

The reason for that was that until that time, political parties had more or less not bothered to campaign until the 90-day period had got under way. They might have been organising like hell and they might have been raising money right, left, and centre, but nobody bothered to campaign until the 90-day period started. We could campaign, and we all did, to a small extent, but there was no other significant campaigning before the 2005 election campaign.

Then, in 2005, campaigning began in April. And it began not in a small way; it began in a very large, expensive, and public way. It was a series of billboards now know generically as the “Iwi/Kiwi” billboards. There were other campaign activities under way at that time as well, but there were none so pronounced as that particular campaign. That meant that one particular party, because it had an ability to make the expenditure—and bless it for that—decided to break the unspoken rule, if you will, that there was not really much point in trying to campaign for more than 3 months, because maybe the public were not interested. National challenged that. It said that it would campaign in April, in May, and in June, that it would campaign hard, and that it would campaign with a lot of expense, because it thought that it could get a gap in the polls that would be sufficient to carry it through.

The other thing that also rather famously happened in the 2005 election, which I have banged on about at length—I will not bang on about it with any anger today, but will simply restate the facts about it—is that one agency, being the Exclusive Brethren, decided to put $2.1 million into the campaign. Was that the correct figure? I think it was $2.1 million; if I have got it wrong, then I apologise. But it was a very substantial amount of money, certainly a very large amount when compared with the cap that large parties such as the National Party or the Labour Party can expend on their party vote campaigns. For us, the expenditure limit is in the order of $2.4 million, yet this similar-sized sum was put up by one third party. It did not argue for a National victory; it argued against a victory by the Labour Party and the Greens. So, in effect, the publicity had the same level of influence. And it was done clandestinely. The question was raised many times about whether the National Party knew about it, a book was written about it, and on the story goes. That was a change in behaviour. It is true that we had the Engineers Union and Federated Farmers doing a little bit of that in earlier times, but it was nothing on this scale.

If we are to go forward as a nation we need to be mindful of that recent history. I commend the current Minister of Justice, Simon Power, for his approach. I think his approach is simply and straightforwardly commendable, and I thank him for that. I hope that the Labour Party will be able to provide good, real, and useful engagement. I look forward to this bill reaching the select committee; whether I am part of the committee remains to be seen. But I think we need to be mindful of our recent history, and we need to be careful that we protect the integrity of our election system for the future, because without it we really have nothing resembling a constitution.