electoral law

Earlier I blogged about Labour’s mystery deceased donor. David Farrar also blogged about it and noted that Labour appeared to have broken the law by hiding the donations for over a year.

Now they claim it was all just a mistake…using the Ted Crilley defence:

The Labour Party could be in hot water over its party donation returns.

Papers published by the Electoral Commission show the party received over $430,000 from the estate of Brian Dalley last year.

The sum was donated in four instalments between April and July last year.  Read more »

In TRUTH‘s January 3 issue I wrote about the outrage of the failure of Police (full article online) to even investigate electoral law breaches.

Police are sitting on more than twenty open investigations referred to them for prosecution under the Electoral Act by the Electoral Commission.

Truth has obtained details under the Official Information Act that reveal Police seem to have no interest in prosecuting offences and breaches of the Electoral Act.

Of the 32 cases referred, 6 have lapsed because the prosecution time limit has expired.

62 dual vote referrals remain open and un-prosecuted.

Headline cases referred by the Electoral Commission that remain open with little or no progress are the Green party worker Jolyon White’s alleged vandalism of National’s signs at the 2011 election, several of Labour’s flyers including their ‘Stop Asset Sales’, ‘Prices are Rising faster than wages’ and ‘Ohariu Census’ pamphlets.

Only 3 cases have been closed, with no action or prosecution resulting.

Now Radio Live and Radio New Zealand are reporting the story like they actually went to the bother of using the OIA to obtain the figures and details.  Read more »

ᔥ NZ Herald

It looks like Local Body Electoral Law may be reformed, in particular around expenses….the easy thing would be to apply normal electroal alw to local body elections. That way Len Brown’s dodgy anonymous trsut would be captured:

“The law literally is an ass in this particular case … anyone can drive a bus through [it].” Mr Key said the Local Electoral Act may need reforming, “and that’s something we’ll consider in due course”.

Changes may be possible before next year’s local authority elections, depending on the Government’s legislative workload.

Local Government Minister David Carter said he’d had preliminary discussions with officials about aligning the Local Electoral Act with legislation that applies to candidates standing for Parliament, “particularly in regard to anonymous donations”.

Labour leader David Shearer said his party was prepared to work with National to improve transparency around donations to local government candidates. ‘It’s something we’ve talked about for a long time and I think there’s a possibility of sitting down and making sure people have confidence in our electoral laws.”

Mr Banks said he would “absolutely” support any move to tighten up the Local Electoral Act.

ᔥ NZ Herald

So the Police can act and complete a report on complaints from the Labour party but are yet to even lift a finger to investigate the more than 20 complaints laid by the Electoral Commission, many of which are complaints against the Labour party.

How does that work?

ᔥ NZ Herald

The Electoral Commission isn’t happy with progress from the Police on the matters it has referred to them. They have a good point too, if Electoral Act breaches are not properly investigated or prosecuted then there really is no point in having the laws int he first place. The fact that Labour so outrageously breaches the laws so frequently is proof that they know the Police are toothless and lazy when it comes to doing anything about it:

The Electoral Commission has taken a swipe at the police for an apparent lack of action in investigating and prosecuting electoral law offences and suggests the job be handed over to another agency.

In its report on the 2011 general election, the commission said that although police dealt with simple matters such as dual voting promptly, they did not do so for more complex issues.

“Some are more difficult and complex and the commission is concerned about the priority the police seem able to accord these referrals.”

It recommended the Government consider whether procedures should be strengthened, noting that some of the breaches of the Electoral Act were serious and carried heavy penalties.

“Effective and timely investigation and prosecution of electoral offences is critical to ensuring public confidence in the integrity of the democratic process.”

One possibility was to hand over the breaches to another enforcement agency or a Crown solicitor to decide whether to prosecute.

If we had an Independent Commission against Corruption they could easily handle this.

ᔥ Legal Beagle

Graeme Edgeler writes his thought about the MMP threshold. He wants it at about 2.5%.

If we are to have a threshold at 2.5% then I think the adoption of the Queensland rule that you need to have 10 MPs to justify a leaders budget should be highly appropriate. That way we avoid the rorts of single MP parties declaring they have a leader and score extra funding accordingly.

The way that people tend to look at this is to consider the effect on parties: for example, in 2008, the 5% threshold meant that New Zealand First wasn’t represented in Parliament. This is a fundamentally flawed way to approach thresholds. I don’t care about parties. I care about voters. The threshold wasn’t unfair to the New Zealand First Party, but it was unfair to the 95,356 people who gave it their party vote. By having a threshold, and in particular, by having a high one, we are telling a lot of people that they have no place in our democracy, and that their views matter less because they voted the wrong way. In creating a threshold, we are deciding that the voices of some voters just aren’t worth hearing. 95,000 voters are enough to given any party 5 MPs, or any party 5 MPs more. That’s a lot.

My simple point is that the threshold should be as low as is needed to achieve whatever it is we want to achieve by having a threshold, and absolutely no higher. So I’m stumping for 2.5%. Whatever anyone wants to achieve by having any threshold at all, I consider it will be achieved with a threshold at this level. Any number will have a whiff of arbitrariness about it, but I think this has a bit going for it if we are going to have a threshold.

In a 120-seat House of Representatives, a party which has the support of 2.5% of voters, has fully earned 3 MPs (with rounding, a party could get three MPs with somewhat fewer votes – as little as 2% will sometimes be enough). Although the case can be made (and I’m quite amenable to it) that two MPs is large enough to have a positive effect on Parliament, when we’re talking about 3 or more likely 4 MPs (which cuts in at around 2.8% ~ 3%), we’re really talking about a significant and useful bloc (of voters, and of MPs). At 4% or 5%, you’re saying that a some groupings of five MPs are too small to bother with, and their voters justifiably ignored, which is at least a couple of steps too far.

Now, you can legitimately argue that even a 2.5% threshold is too great an imposition on the the principle that all voters should be equal, and there’s something in that, however I’m a pragmatist, and because I think it highly likely that this debate will end up being an argument over whether the threshold should be 5% or 4% and because I think both of these numbers are far too high, I’m happy to compromise.

Graeme Edgeler is very good at covering the legal angles in politics, even if he is somewhat long-winded. He does however cover pretty well without the hysteria all the angles concerning Radio Live’s referral to teh Police for breaching electoral law:

He provides an eight point examination of the issues.

For me the most concerning part now is the huge backlog of cases that the Police have and no apparent progress.

Last week Mr. Jan Trotman, kept man of  St Marys Bay issued a press release railing against gambling:

Rt Hon Winston Peters says that gambling is a scourge of communities, preying on families and at-risk individuals throughout New Zealand.

“Deregulation to allow greater advertising of gambling will significantly impact on families, communities and the most vulnerable in society,” says Mr Peters.

“This is a good deal for Sky City but a raw deal for the community and taxpayers”

Mr Peters says that these deals negotiated by the government drops it into the pockets of the gaming industry.

“The government is gambling with the future of New Zealand and the people will be the losers,” says Mr Peters.

Would this be the same Rt Hon Winston Peters who was doing his level best to help the gambling industry in 2005:

Peters revealed to the Herald yesterday that a $30 million-plus package a year to horse racing was already in place.

The New Zealand First leader might have to work hard to prove himself with the cynics when dealing with the rest of the world, but the new Racing Minister had accomplished his aims for racing even before being sworn in yesterday afternoon.

In a stunning declaration, Peters said New Zealand First’s demands for the racing industry had been agreed to during his party’s negotiations with the Labour Party in the past two weeks.

And they encompass pretty much all of what racing has been looking for, and failed to receive, from recent successive Governments.

“There was no use taking on the racing portfolio if we couldn’t deliver on our promises,” Peters said.

“I would never have signed up for racing if I hadn’t been confident of that. My demands have already been agreed to by the Labour Party.”

In that simple statement racing has had its best news in decades.

Peters said all five points in New Zealand’s First’s racing policy on its website are in the bag.

His “demands” for the gambling industry were:

• Remedy the anomaly in gaming legislation by putting gaming on the same foot.
• Implement an improved depreciation regime for stallions (write-down over two years) and broodmares (including provision to fully depreciate a mare 12 years or older in the year of purchase).
• Provide a tax advantage for on-course betting.
• Review the Racing Act 2003 and clarify governance and management roles.
• Provide interim measures in conjunction with the Racing Board to ensure a smooth transition to the amended taxation regime.

So gambling wasn’t a scourge of communities when he was propping up racing and betting at racecourse and putting gaming on the same footing, nor was it a scourge when he was subsidising and raising stakes for races.

New Zealand’s premiere harness races will receive a stakes increase totalling $1.6 million this year, Racing Minister Winston Peters announced at the Harness Racing New Zealand annual conference today.

“Government funding of $750,000 boosted by $850,000 of club and industry money will raise the stakes of key harness racing events by a total of $1.6 million in 2008/09,” said Mr Peters.

“Big-money races provide the bedrock around which highly successful racing carnivals can be built, bringing proven, serious economic benefit not just to the racing industry but to the economy as a whole and local communities in particular.

Those would be racing carnivals where people get more races to place bets and gamble…clearly not a scourge on communities when Winston peters is promoting it. Then again perhaps he was influenced by his large donations from racing interests:

Hogan, whose personal fortune has increased from an estimated $70 million to $100m in the past year according to the NBR Rich List, had become a fully fledged campaigner for the party by the time of the 2005 election, writing pro-NZ First articles in industry publications and paying for newspaper advertisements explaining why racing folk should block-vote for the party.

“I don’t deny that at the time when we were pushing very hard to get changes to the tax take that I did spend a few dollars with advertisements in the paper,” Hogan told the Sunday Star-Times last week.

“It wasn’t done… to get around the rules. There were no political donations. I might have spent eight, 10, 12 or 14 thousand dollars contributing to advertisements. At that time, you certainly didn’t have to declare it.”

The Electoral Commission says the rules at the time stated that if the advertising was done with the agreement of the party, it should have been declared, but expense returns did not require itemisation. At the last election, NZ First had an expense limit of $1.8m and returned total expenses of $417,227.

However, if the value of the advertising exceeded $10,000, it should have been returned as a party donation. NZ First made a nil return that year.

Hogan says the advertising was his own initiative. “Certainly it was not by any request from Winston, it was me `push push push’.”

NZ First had previously benefited from generous donations by the Vela family, owners of horse breeding and sales company NZ Bloodstock and with an estimated worth of $180m. According to the Dominion Post, cheques totalling at least $150,000 from Vela accounts, including the family’s fishing and thoroughbred companies, were written out to NZ First from around 1999 to 2003.

The paper has alleged that some of the cheques were handed to Peters, and that not all of the money made its way into the party’s bank account. Peters is threatening legal action over the claims and told a press conference on Friday that all the money from the Velas was lawful.

There is a word that you can use to describe the selling of policy for large cash donations, it is corruption. When corruption and hypicrisy are added together you have a serous problem.

This is why I want an Independent Commission Against Corruption established. They should look at issues like this I have outlined above, they should look at political parties wilfully breaking electoral law, they should look at contracts and bids from local body to government and they should look at establishing a register of lobbyists.

Graeme Edgeler plays a straight bat. Sometime I disagree with him, often I don’t. When he expresses alarm at what Phil Goff has suggested, that Labour will make the Electoral Act a plaything of their party if they win the election then we should all sit up and take notice.

I want there to be a debate about the electorate seat lifeline, and I want there to be a debate about whether we should have a threshold as high as 5% (or have one at all), and Labour has just announced that it’s not going to engage on these matters at all.

It’s also pretty good evidence for what Jordan Williams of Vote for Change has been saying for quite some time: it’s the politicians who will ultimately decide what a remade MMP will look like, not any independent experts. And so far, it isn’t looking good. Of course, it’s the politicians who would ultimately decide what, for example, a new Supplementary Member system would look like as well, but that doesn’t make Labour’s decision to ignore public submissions on an MMP review in order to advance its own partisan interest any more palatable.

Phil Goff’s position is constitutionally repugnant, but at least now we know exactly what Labour thinks. Electoral law is ours not the politicians.

When Phil Goff rails against the threshold provisions remember his history and that of the Labour party to act in venal self interest. National also is guilty of venal self interest in electoral matters:

While not inconsistent with David’s view of a bi-partisan electoral law, we shouldn’t ignore National and Labour’s joint attempts to tilt the system in their favour by, for example: having government and opposition members on the Representation Commission nominated by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition; setting up broadcasting rules massively favouring themselves, including in one instance, combining to ensure a newly-formed New Zealand First couldn’t advertise on radio and TV at all; and increasing the party vote threshold to 5% from the 4% recommended by the Royal Commission.

Phil Goff was in the parliament when the threshold was altered by the politicians. Now he is flip flopping and saying it is all bad.

If anything this whole episode has served to show us the perils of letting politicians control the process of amending our electoral law. This is why I will be voting for Change in the referendum.

I note today, the Labour aligned teacher unions have had a go at Bill English, trying to suggest that he is in breach of electoral law. Of course this is still sloppy stuff from Bill English who appears to have the ball handling skills of Quade Cooper.

But hypocrisy from Labour and the teacher’s unions is staggering.

Attached are images from a school newsletter, featuring a Parliamentary-funded advertisement from Carol Beaumont, under the slogan “Please Support Our Sponsors”

School Newsletter

This was published within the regulated period.  Furthermore, I understand Carol Beaumont paid for the advertorial space, which is blatant campaigning and has no authorisation. Bill English has said that he will account for it in his election return I wonder if Carol Beaumont will do likewise.

It appears it’s only wrong in the teacher union’s eyes when National does it.

Of course the teacher’s unions are also blind to the blatant electioneering by their own members in school newsletters.

The School Trustees Association has it right:

Schools Trustees Association president Lorraine Kerr said individual school boards made decisions about advertising but she could see a problem with schools getting involved in politics.

“Schools can’t afford to align themselves to one political party because they don’t know who their community, their families, represent or not,” she said.

“Rather than get into that sort of battle they’re better to remain neutral.”

And that means free from politicking by union loving principals and teachers as well.