No call to rush donations law

It’s an open secret in Parliament that the justice select committee is a mess. It took 16 months to consider the End of Life Choice Bill but made no major recommendations to change it. A separate committee had to be set up to look at abortion law reform. And its inquiry into foreign interference in our election processes went through six chairpeople in less than four months.

This dysfunction was one of the excuses offered up by Justice Minister Andrew Little yesterday when he announced with no consultation that the Government would be banning all foreign political donations of more than $50 – and doing it under urgency in a single sitting session, with the bill passing either last night or this morning.

This is good politics for Little, but an appalling way to make law. A bad select committee does not excuse running roughshod over Parliament. Even after March 15, with plenty of reason to pass law quickly, Parliament took two weeks.

Little’s antenna correctly predicted that, no matter what objections National had to the process of the donations bill, it would be politically untenable to vote against it while its own donations are being looked at by the Serious Fraud Office.

Now that National has agreed to support the bill, it appears bipartisan, blunting the attack line that Labour is ‘‘screwing the scrum’’ against them unconstitutionally. (Another thing that blunts that line is the fact National passed a law banning thousands of prisoners from voting without any support from Labour in its last term of government.)

But good politics doesn’t always equal good law.

Justice Minister Andrew Little could slow down and pass this bill with proper consideration, says Henry Cooke.

Indeed, many who agree with the overall purpose of this bill can find plenty wrong with it – problems that could well be fixed were it not being passed within less than 24 hours.

A glaring problem – one raised by the Electoral Commission over the years and by officials in the tiny bit of documentation the bill was released with – is that the requirements for foreign donations and anonymous donations no longer match. Donations of less than $1500 will still be allowed from anonymous donors but not foreign donors.

This means party secretaries will still be able to receive an envelope with $1499 of cash in it and bank it happily, as long as they have no reason to believe it came from a foreigner. The Electoral Commission has long argued these two should match, but Little has decided they should not.

There are three more weeks of the parliamentary calendar for the year, and this bill won’t come into effect until 2020 anyway. Why not have at least a week of consultation and iron out some wrinkles?

There’s also the question of whether this will stop what people are actually worried about. When people think ‘‘big foreign money’’, they aren’t usually concerned about $1500 from someone openly declaring their roots. They are worried about much larger quantities from New Zealandbased companies that are in practice anything but. The most obvious example from the last electoral cycle is the $150,000 donation from a China-owned but NZ-based horse company paid to National.

Little says new requirements for party secretaries to check that money isn’t coming from foreign sources will stop this happening. But that is putting a very large amount of faith in party secretaries to sort through the intricacies of company ownership. One shouldn’t forget electoral law is so complicated that the Serious Fraud Office is looking at one of the allegations raised in recent years, and is taking months to do so.

Little did make a good point when defending his changes to journalists, saying we are still operating with a law from the 1950s that has had MMP tacked on. It’s true – our electoral law is an absolute mess, with loopholes wide enough to drive a moderately priced Toyota through. Fixing it in time for the 2020 election would indeed be pretty impossible. Furthermore, any full overhaul of the law wholly designed by the large two parties will likely entrench their dominance of the system.

No, the way to fix it is the way MMP was brought in: with a royal commission. That process would take years, rather than days. But it would be worth it to actually correct some of the problems at the heart of our democracy, not just paper over them with a decent headline.

It’s quite possible a royal commission might suggest things be properly simplified by getting rid of donations altogether, and funding parties with taxpayer money. The prime minister said yesterday that, in a ‘‘perfect world’’, she would love for parties never to have to fundraise – but she doubted the public would ever back such a move.

She’s probably right. But there’s no harm in asking a royal commission to have a look.