Let me save you $1000 on buying influence
Cabinet minister Stuart Nash is the great-grandson of prime minister Sir Walter Nash. This is valuable knowledge.
The Napier MP is a strong advocate for putting more money into the pockets of hard-working New Zealanders. He is a family man, and he understands how important it is that we provide a reason for our young, smart and globally-engaged people to make New Zealand home.
You could pay good money for this information. (Or you could cut and paste it from his Labour Party webpage).
So let me save you the $1000 that some – seriously! – are willing to pay for insight into the minister and his thinking.
As Police Minister, he recently inducted ‘‘an elite group of men and women into an elite organisation’’ and vowed to give them tools and support to protect themselves and all New Zealanders.
As Minister for Small Business, Nash has regularly been meeting ‘‘like-minded people’’, sharing with them his concerns about New Zealand’s relatively low productivity, and conspiring with them to close the gap with other nations. He’s promised the Government will make it a priority, too.
As Fisheries Minister, Nash is threatening to go to the Supreme Court to stop a small hapu¯ getting a protected marine zone. He confided that yesterday to 170 paying guests at a lunch. ‘‘Just know that the direction I would like to take fisheries is quite different,’’ he revealed. ‘‘It’s fair to say I’m taking much more of an operational role.’’
This commercially valuable disclosure wasn’t made at his $1000-a-head campaign fundraiser in the private Logan Campbell dining suite in the members-only Northern Club, over entrees of 18-hour crispy pork belly, mains of duck or seared eye fillet, and a selection of Hawke’s Bay chardonnay and red wines.
No, he withdrew from that luncheon after the Labour Party expressed displeasure at him cavorting with such critics as his right-leaning mate Matthew Hooton.
Instead, yesterday’s lunch was the Forest & Bird conference, with a $55-a-head talkfest and buffet of sustainably-sourced sushi.
So do Forest & Bird members now have the inside running on government fisheries policy? No. And neither did the wealthy donors who turned up to Nash’s annual fundraisers at the Northern Club. Nor the new police constables of Wing 312, whose graduation he spoke at.
It’s fair to assume that when ministers speak to high-priced fundraising luncheons and dinners, they’re not revealing much that they wouldn’t disclose in any other speech. And as much as they might nod and smile at every entreaty from those with more money than sense, it’s unlikely those requests carry much greater weight than those from someone they might meet while out canvassing in a mall.
(Frankly, if ministers were so corrupt as to sell off favours, they would do it a lot more covertly than at a six-hour luncheon with 20 other guests and a never-ending supply of Te Mata Coleraine).
Still, that doesn’t make it okay for ministers to pimp themselves out at campaign fundraisers. Wealthy donors may not be able to buy direct influence, but they are able to buy access – and that’s not how democracy should work. Just as justice must be seen to be done, so too democracy.
It can’t be done with a select paying few in a private room at the Northern Club, with the media and the general public excluded.
Yesterday, Nash also talked about his commitment to transparency.
If he, Grant Robertson, Winston Peters and the rest of Cabinet are serious about that, they must avoid selling themselves in the Logan Campbell suite.