Donors, like voters, should stay secret: Peters
NZ First leader steps up to clarify role of foundation and blasts ‘stolen information’
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says donors to the New Zealand First Foundation are entitled to keep their identities secret. Peters, the leader of New Zealand First, took to Facebook last night in an attempt to clarify the role of the NZ First Foundation, which is facing a Serious Fraud Office investigation.
Peters compared the situation of political donors to that of voters, who were entitled to exercise a secret ballot.
Without donations, the taxpayer would have to fund political parties, and NZ First was opposed to that, Peters said.
Asked if he would step down if found to have received money improperly, Peters said: “I did not receive any money. Fullstop. I am not part of the foundation.”
In answer to a question about whether donations should be transparent, Peters said simply that electoral law should be followed.
He said he was “pretty certain” who had leaked information about donations to the foundation, which he referred to as “stolen information”.
Peters said the foundation was set up as a similar structure to the National Party’s foundation.
But National leader Simon Bridges has rejected this, saying any donation to National’s foundation was treated as a donation to the party.
Radio NZ — which appears to have detailed accounts of donations to the foundation — yesterday reported that the foundation had received tens of thousands of dollars of donations from the horse racing industry.
Many of these donations, said RNZ, fell just below the $15,000.01 threshold at which the financial support must be made public.
Peters, also Minister of Racing, has been a champion of the industry since taking up the portfolio in 2017.
Peters addressed this issue last night, saying that “no one is buying any policy here” because he had simply implemented an independent racing policy.
Many of the comments on the Facebook livestream said they could not hear what Peters was saying.
The Electoral Commission has looked into the foundation and issued a statement saying it believed that electoral laws had been broken.
It referred the matter to police, which referred it to the Serious Fraud Office.
National Party finance spokesman Paul Goldsmith said New Zealanders needed reassurance that there had been no undue influence as a result of the donations.
“We have New Zealand First ministers making large decisions about large spending and all New Zealanders want to be assured about the integrity of the decision-making.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern defended Peters, calling such accusations “not fair”.
“Racing policy, decisions, bills, as with any decision we make as a Government, goes through considerable scrutiny — no one policy is ever decided by one party, they go through all of us.”
In this case, she said, it went before the House and received support from across the House.
Asked if Peters had disclosed how much money the racing industry had given him, Ardern said that it was “no secret to anyone in New Zealand that Winston Peters has a strong knowledge, understanding and longstanding connection to the racing industry”.
Ardern said she had not spoken to Peters about the donations.
I did not receive any money. Fullstop. I am not part of the foundation.
Winston Peters, NZ First leader
New Zealand First’s Shane Jones used a rather interesting analogy in defending his leader Winston Peters this week.
Asked if Peters would survive the shemozzle around donations, Jones said Peters was Tane Mahuta.
Tane Mahuta — that grand kauri tree in Northland’s Waipoua Forest — is estimated to be up to 2000 years old.
What Jones did not think about was that Tane Mahuta is currently at threat of kauri dieback disease.
All manner of protective measures have had to be deployed to try to protect it.
Peters’ equivalent of kauri dieback disease comes on two fronts: there are questions upon questions about donations taken by the NZ First Foundation, and there is National Party leader Simon Bridges’ decision to rule NZ First out as an ally.
Peters is trying out his own inoculation from the NZ First dieback disease.
He pleaded ignorance. He knew nothing, it was nothing to do with him. It was to do with the NZ First Foundation, not him, and not his party. He was not involved.
His next line of defence was there was nothing to know. Everything was above board.
Everything was pretty legal, to borrow a phrase from another of Peters’ nemeses, Steven Joyce.
Everything was tickety-boo, but he had asked his party to check its processes anyway.
Now he faces RNZ’s dripfeed of details of the donations the NZ First Foundation got, and has a Serious Fraud Office probe hanging over his party.
That came after the Electoral Commission declared it did not think all was tickety-boo with donations to the NZ First Foundation, and referred it to police.
So now Peters — who was riding high as Deputy Prime Minister and on the cusp of making it through a whole term in Government without incident — faces another election year of questions and suspicions.
In 2008 there were similar circumstances and NZ First did not make it back in.
In 2008 Peters campaigned in a defensive, combative rage.
The party was cleared of fraud by the Serious Fraud Office, but told to disclose some of the donations it had received through the Spencer Trust.
That was before the election, but the taint had set. Peters will remember that.
This does not come without a cost to the other parties.
As well as the NZ First donations, there are the SFO charges against four people in relation to $100,000 given to the National Party.
Those charged have not been named, but National has said none is with the party and it intends to return the money.
By and large, donors expect the party they are donating to will be able to advise them and will meet all the requirements for disclosure.
But there are legal requirements on donors. Donors cannot deliberately try to avoid the law.
If donors are worried about the impact on their reputation or legal consequences, they will simply close their wallets. That will affect all parties and could not come at a worse time than election year. The current state of affairs has led to inevitable calls for reform.
PM Jacinda Ardern has proposed a review of the donation laws, saying a consensus on those laws, and more clarity, is needed. There is already consensus over the donation laws, although there is debate about the disclosure limit. They are almost the same as those Labour instituted in 2005 under the Electoral Finance Act. Other aspects of that law were controversial, and were repealed by National, but the donations laws remained intact. Those laws are also already clear, although it is convenient for politicians to claim they are not. They are more robust than in many other countries. They explicitly ban things such as allowing donations from one person to be hidden among a wider collection of donations. They explicitly ban one person avoiding disclosure by donating several amounts of less than $15,000 through different companies. Purely anonymous donations are only allowed up to $1500.
For any over that amount, the party must keep records of the donors and amounts.
They do not need to be disclosed publicly unless they are over $15,000 but the party’s records must be kept in case an inspection is required.
What is missing is not consensus or clarity — but trust. Abiding by the donations laws is actually easy. The Greens seem to manage. So too do Act and Labour.
Where things seem to run into trouble is where parties try to outwit the law.
When it comes to reform, where questions should be asked is around the policing of those laws.
Currently, political parties must file annual donation returns with the Electoral Commission.
By and large, it seems to be a trust model. Perhaps more rigorous monitoring of those returns is needed. It should not take leaks and the media to flush out questionable donation practices.
The Electoral Commission and auditing process should be able to do that through proper probing of donations returns. Yet here we are.
Where things seem to run into trouble is where parties try to outwit the law.