7. Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) Link to this
to the Minister of Justice
Who is responsible for enforcing breaches of the Electoral Finance Act 2007 related to the supply of credit to political parties at better than market rates provision in section 21(2)?
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Justice) Link to this
I presume the member does not really mean what he says in the question—that is, that someone should be enforcing breaches of the Electoral Finance Act. I think he meant to ask who is responsible for the enforcement of provisions of the Act, but I am not sure.
Can the member recall telling this House during the debate last year that in fact the police are responsible ultimately for enforcing the Electoral Finance Act; in the light of those statements is she concerned about a statement on Monday by the Labour Party President, Mike Williams, that interest-free loans do not constitute donations under any electoral law, and does she believe that he should be investigated by the police in case he is breaching the Electoral Finance Act?
Under the Electoral Finance Act, the Electoral Commission and the Chief Electoral Office have administrative responsibility for aspects of the Act, and the police have the prosecution function.
So what action does the Minister expect would be taken by the Electoral Commission or the police when the president of a major party says: “We don’t declare these sort of donations, but we get lots of them.”, and will she be ensuring that the credibility of the Act is reinforced by some show of enforcement of its provisions?
A show of enforcement will be made either by the Chief Electoral Officer or the Electoral Commission, or the police if that is necessary—it is not for me to say that. But what I will say to the member is that up until the end of last year the provisions relating to donations were part of the 1993 Act. That member yesterday asked in this House whether I was aware that the Electoral Finance Act made it quite clear that interest-free loans would be counted as a donation. There is no mention in the 1993 Act of such a thing.
If that is the case, can the Minister tell us why the Prime Minister has gone to so much trouble to say that the Labour Party will now comply with that piece of legislation over its interest-free loans?
The law is in effect, and in terms of any donations that were made in relation to the 2007 Act, the Labour Party would certainly be following it.
Can the Minister tell us whether the 1993 Act or the Electoral Finance Act includes provisions designed to stop parties from splitting up donations in order to avoid declarations; if so, can she tell us what she thinks of an apparent statement made by the president of the Labour Party that “We get lots of these interest-free loans.”, and that he may be splitting them up so that they do fall under the $10,000 threshold and do not have to be declared?
All those questions raised by the member are hypothetical. I do not have the answers for them, and I do not intend to make it up, which the member is doing.
Hon Phil Goff
Madam SPEAKERWhat credibility does the Minister think she has in answering these questions, when in this House last year she railed against big money in politics and said that the whole point of the bill was transparency, only to find that Labour’s own donor and own president were doing big-money secret deals behind closed doors while she was making those statements in this House?
That is very rich indeed, because Mike Williams has spoken publicly about donations, but the National Party has never answered this question: why were its members scurrying around just before the Act came into force in December, asking for anonymous donations to be made so that they did not have to comply with the new Act? Why do not we have some editorials written about that behaviour? Talk about transparency! What we would like to know is how many anonymous donations those members managed to sneak into their bank accounts before the Act came into play.