Political party donations

The Electoral Commission has published last year's annual returns of political party donations. These only cover donations of more than $10,000, but they make interesting reading all the same. As expected, National - the party of the rich - did considerably better than Labour, raising over twice as much from large donors. ACT seems to have missed out entirely, raising a mere $32,200 - barely more than the Maori Party. But its the identities of individual donors which are most interesting. Toll Holdings, Westpac and Sky City all seem to have been splashing the cash about, with the latter donating large sums to ACT, the Progressives, Labour, and National. The Greens were funded mostly by their MPs, with the exception of a grant from the NDU and one from the JMG Foundation (a British foundation funded from the fortune of James Michael Goldsmith, which supports anti-GE organisations worldwide). Labour got a lot of union money, as well as $300,000 from their sugar-daddy Owen Glenn. They also have a large number of high value anonymous donations, which should be poked into further. Unless these people were paying with briefcases of cash or through intermediaries - if for example they paid by cheque - then I'm not sure they should really be anonymous. Meanwhile, National once again subverted the entire disclosure process by receiving most of its money through lawyer's trust accounts - a process which really should be outlawed ASAP. While political parties are always going to have to rely on donations from the public for funding (unless we institute state funding, that is), transparency requires that we know who is funding them, so we can assess whether donors are buying influence and whether politicians are behaving corruptly. Anonymous donations and the use of trust funds and fronts undermine this, and should be tightly restricted.

Of course, the chances of politicians voting for that are about as likely as Turkeys voting for Christmas...