The Justice Committee has reported back on the Electoral Amendment Bill. The bill implements the recommendations of the Ministry of Justice consultation on election funding - the one where the Ministry of Justice conspired with the labour party to keep its highly influential submission totally secret - and the Labour-dominated select committee has recommended that that regime is basicly unchanged. So, the disclosure threshold will be lowered from $15,000 to $5,000 - which is better, but not far enough - but at the price of reduced transparency over very large donations. Coming in the wake of Monday's report on how donations buy influence over policy, it just seems like the big parties writing the rules to suit themselves (and their donors) in the usual corrupt stitchup. And it seems unlikely to go far enough to resolve the real trust issues that have built up around election donations.
Meanwhile, National and ACT are screaming bloody murder over the lowered threshold. Which really makes you wonder: what corrupt deals are they trying to hide?
