“Follow the money” is the classic directive to journalists trying to understand where power and influence lie in society. In terms of uncovering who influences various New Zealand political parties and governments, it therefore pays to look at who is funding them.

The political parties are legally obliged to make declarations about the donations they’ve received each year. They pass this information on to the Electoral Commission, and the donations from the 2023 year have now been published on the Commission’s website.

Below are the aggregated total donations for each party elected to Parliament last year. The total donations received by these parliamentary parties were nearly $25m. Of this total, the parties of the new government (National, Act, and NZ First) received 16.5m, and the parties of the Opposition (Labour, Greens, Te Pati Māori) received the lesser amount of about $8.2m.

Total donations

Huge totals of donations received

National has declared a total of $10.4m of donations for the 2023 election year – which has captured media headlines about the release of the donations declarations. Journalists reporting on this have used the terms: “staggering” (Stuff), “enormous” (Newshub), and “massive” (The Herald and Newsroom).

The $10.4m raised is indeed significant and illustrative of just how popular the National Party is at the moment with wealthy individuals and companies. However, some caution is also required in the interpretation. For example, some reports have compared the $10.4m figure with smaller totals that National have received in the past, suggesting a significant increase in funding for National. But this is a case of apples being compared to oranges.

The reporting rules have changed significantly for the 2023 election-year donations. Whereas previously, the parties were legally required to declare donations of $15,000 or more, this threshold has now been considerably lowered to include any donations over $5000. This means National’s donation reporting captures many more donations than in the past.

Furthermore, parties also now have to report on the quantum of donations received that are below the declaration threshold. For 2023, National has declared about $6m of below-$5000 donations. The larger donations only make up about $4m, or about 40 per cent, of National’s declaration.

The $10.4m raised by National is still highly significant and note-worthy. However, there should also be caution with the claim made in the media in the last few days that this figure is the largest ever received by a party in New Zealand’s political history. It’s worth noting that at the 1987 general election, the Labour Party of David Lange and Roger Douglas received about $3.5m in donations. When this figure is translated into 2023 dollars, it’s about the same as National received last year.

Large donations

The 2023 election year certainly contained quite a few huge donations from wealthy individuals and companies. By far the biggest was the $500,000 donated to National by business owner Warren Lewis. Although this has been reported to be the largest recorded donation given to a political party, back in 2005, businessman Owen Glenn infamously gave $500,000 to the Labour Party.

The second-largest donation was $200,000 given by property developer Mark Wyborn to New Zealand First.

National also received a $200,000 donation from Buen Holdings, which is owned by Guemsoon Shim and Lian Seng Buen. However, the records state that this was received on 10 August last year, but it was then returned to the donor on 23 August – the same day that the donors were in the news for a story about the Auckland Council and Tenancy Services investigating alleged unlawful tenancy management in one of their buildings.

The table below lists the biggest donations received.

Large donations

While the above table includes all the donations of $100,000 or more, it’s also worth noting the amount of lesser amounts. Taking an arbitrary threshold of $20,000, the following table shows how many medium-sized donations the parties have received.

It’s also useful to look at how many large donations each party received. If you take an arbitrary threshold such as $20,000, the list below shows how many large donations above this figure were received by each party.

Once again, of these 131 medium-sized donations, most have gone to the parties of the new government (101), and few have gone to the parties in opposition (30).

Medium donations

Donations under $5000

In the past, parties only had to declare donations over a certain threshold (which has been $15,000 in recent years). But now parties also must account for donations under $5000. Rather than detailing each donation and the identities of the donors, the parties simply declare how many such donations they have received and what the aggregated amount of money is. The total number of sub-$5000 donations received by each party is below.

Small donations

The donations below $5000 appear to make up the vast bulk of money received by the parties. As already mentioned, 60 per cent of National’s donation income in 2023 came from these smaller donations, and for some of the other parties, it is even higher. Interestingly, the parties of the opposition, in particular, have received more of the smaller donations (88,253) than those of the government parties (53,397).

Anonymous donations

Political parties’ ability to receive anonymous donations has been clamped down. Parties can now only receive such donations in two highly regulated ways.

Firstly, parties are only allowed to accept anonymous donations of less than $1500. The table below shows how many such donations each party received in 2023 and the total amounts of these donations for each party.

Anonymous donations

Donations can also now be given anonymously to political parties by sending the money to the Electoral Commission, which then passes the money onto the parties without any identities attached. These are called “Protected donations”, and the Electoral Commission is only allowed to distribute a maximum of $373,520 to any one party in a year. Below is the list of protected donations passed onto the parties.

In 2023, there were only eight such donations, six of which went to National, totalling $363,000 (just below the allowable limit). NZ First and Act received one protected donation each. This information can be seen in the table below.

Protected disclosure donations

MP donations

Parties raise much of their income from MPs’ high parliamentary salaries. Some parties, traditional on the left, have a “tithing” rule in which roughly ten per cent of their MP or Ministerial salaries are donated to the party.

Such tithing didn’t always appear in the Electoral Commission records – because, in the past, when the threshold for disclosure was higher, many of the MP tithing amounts were lower than needed to be declared. But in 2023, all the tithes for Labour and Green MPs were published. See the table below for the biggest MP levies in 2023.

MP donations

Donations from election candidates

The records of donations released by the Electoral Commission include some curious donors – the candidates themselves running for Parliament. It’s pretty standard for party organisations to raise money to give to candidates to help their local election campaigns, but in this case, some of the candidates have also been making donations to the head office.

The most prominent example in the table below is the $50,000 given to Te Pati Māori by list candidate John Tamihere, however in his case, he’s also the President of the party. Just as Tamihere didn’t make it into Parliament, National’s Auckland Central candidate Muralidhar Mahesh – who donated $37,199 – also missed out, along with TOP donor-candidate Ben Wylie-van Eerd ($6098). More successful were Jenny Marcroft ($32,000) for NZ First, Vanessa Weenink ($26,357) for National, Tanya Unkovich ($5970), and Karen Chhour ($5200) for Act.

[ Donations from candidates

Donations from former politicians

It’s normal for political parties to seek extra fundraising from former MPs, especially those in retirement who might have accumulated decent fortunes from their time in politics and afterwards. While the example in the table below of Clayton Cosgrove’s consultancy firm giving $6000 to NZ First is the smallest, it’s possibly the most interesting, given that Cosgrove is a retired Labour MP.

[ Ex-MP donations

Loans to political parties

Although donations to parties have been regulated for decades, the loans provided to politicians have often flown under the radar, even though such loans have in the past been written off. Loans can often turn into donations, so they are now required to be disclosed. But in 2023, only two loans were disclosed, and they were both given to the NZ First party from the families of candidates—see the table below.

Loans to parties

Donors giving to multiple parties

Several donors have given to more than one political party. Clearly, some donors wish to support many different parties on the same side of the political spectrum. Hence, New Zealand’s richest man, Graeme Hart and his company The Rank Group, gave $204,000 to Act (in separate donations), $150,000 to National, and $110,000 to NZ First – all totalling $464,000.

Another Richlister, Trevor Farmer, gave $115,000 to Act, $100,000 to National, and another $50,000 to NZ First.

AJR Finance has only given to two of the new Government coalition partners: $55,000 to NZ First and $20,000 to National.

Another company, Christopher & Banks, gave National and Act $100,000 each. The private equity firm is run by Christopher Huljich, who gave National another $10,000.

Property developers Christopher and Michaela Meehan have given $103,260 to National and another $50,000 to Act. Similarly, Wellington’s Chris Parkin gave $24,500 to National and $10,000 to Act.

Wellington businessman Troy Bowker – a previous donor to Labour’s Stuart Nash – gave $15,000 to Act and $10,000 to NZ First.

On the left, gym company boss Phillip Mills gave $50,000 both to Labour and the Greens. Similarly, property developer Mark Todd gave $50,000 to Labour and $20,000 to the Greens.

Donating to more than one party

Housing property donations

A large number of donors appear to be involved in the housing and property development industry. These donations have featured particularly strongly in the declarations from the parties now in government.

The largest donation of the year – $500,000 from Warren Lewis – is not directly involved in property but the wider construction industry. Lewis’ business, FMI Building Innovations, is described as a “building systems and materials supplier”.

Various property developers have made some large donations. For example, Mark Wyborn has given $200,000 to NZ First and $24,000 to National. His business partner Trevor Farmer has given $115,000 to Act and $100,000 to National.

Property developer Winton is partly owned by CEO Chris Meehan and his wife Michaela Meehan. Together, they donated $103,260 to the National Party in 2023. In addition, Chris Meehan donated $50,000 to Act. Christchurch property investor Philip Carter donated $59,500 to National.

One of the largest private developers in New Zealand, Manson TCLM, is partly owned by Culum Manson, who gave $70,000 to National. Real estate boss Garth Barfoot, a long-time National donor, gave $20,000. National received a further $22,000 from Auckland commercial landlord Andrew Krukziener, who also donated $19,999 to NZ First.

NZ First also received $145,000 from Wellington property developer Vlad Barbalich.

One of the more interesting property developers, Ockham Residential, appears to have hedged its bets with political donations. Owner Mark Todd gave $50,000 to Labour and $20,000 to the Greens. The company’s Chief Executive, William Deihl, gave a further $20,500 to National.

Housing donations

Mismatch between donations and spending

The $25m declared in donations by the parties in Parliament for 2023 was obviously used for fighting that year’s general election. However, caution must be taken when comparing the donations and expenditures declared to the Electoral Commission.

At first glance, there might appear to be a major discrepancy between the funding and expenditures. For example, National declared $10.4m in donations but only spent about $3.6m. Labour spent more than this ($4.8m) despite declaring a smaller amount of donations.

The two figures aren’t immediately comparable. First, the spending figures only relate to the 12 weeks before polling day, whereas parties generally spend money on campaigning throughout the year.

Secondly, the spending figures only account for money spent on paid advertising. There are plenty of other party and election expenditures that aren’t captured by the legal declarations – such as money spent on staff and opinion polling.

Further columns will dive deeper into this and look at the donations received by individual parties.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Solomon Islands’ incumbent prime minister Manasseh Sogavare has been re-elected in the East Choiseul constituency.

It is the opening move in the political chess match to form the country’s next government.

Returning officer Christopher Makoni made the declaration late last night after a day of counting, according to the national broadcaster SIBC.

Counting continues today in provincial centres across the country.

So far at least four members of Sogavare’s former cabinet have been re-elected.

But it is still early days as the first upset of the election also took place overnight, with George Tema unseating Silas Tausinga in the West New Georgia-Vona Vona constituency.

According to the Electoral Commission’s political party breakdown of the election results received so far, Sogavare’s Our Party was leading with 34 percent of votes counted on Saturday morning, followed by former opposition leader Matthew Wale’s Solomon Islands Democratic Party which had 26 percent.

Independent election candidates rounded out the top three with 23.4 percent of the votes counted so far. There was then a sharp drop-off to the fourth-placed People’s First Party on 8 percent.

Once all 50 members of Parliament have been officially elected, they will be whisked back from the provinces to the capital, Honiara, where lobbying camps are already being set up in hotels.

One political party leader and election candidate, whose result has yet to be declared, told RNZ Pacific the first of those camps would be at the Honiara Hotel, and that coalition talks were already underway.

Fewer women MPs
There are also likely to be less women in Parliament after another incumbent woman MP, Lillian Maefai, was ousted by Franklyn Derek Wasi in the East Makira Constituency.

Two other incumbent women MPs, Lanelle Tananganda and Ethel Vokia, did not re-contest their seats in this election, making way instead for their husbands — who had formerly lost the seats because of corruption convictions — to stand.

That left Freda Soria Comua, as the last of the four women MPs in the former parliament, still with a chance to make it back into the house.

There are 20 women among the 334 candidates contesting this election.

It is very rare for women to be elected in Solomon Islands’ male-dominated political sphere. Three out of the four women in the last parliament came into the house as proxies for their husbands.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape says funding for impending byelections is not an issue.

“We are assisting the Electoral Commission with funding, I have strongly advised Electoral Commissioner to get the byelection up and running.

“Put the programme together, get to Treasury and request funding and the byelections must be done. As far as the government is concerned, we want the byelections done at the earliest.”

The election needed to be “done now”, he added.

However, Electoral Commissioner Simon Sinai confirmed the deferral of the byelections was due to lack of funding.

“We are prepared and ready to conduct byelections in the three open electorates first, Sohe in Northern, Maprik in East Sepik and Porgera-Paiela in Enga,” Sinai said.

“However, due to the cash flow situation in the country, we have to wait for the lead agencies to secure the necessary funding for us to deliver the elections.”

Three byelections delayed
Sinai said byelections in Madang, Aitape-Lumi and Dei would not proceed as initially planned until the review matters before the courts were dealt with and concluded.

The issue of writs for the byelections for three electorates in PNG were scheduled for Wednesday and this was said to be now deferred until April due to financial constraints.

PNG Electoral Commission needs K20 million to run the three planned byelections and so far no funding has been allocated.

The Electoral Commission is still waiting for the Finance and Treasury Departments to release the funds that were requested through a budget submission for six open electorates where byelections were expected to be conducted this year.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier by permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards – Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Elections in the United States are dominated by big money. But what isn’t commonly understood is that most of it is raised and spent, not by the political parties and candidates for office, but by special interest groups who run their own election campaigns to influence the outcome.

Billions of dollars are channelled into campaign groups to run what are normally attack ads against politicians. The reason for this is because the political donations rules are designed to encourage this – with big clampdowns on people funding the politicians, but allowing them to more easily give to advocacy and lobbying groups instead.

This is a trend that is finally starting to occur in New Zealand. As the rules tighten on money going to candidates and political parties, this is pushing the big money towards less regulated and less transparent special interests. Critics call this “dark money” or “soft money” because it’s outside of the party system and therefore more difficult for officials and the public to scrutinise.

As with the US, such groups are incentivised to run negative attack campaigns, because if they run positive campaigns in support of a party or candidate, then that spending has to be allocated against the expenditure limits of the politicians, who also need to sign off their agreement with the campaigns (which they never want to do).

Dark money spent in the 2023 general election

Some of the money spent by campaign lobby groups must be declared. The Electoral Commission has just published the declarations of those organisations that spent more than $100,000 on advertising at the last election. However, there are many ways that “dark money” spending can stay below the threshold, and so most lobby group campaigning isn’t captured by the Electoral Commission.

The amount spent by these so-called “Third-Party promoters” has escalated quickly in recent elections. At the 2020 election, only $147,000 was spent. This increased by 13 times in 2023, with nearly $2m being declared. You can view all the declarations here: Registered promoter expenses for the 2023 General Election

The top spender lobby groups were the following, in order of money spent:

1. Vote for Better Limited: $386,515
2. New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union: $371,565
3. New Zealand Council of Trade Unions – Te Kauae Kaimahi: $299,344
4. Hobson’s Pledge: $283,899
5. Family First New Zealand: $204,771
6. The Better NZ Trust: $266,069.39
7. Groundswell NZ: $283,899

Lobby group spending dominated by the political right

This big spending list is dominated by rightwing campaigners – with only the CTU and Better NZ Trust being aligned with the leftwing parties. The latter carried out a campaign promoting policies to enable greater electric vehicle uptake. It’s unclear who funded the group, but previously they had listed one of their supporters as being Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority (EECA) – a government agency – which led to allegations that they were a “sock puppet” group. And the CTU ran an attack campaign against Christopher Luxon, with advertisements saying he couldn’t be trusted.

On the right, there was a real mix of socially and fiscally conservative lobby groups. The biggest spender was the mysterious Vote for Better group, run by businessman Tim Barry, whose main interests are in the horse racing industry.

The next biggest spender was the Taxpayers’ Union, run by director Jordan Williams, which ran anti-Government campaigns, mostly focusing on extravagant spending. Some of the TU’s declared advertising expenses were paid to The Campaign Company, which is also owned by director Jordan Williams. The Campaign Company was also contracted to several other lobby groups – such as Groundswell and Hobson’s Pledge. The company was also employed by electorate candidates, such as NZ First’s Casey Costello.

Some of this is covered today by Farah Hancock’s very good RNZ report, $2m surge in election campaign spending by third-party groups. In this she raises whether some groups such as Hobson’s Pledge have been involved in “astro-turfing”, in which elite well-funded campaigns are passed off as grassroots movements. She also draws attention to the increasing amounts being spent by the conservative groups – Hobson’s Pledge increased their spend from $254,115 in 2017 to $283,899 last year, and Family First went from $141,224 in 2020 to $204,771 in 2023.

There were 31 “third party promoters” that were registered with the Electoral Commission because they were planning to spend significant amounts of election advertising, but 26 of these didn’t make a declaration, presumably because they say they didn’t spend above the $100,000 threshold that necessitates one.

RNZ’s Farah Hancock has also investigated some of these groups. One appears to have been politically successful in its objectives: “The Natural Health Alliance encouraged voters to choose NZ First to get the Therapeutic Products Act repealed. It ran several full-page advertisements in the New Zealand Herald. Chairperson Paddy Fahy indicated these cost close to $10,000 each. Repealing the Act formed part of National’s coalition agreements with NZ First and ACT and is included in the government’s 100-day plan.”

While we know some of what these campaign groups have spent money on, it’s difficult to discover where they raised their money from. Although New Zealand’s political donations rules keep tightening up – and some scholars think they should be tightened significantly more – this has merely pushed the big money into these more mysterious groups, who don’t need to disclose their funding. This trend is only likely to worsen. And because such groups are incentivized to run campaigns against political parties (because the rules discourage them from campaigning in favour of parties or candidates), New Zealand is likely to go further down the route of elections dominated by Americanised attack advertising funded by dark money.

Fights between left and right activists about such dark money are likely to escalate. The Labour Party’s Greg Presland, who is also a part owner in corporate lobbying-PR-consulting firm Polis Consulting Group, has been drawing attention to the funding of groups on the right, asking questions about the rightwing Vote for Better Limited, which was the biggest campaigner last year – see: About the promoters electoral returns

Here’s his key point about this campaign run by businessman Tim Barry: “There is nothing to suggest that he is a well healed individual who is deeply upset with the direction of the last Government and the thought struck me what if he was paid by someone to do all of this? What if he was instructed by a Fisheries Company or an Oil Company or a fundamentalist American Christian Church or the Atlas Network for that purpose to do his best to undermine confidence in the left during the election campaign? The problem with the promoter rules is there is no obligation for them to say who they were paid by. And it can be an overseas person or corporation.”

Other political donations scrutinised

Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne has also drawn attention to a big mining company that appears to have successfully influenced an election race on West Coast last year. He has been investigating the spending of $32,600 by Bathurst Resources to bankroll the campaign of an Independent candidate at last year’s election, which is said to have been a decisive factor in leading to Labour’s Damien O’Connor losing to National’s Maureen Pugh – see: Big coal company bought West Coast election campaign

The mining company was opposed to the Government’s mining policies, and so funded the contest of independent candidate Patrick Phelps who was campaigning for more mining on the West Coast. Phelps is the manager of Minerals West Coast Trust, which last year was given $220,000 by various mining companies.

The donation from Bathurst Resources meant Phelps was the biggest spending candidate, and according to various sources was able to pull enough votes off O’Connor to let National win the seat – something that the Bathurst Resources company also boasts about.

The experience has made Labour’s O’Connor even more critical of the role of the wealthy in the political process: “There are many international companies and organisations wanting to influence New Zealand elections for their own purposes – the smoking industry, the investment and real estate industry as we’re starting to see. And there’ll be many more… I think what people have to do is follow the money, ask the question: why such investments would be made? And for the most part, no business makes an investment without some realistic expectation of a return.”

The big fundraising and spending electoral candidates

The Electoral Commission released the donations and expenditure declarations of all electorate candidates last week, which means the public has a better understanding of the money being used by politicians at the local level. Below are some of the top figures from these declarations, detailing whether they were successful in their campaigns.

The top ten donation recipients:

1. Siva Kilari, National, Manurewa – unsuccessful: $110,483
2. Mahesh Muralidhar, National, Auckland Central – unsuccessful: $109,496
3. Shane Jones, National, Northland – unsuccessful: $95,524
4. Chlöe Swarbrick, Greens, Auckland Central – successful: $95,023
5. Chris Bishop, National, Hutt South – successful: $98,549
6. Cameron Brewer, National, Upper Harbour – successful: $86,659
7. Tim Costley, National, Ōtaki – successful: $79,679
8. Hamish Campbell, National, Ilam – successful: $70,677
9. Scott Sheeran, National, Wellington Central – unsuccessful: $64,260
10. Catherine Wedd, National, Tuktuki – successful: $61,920

The top ten election advertising spenders:

1. Scotty Bright, Democracy NZ, Port Waikato – unsuccessful: $41,905
2. Rachel Boyack, Labour, Nelson – successful: $32,560
3. Julie Anne Genter, Greens, Rongotai – successful: $32,554
4. Raf Manji, TOP, Ilam – unsuccessful: $32,502
5. Tim Costley, National, Ōtaki – successful: $32,089
6. Chlöe Swarbrick, Greens, Auckland Central – successful: $31,643
7. Dana Kirkpatrick, National, East Coast – successful: $31,565
8. Cameron Brewer, National, Upper Harbour – successful: $31,243
9. Katie Nimon, National, Napier – successful: $31,191
10. Carlos Cheung, National, Mt Roskill – successful: $31,072

Some of this information is also available today in Glenn McConnell’s very good Stuff article, The politicians who were flush with cash and broke the bank campaigning

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

A Papua New Guinean academic says the new security deals with the United States will militarise his country and anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve.

In May, PNG’s Defence Minister Win Barki Daki and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed the Defence Cooperation Agreement and the Shiprider Agreement.

Last week they were presented to PNG MPs for ratification and made public.

The defence cooperation agreement talks of reaffirming a strong defence relationship based on a shared commitment to peace and stability and common approaches to addressing regional defence and security issues.

Money that Marape ‘wouldn’t turn down’
University of PNG political scientist Michael Kabuni said there was certainly a need for PNG to improve security at the border to stop, for instance, the country being used as a transit point for drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine.

“Papua New Guinea hasn’t had an ability or capacity to manage its borders. So we really don’t know what goes on on the fringes of PNG’s marine borders.”

But Kabuni, who is completing his doctorate at the Australian National University, said whenever the US signs these sorts of deals with developing countries, the result is inevitably a heavy militarisation.

“I think the politicians, especially PNG politicians, are either too naïve, or the benefits are too much for them to ignore. So the deal between Papua New Guinea and the United States comes with more than US$400 million support. This is money that [Prime Minister] James Marape wouldn’t turn down,” he said.

The remote northern island of Manus, most recently the site of Australia’s controversial refugee detention camp, is set to assume far greater prominence in the region with the US eyeing both the naval base and the airport.

US fighter jets now (21.06.23) at Jacksons International Airport, Port Moresby.

📷 Walen Parange pic.twitter.com/EVrOV7CWZ3

— Bobby Jr (@tambijr_4rmPNG) June 21, 2023

Kabuni said Manus was an important base during World War II and remains key strategic real estate for both China and the United States.

“So there is talk that, apart from the US and Australia building a naval base on Manus, China is building a commercial one. But when China gets involved in building wharves, though it appears to be a wharf for commercial ships to park, it’s built with the equipment to hold military naval ships,” he said.

Six military locations
Papua New Guineans now know the US is set to have military facilities at six locations around the country.

These are Nadzab Airport in Lae, the seaport in Lae, the Lombrum Naval Base and Momote Airport on Manus Island, as well as Port Moresby’s seaport and Jackson’s International Airport.

According to the text of the treaty the American military forces and their contractors will have the ability to largely operate in a cocoon, with little interaction with the rest of PNG, not paying taxes on anything they bring in, including personal items.

Prime Minister James Marape has said the Americans will not be setting up military bases, but this document gives them the option to do this.

Marape said more specific information on the arrangements would come later.

Antony Blinken said the defence pact was drafted by both nations as ‘equal and sovereign partners’ and stressed that the US will be transparent.

Critics of the deal have accused the government of undermining PNG’s sovereignty but Marape told Parliament that “we have allowed our military to be eroded in the last 48 years, [but] sovereignty is defined by the robustness and strength of your military”.

The Shiprider Agreement has been touted as a solution to PNG’s problems of patrolling its huge exclusive economic zone of nearly 3 million sq km.

Another feature of the agreements is that US resources could be directed toward overcoming the violence that has plagued PNG elections for many years, with possibly the worst occurrence in last year’s national poll.

But Michael Kabuni said the solution to these issues will not be through strengthening police or the military but by such things as improving funding and support for organisations like the Electoral Commission to allow for accurate rolls to be completed well ahead of voting.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Fiji’s former Elections Supervisor Mohammed Saneem is under investigation by the country’s anti-corruption agency for alleged abuse of office and has been stopped from fleeing the country.

The Fijian Elections Office (FEO) said Saneem was alleged to have “on numerous occasions . . . unlawfully authorised payments of sitting allowances” to members of the Electoral Commission (EC) and has been referred to the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption (FICAC).

The FEO said the Constitutional Offices Commission had clarified to Saneem that the allowance for the chairperson and members of the EC remained at the same rate of FJ$500 (NZ$356) per person, per meeting.

Saneem, however, had continued to instruct for allowances to be paid to the commission’s members for attending events other than meetings, including social functions.

According to Section 5 of the Electoral Act 2014, meetings held by the Electoral Commission are to be determined by the chairperson or a majority of the members of the Commission.

The Electoral Commission could also hold meetings virtually.

The FEO said the former elections boss — who was suspended last month and resigned this week — “continued to deviate from this and constantly gave instructions for payment of FJ$500 allowance to the Electoral Commission members”.

Attorney-General Siromi Turaga confirmed to Fijivillage News that Saneem had been trying to board a flight to Australia on Friday morning but was stopped by border officials as he was now under investigation by FICAC.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The impartiality of officials who have been appointed to manage polling in the National Capital District during the Papua New Guinea general election next month has been questioned.

In a first of its kind meeting in Port Moresby yesterday, candidates, police and the election manager convened at the Sir John Guise stadium where issues such as impartiality, vote rigging, common roll and security were the biggest concerns.

The meeting comes on the back of the appointment of all Assistant Returning Officers (AROs) by the PNG Electoral Commission to conduct the national elections.

The list of appointees will be published by the Post-Courier tomorrow for readers’ information and comment.

Former Moresby North-west MP and now NCD regional candidate Michael Malabag, who was Health Minister in the outgoing government, questioned the appointment of five AROs who are engaged with the National Capital District Commission, claiming that this may influence the election process.

In response, NCD Election Manager Kila Ralai said the officials were public servants attached with the NCDC and that there was no intention to compromise the integrity of the election process.

“We have 16 AROs for NCD’s three open electorates and we have two APROs and that makes it 18 and out of those 18 AROs we have only five staff from NCDC as part of AROs to assist in these elections,” he clarified.

A petition is possible
“Because they are public servants in NCDC, likewise, if I was in East Sepik I would also have public servants as AROs.

“So in that process we only considered five out of a couple of applications from NCDC.”

However, Ralai added that if the candidates wished to apply for changes, they could present a petition which he would bring it to the Electoral Commissioner for further deliberation.

He also advised candidates that there would be issues with the common roll which should be ironed out after this election.

Another matter raised by NCD regional candidate Michael Kandiu was the transportation of ballot boxes from the polling stations to the counting venues.

He said there were allegations of foul play in the last two elections.

In this election he demanded transparent operations and better security.

No tinted police vehicles
“I want police to make sure that no ballot box is transported by any tinted police vehicle and it must be transported straight from the polling booth to the counting centre,” he said.

It was resolved that ballot boxes would be transported on open back vehicles straight from polling sites to counting venues.

The former Secretary for Department of Community Development and Religion, Anna Bais, who is contesting the Moresby Northwest Open, asked about the installment of CCTV (closed circuit television) cameras in all counting sites.

“We want CCTVs so we need to know if CCTVs can be put in here.

While government may say there is no money, we are willing to support,” said Bais.

Her call for CCTV linkages was supported by other candidates who offered to help with funds.

Metropolitan Superintendent Gideon Ikumu explained that the manpower in the city included 200 recalled reservists and another 150 recently trained reservists who would join the regular police officers along with members of the PNG Defence Force.

Claudia Tally is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand has a problem with money in politics. National and NZ First have been the subject of Serious Fraud Office investigations. And now that Labour mayors Phil Goff and Lianne Dalziel have been added to the list of fraud investigations, this should cement in the fact that we have a problem across the political spectrum, and at central and local government levels.

But what to do about the problem? A debate is now underway about how to fix the problem of money in politics. I’ve written an opinion piece for The Guardian, arguing that we can’t trust the politicians to fix this, because their self-interest is precisely what has led to a situation where poor regulation allows wealthy interests to dominate the political process – see: Vested interests in New Zealand politics are too big to ignore – we need a Royal Commission.

We’re way beyond the point where tinkering is an option, and I suggest that we can learn from the way that MMP was developed as a solution to problems with our old electoral system: “In the 1980s when a crisis of confidence was developing about the old First-Past-the-Post electoral system, the Labour Government of the time did the right thing by establishing The Royal Commission on the Electoral System. This made the case for our MMP system, which was eventually adopted by voters in a referendum. It’s time for a new Royal Commission to take the problems of vested interests in politics out of the hands of politicians and come up with a fundamental rethink of how to deal with money in politics.”

Danyl Mclauchlan has also written about politicians being part of the problem: “It’s because they literally write the laws, and get to decide what is and is not legal, so the laws around political donations have been written with massive loopholes allowing parties to accept large donations and conceal the identity of the donors” – see: The donations mess reveals a vacuum in our political system. Who will fill it?. He argues that “it’s not in the short-term interest of any party in parliament to seriously fix our donation regime”.

The problem is also made worse, Mclauchlan argues, by the lack of anti-Establishment forces in politics that might rally for major reform. In the past, this role might have been taken on by NZ First and the Greens, but both are hamstrung by current events or are no longer so radical: “now the Green Party occupies an ideologically incoherent space bounded by technocratic centrism and campus wokeness, characterised by an obsequious, fawning fear towards Peters and New Zealand First.”

Former United Future leader Peter Dunne has said we simply won’t get the necessary reform of wealth in politics because of politician self-interest, and he suggests any likely reform of donation rules will only produce more loopholes and workarounds – see: Chances of transparent election campaign funding are close to zero because the politicians who call for it really don’t want it.

Here’s Dunne’s main point: “the more the rules are tightened and tinkered with, the more bureaucratic checks that are imposed, the one certainty is the more politicians and political parties will simply engage in even more elaborate ways of getting around them. And the more we should come to expect election years being clouded by the types of funding controversies we are seeing already this year.”

Of course, there has been reform of donation laws in the past, and this hasn’t halted the problems or prevented scandals. For more on this, see Max Rashbrooke’s A brief history of New Zealand donations scandals.

Rashbrooke concludes: “Past reformers have contemplated fixing all these weaknesses, but have ultimately shrunk back from the task. In the light of the accelerating pace of scandals, that stance is increasingly untenable.”

So, will we get reform? There are an increasing number of voices calling for big change, including a global anti-corruption watchdog – see Yvette McCullough’s Transparency International warns need for political funding reform is urgent. According to this, “Transparency International is warning the need to reform political funding structures is more urgent than ever – and that complacency is leaving the country more vulnerable to corruption.”

However, the same article quotes Jacinda Ardern denying New Zealand has a problem: “That is not the New Zealand politics, that is not the New Zealand democracy I know. So actually I do reject that, I reject that strongly.” It is also reports that an independent inquiry is unlikely: “Although Ardern promised to look at electoral finance laws if she was re-elected, she was inclined to have an in-house review through the normal select committee process.”

Proposed solutions

One of the more radical proposals for reform comes from Peter Dunne, who suggests radical transparency, in which all donations are publicly declared: “all the financing provisions of the Electoral Act could be abolished and replaced with one simple overarching provision: every donation made to a candidate or a political party, whether in kind or cash, from overseas or within New Zealand, whether it be $1 or $1,000,000, should be fully disclosable.”

Dunne also argues that there is already generous state funding of political parties, via the backdoor of parliamentary resources. These are exploited, Dunne says, with the multi-million-dollar budgets actually spent on electioneering, all without any real oversight. He suggests: “a simple requirement for every MP and their party to file an annual audited return of their specific Parliamentary expenditure. The public would quickly prove to be far better monitors of what was reasonable use of public funds by politicians than any set of confusing, ambiguous and often contradictory Parliamentary rules could ever be.”

Most other writers on the topic suggest bans or limits on donations to parties. For example, Action Station’s Laura O’Connell Rapira argues for a cap of $1000 per year being put on donations, and she suggests banning donations from certain industries that create “harm” – anyone who invests in, say, property, pornography, or banking could be disqualified from donating – see: To build a new politics, we must break the grip of big money.

O’Connell Rapira also champions greater use of a little-used mechanism for fundraising – the Protected Disclosure regime administrated by the Electoral Commission: “Currently, the Electoral Act contains a mechanism for anyone wanting to donate to a political party and not wanting their identity disclosed. The clincher? If you want your donation to be anonymous to the public it also has to be anonymous to the party receiving the donation. How it works is that the Electoral Commission aggregates all of the donations and passes them on to parties. The Commission does not identify the dollar amount of individual donations, or the number or names of donors.”

In fact, this mechanism could be greatly expanded and even made compulsory, according to Liam Hehir, who has long-championed this as the best way to allow donations to occur but without donors being able to gain leverage with the politicians – see: A step by step guide for compulsory anonymity in political donations.

In his column, Hehir explains: “The basic concept is to funnel all political contributions through a process that makes it impossible for political parties to know who their donors are. The goal is to reconcile the privacy interests of donors with the legitimate right of the public to assurance their democracy is not for sale.”

Similarly, Andrea Vance has written that politicians simply can’t be trusted to write the rules of fundraising or even to be part of the fundraising process: “As long as there are secret donations and opaque rules, there will be fundraising scandals. Politicians write the rules they so blatantly flout. The parties manage their own accounts and the cash that flows into them. Now it’s pretty obvious they can’t be trusted, it’s time to take away that power and ban them from accepting donations directly. Is it time to change the laws to keep politicians in the dark over electoral donations?” – see: Keep politicians in the dark over election donations.

There are also calls to ban all donations and replace them with taxpayer-funded resources. That’s essentially the argument of Cat MacLennan, who cites the use of state-funding in many other countries – see: Time for state-funded political parties to replace donations.

She does point out that hasn’t necessarily fixed the problem elsewhere, and therefore additional controls on donations are also needed. Like others, MacLennan emphasises the need for large-scale reform that isn’t stymied by politician self-interest: “MPs have made numerous changes to donation laws over the years, but their common characteristic has been that they have effectively amounted only to tinkering. They have failed utterly to address key concerns, or to prevent parties from doing their best to hide donors’ identities.”

A variation on the state funding proposal is made today by Elisha Watson, who outlines how “democracy dollars” could allow citizens to choose which parties to give taxpayer-funded vouchers to – see: A novel way to fix our broken political donations system: flood the market.

Watson is unimpressed with the other calls to regulate donations, using the “hydraulic theory of money” to point out that inevitably all such regulations fail, and money gets through in the same way that water eventually gets through the ground.

Here’s her argument: “Any clever person seeking influence through money will simply redirect their dollars elsewhere to another point of influence that is currently unregulated – people will then grow outraged about this, new regulations flow, and then the dollars flow to the next influence point, and so on. One option is simply stop fighting – but instead of giving up, do exactly the opposite. Flood the market (in this case the market for political donations) with dollars so that even if rich people did make donations in search of influence, it wouldn’t even matter because politicians would be swimming in a proverbial pool of money.”

Former Labour MP Tim Barnett also points to democracy vouchers as a potential way forward, and cites their use in Seattle city elections last year in which voters were issued with $25 vouchers to give to whatever candidate they wished – see: Political party funding in New Zealand.

Barnett’s analysis goes much further than this, and says the problem of money and politics requires “fresh thinking coming from outside the parties”. He proposes six criteria for which to judge the current system, which mostly fails in his view. Overall, he argues, the political funding system here doesn’t work well: “In short, we have ended up with the worst of both worlds – a system full of holes and inconsistencies where the risk of corruption is real, and a skewing towards resourcing the Parliamentary side of organised politics.”

There is a school of thought that all the calls for reform are misplaced, given the various investigations by the Electoral Commission and the Serious Fraud Office shows the wheel of justice are in motion. This is essentially the argument of a recent editorial in The Listener, which says we simply need the political parties to obey the law – see: A simple way to clean up the political donations mess.

Here’s the magazine’s main point: “Just because parties and individuals sometimes fall foul of electoral law does not automatically mean the law needs “reform”, just as restaurants falling foul of hygiene regulations does not necessarily mean there is something wrong with the regulations. Improving compliance with electoral law should be political parties’ first response to problems with handling donations. From the public perspective, seeing parties and individuals charged and/or investigated indicates that the law is working just fine. The area of donations feels messier than usual partly because of some good investigative reporting by RNZ into donations to the New Zealand First Foundation.”

Finally, for the ultimate big picture discussion on why this all matters, see Andrew Geddis’ Money talks: Why the donations crisis goes to the heart of trust in our politics.

Is the National Party off the hook over the Serious Fraud Office donations prosecution? That’s what the party is claiming, pointing out that no National official or MP has been charged.

But of course, there was a National MP involved – albeit one no longer with the party – and he is being prosecuted. In fact, at the time of the alleged offending, Jami-Lee Ross held the very senior role of Party Whip and was known to be close to Bridges. There is also no escaping the fact that the dodgy donations were made to and accepted by the National Party.

News yesterday that Jami-Lee Ross is one of the four going to trial should be a major embarrassment for National. For a very good account of what occurred yesterday, see Sam Hurley’s Jami-Lee Ross speaks out about his ‘outrageous’ SFO charges after name suppression lifts.

In terms of Ross’ surprise charge by the Serious Fraud Office, it’s worth reading Claire Trevett’s very good column today: Jami-Lee Ross SFO charges – blowing the whistle on NZ politics’ greatest own goal (paywalled).

Here’s her succinct summary: “Ross was revealed as one of four men charged by the Serious Fraud Office for alleged involvement in two donations to the National Party which had been broken up into smaller amounts to avoid disclosure. Rarely has anybody been both hero and zero at the same time. In this saga, Ross himself was the heroic whistleblower – it was he who exposed an alleged $100,000 donations rort within the National Party. That was an attempt to discredit Bridges. Instead, Ross is now in court charged with that alleged rort himself – although he has been quick to claim he is innocent and a ‘scapegoat’ for the National Party.”

Trevett nicely backgrounds how Ross came to be charged: “It was yet another twist in one of the most dramatic episodes New Zealand’s Parliament has witnessed, which began in October 2018 when Ross, full of rage, mounted a scathing attack on Bridges’ integrity. He claimed Bridges had ‘directed’ that a donation be split into smaller parts to avoid disclosure. Bridges denied it and Ross delivered an audio recording of a phone call with Bridges that proved nothing at all other than that the donation was talked about. It was Ross too who delivered papers to the police station, the media trailing him through Wellington’s streets as he went, the white knight of justice.”

She says that National should be worried: “In the court of public opinion, the entire story is a rank one for the National Party – regardless of whether they are in the dock. However it is spun, and whoever is involved, it is not a good look for the party. It fuels suspicion… National has a lot more to lose and this will now plague it in an election year, including potentially damaging evidence from those charged. Ross himself has said he will produce evidence as to whodunit”.

National is still arguing that the charges and the donations procured by Ross have little or nothing to do with them. MP Paul Goldsmith even went on TV this morning and said this about the scandal: “We’re watching it closely but it’s not relating directly to us”.

The attempts by National to distance themselves from Ross’ actions are rejected by blogger Martyn Bradbury who says: “Jami-Lee Ross is theirs, they’re responsible for him despite all their deceitful manipulations pretending he’s some rogue lone wolf” – see: Consider the distance National are pretending exists between them and Jami-Lee Ross.

Bradbury argues that Ross “joined National early & rose through the ranks because of the dark skill set they are now damning him for. His head kicker schtick and House of Cards ethics were crafted by the National Party hierarchy who saw talent in his Stormtrooper ways. He became a whip, he was a bag man for the boss, he was muscle for political kneecappings.”

He believes the court trial will end badly for National: “The JLR charges by the SFO are the worst outcome for National. It means the bloody thing won’t die now and could possibly play out in Court during the election. That’s a lot of air time for JLR to endlessly claim Simon is corrupt and release the rest of his hidden evidence.”

Electoral law expert Andrew Geddis said some similar things on RNZ’s Morning Report today: “One of the persons that has been charged is Jami-Lee Ross, who was Chief Whip under Simon Bridges, and was for a while their party ‘bagman’ in Auckland, whose job was to go around raising very big sums of money from particularly the Chinese community to fund the party business. And one two occasions, according to the Serious Fraud Office, he did so unlawfully. Now, how closely voters want to tie Jami-Lee Ross – who was a National Party MP – to the existing party, well, I guess that’s what we are going to be discussing” – see: National Party can’t separate itself from fraud charges against Jami-Lee Ross – expert.

He also suggests that the trial is unlikely to take place before the election – although “that doesn’t of course stop Jami-Lee Ross continuing to speak out if he so wishes”.

Geddis also wrote last month – when the SFO first announced their decision to charge four individuals – speculating on whether this might damage National. He suggesting it would depend on “the degree of culpability that the public assigns to National for being associated with this sort of allegedly unlawful behaviour. Will National be seen as complicit in the alleged offending, or a victim of it?” – see: A political donations powderkeg: on SFO criminal charges and the National Party.

He argued that “the fact no charges may have been laid against them does not necessarily mean that Bridges and the National Party can claim to be completely blameless in this matter.”

And he outlined why he’s not surprised that no National officials, or the party leader, have been charged: “For Bridges to be charged, he pretty much would have to had explicitly told donors something like, ‘I want you to give my party this money in this illegal way.’ Now, much as I know that plenty of inner-city, kombucha drinking liberal types like to hate on our Simon, no political party leader would be that stupid. Not even Simon Bridges. And the National Party secretary’s legal responsibility really amounts to little more than receiving and recording donations, before passing on limited information about those donations to the Electoral Commission. When doing so, he’s entitled to simply rely on what he’s told by donors to the party without having to try and independently verify that it is the truth.”

Some of these questions are also raised briefly in today’s Dominion Post editorial: “More importantly for voters in 2020, it will be hard for Bridges to plausibly claim he had nothing to do with the donations. He too is under pressure” – see: Songs, jokes and serious fraud in New Zealand politics.

National and Bridges are very lucky that this scandal has only fully hit the courts amidst controversy over the NZ First Foundation donations, as the public might be less inclined to follow the detail or see this behaviour as particularly unique.

And due to its own predicament, NZ First is unable to lead the charge against National in their usual manner. Labour and the Greens are also somewhat hamstrung, given that they have chosen not to take a hard line against NZ First over their donations scandal.

The quietness of National’s rivals is already being noted. RNZ says: “Even leaders of other parties like NZ First’s Winston Peters and Green co-leader James Shaw were reluctant to pass comment. ‘You hear of the sub judice rule? Well start observing it,’ Peters said to reporters. Shaw said he couldn’t comment on the particulars of the case, because it is part of a judicial process” – see: National Party donations case: ‘I am now being painted as the scapegoat’ – Jami-Lee Ross.

This will leave most of the debate to commentators and bloggers. And Labour Party blogger Greg Presland has sarcastically mocked Bridges’ apparent pleas of innocence in regard to the scandal – see: National has nothing to be afraid of.

Here’s his list of how little Bridges supposedly knows about what has gone on: “Simon Bridges himself had no idea what was happening. He has not met Zhang Yikun or Colin Zheng or had dinner at their home. He was not told that they wanted to make a $100,000 donation to the National Party. He was not told by Jami-Lee Ross that the money had been paid. He was not going to spend the money on attack ads. He was not aware that the money had been paid into the National Party Botany account. He was not told that the donation would be made by multiple people belonging to one association. He was not aware that the expectation behind the donation was having two Chinese MPs. He did not know that the donation was carved up into non declarable little pieces and transmitted to head office. Colin Zheng has not put his name forward for National’s candidate’s school.”

And even National-aligned blogger David Farrar admits the case is “very embarrassing for National” – see: SFO files charges in National Party donations case. He says: “Even though the party presumably (if correct the charges are against the donors only) did nothing wrong (in fact HQ insisted on getting details for each donor, and verifying they were eligible to donate), it is still a bad look to have charges laid in relation to a donation to you. At a minimum the party should, once the legal issues are dealt with, refund the donation.”

Finally, there are still questions about the twists and turns regarding the name suppression originally granted to the four men, which was lifted yesterday. For an interesting discussion by a journalist involved in this saga, see Barry Soper’s If Jami-Lee Ross didn’t want name suppression why did his lawyers threaten me?

NZ First is facing the boot at this year’s election, especially as it’s now embroiled in an unfolding donations scandal, which comes on top of low poll ratings. But what effect will the scandal have on NZ First’s government coalition colleagues? And is Labour and the Greens’ hands-off stance appropriate, or are they ethically compromised?

Pressure is mounting on NZ First’s coalition partners – and especially Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – to condemn the party over its political finance arrangements and orientation to media freedoms.

Critics argue some political actions are just too indefensible in a democracy, and by ignoring NZ First’s actions, Labour and the Greens are being hypocritical and allowing “dirty politics” and potential corruption to prosper. The counterargument is that Labour and the Greens have no responsibility for what their government partner does, and to admonish Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters would simply jeopardise the coalition government’s stability.

Veteran political journalist John Armstrong has expressed his views in the strongest terms, saying Ardern must grow a backbone and remind Peters who’s the boss. In his must-read column, Armstrong argues that Ardern’s refusal to comment on her coalition partner’s behaviour is “a major cop-out” and it is, in fact, “incumbent on the Prime Minister to be seen to be doing something that demonstrates she is treating the current and still unfolding affair with the utmost seriousness.” He believes Ardern should stand Peters aside as deputy PM, but leave him outside of Cabinet in his role as foreign minister.

Would this cause instability? Armstrong points to Peters’ weak position, especially with National ruling out his party for future government: “He is hardly in a position to pull down the Government. That makes Ardern’s failure to talk tough appear even more pathetic.” And he argues that the “the verdict of the Electoral Commission” was so damning “any other minister finding themselves on the receiving end of such a judgement would have been stood down forthwith.”

Stuff’s Henry Cooke says Ardern has slipped “into plain supplicancy” with Peters, and her arguments for not commenting on the scandal make no sense – see: Jacinda Ardern’s silence on Winston Peters is deafening.

Cooke goes through a variety of meaningful responses that Ardern could have made, which would have been useful for democracy and in the public interest. He points out that the recent publishing of photographs of journalists investigating the scandal, “clearly designed to intimidate journalists – is worth condemning, and you can bet that, if Ardern was in Opposition, she would manage it. Instead she’s not commenting”.

The Green Party, too, are criticised by Cooke: “Worse, this rot of silence has also infected the Green Party, which, as a confidence and supply partner, has plenty of legitimate room to criticise such tactics. You don’t need to tear the Government up or demand that Peters is fired – you can just say what the journalists’ union said on Friday, that Peters needs to explain himself and apologise. Instead the Greens just talk about how the law needs to be changed – which most people agree with, but isn’t the point. The topic at hand isn’t underhanded but lawful behaviour, it’s stuff that is potentially illegal – hence the police referral. The party should grow back its spine.”

Cooke does acknowledge that such criticisms of NZ First and Peters would take courage from Ardern: “He is not the kind of man to take a telling-off sitting down, and it would probably all get messier as Peters extracted some kind of utu for her daring to criticise him.”

National-aligned blogger David Farrar says the reason the Greens have been silent is “to protect their baubles of office” – see: The Government of kindness strikes again.

Here’s his main point: “Also worth noting the massive silence from the Greens. Let’s imagine the nightmare happened and NZ First had chosen to go with National, and all the revelations about secret donors, secret trusts, policies that benefit donors and finally the Deputy PM (or a proxy) having journalists tailed to expose their sources. The Greens would by at hysteria level 13 on a 0 – 10 scale. They would be calling it corrupt. Demanding resignations, court action. Calling for a general election. They’d be painting National as equally complicit and corrupt as NZ First for putting up with it.”

A similar point was made yesterday by Andrea Vance, who says Labour and the Greens used to be strong on these issues: “They now risk being accused of hypocrisy. Both parties were staunch critics of National’s ‘dirty politics’ tactics in 2014, but have remained quiet about Peters’ latest antics” – see: Snooping on journalists is an attempt to silence and shut them down.

Vance makes a plea for the governing parties to better protect the media freedoms involved in this controversy: “good journalism and a free press is an essential part of a functioning democracy. This attack on Shand and Espiner’s privacy is an attack on the public’s right to know about who is secretly funding their Government partner. Both Labour and the Greens must acknowledge that and condemn it, if we are to believe their exhortations New Zealand politics should be transparent and fair.”

The Greens have finally made a statement, with co-leader James Shaw expressing his concern – see Derek Cheng’s NZ First Foundation saga: Greens break silence on ‘chilling’ photos of journalists.

Leftwing blogger No Right Turn points out it was “obviously unsustainable” for the Greens to continue their conspicuous silence, which was turning into an “example of how getting along with their government partners was eroding their values and their own reputation” – see: Finally.

However, No Right Turn disputes the PM’s argument for avoiding taking responsibility for what her Cabinet ministers do: “She’s the Prime Minister, and wholly responsible for the ethical standards of her Cabinet. Pretending otherwise is simply a coward’s way of saying that she’s perfectly fine with corruption and dirty politics when it’s done by her allies, or at least willing to look the other way. But while this denial of responsibility gives her formal deniability, the problem is that this stench is not going to go away, and some of it is going to stick to her. And if it costs her a second term, she will have only herself to blame).”

The Prime Minister has gone on various media this morning to answer questions about her silence over the NZ First scandal. For example, on RNZ’s Morning Report she again denied that Cabinet ministers are answerable to her in terms of following the law on political fundraising, or their ethical dealings with media – see RNZ’s PM Jacinda Ardern washes hands of NZ First Foundation photos saga.

Ardern responded to questions, saying: “These aren’t matters that I have any responsibility for. I’m the leader of the Labour Party, I had nothing to do with this and I’m not going to stand here and explain it or defend it because it’s not for me… I cannot run both a government and three political parties.”

Similarly, reporting on her appearance on Newstalk ZB, Jason Walls says “Ardern has let NZ First leader and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters off the hook for admitting – then denying – having secret photos of journalists taken” – see: PM Jacinda Ardern again fails to pull Winston Peters into line over controversial photos.

According to this report, “Ardern wouldn’t directly comment” as to whether “Peters was upholding the highest ethical standards, as outlined in the Cabinet manual”. Although elsewhere she has argued the question isn’t relevant.

The fact that a party in the Labour-led Government is utilising Cameron Slater’s blogsite to publish the photos of journalists is going to be bad for Ardern’s re-election campaign according to Heather du Plessis-Allan, who says Labour had hoped to run as the party on the side of positivity and truth – see: Winston Peters’ flirtations with internet bringing trouble to him and Ardern (paywalled).

Here’s her argument: “Labour was clearly hoping to run a Goodie v Baddie campaign, where they pitch themselves as squeaky clean while accusing National of resorting to ‘dirty politics’. Well, that’s going to be hard to do, isn’t it, when Labour’s bedmate is the party most flagrantly and apparently unapologetically engaging in dirty politics in cahoots with one of the central figures of Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics book.”

Finally, could this scandal actually have bigger ramifications for our political system and party system? Danyl Mclauchlan argues today that NZ First and the Greens used to be the main parties to rail against corruption and anti-democratic behaviour in politics, but they’ve both been silenced – see his must-read column: The donations mess reveals a vacuum in our political system. Who will fill it? He ponders who will pick up the role of holding the powerful to account.

Does money buy policy in New Zealand politics and government? Based on the ongoing political finance scandal involving New Zealand First, which comes hot on the heels of the Serious Fraud Office charging four people in relation to donations to the National Party, New Zealanders have every reason to doubt the integrity of the electoral process. It’s no wonder there are growing calls for reform of a broken political finance system.

The ongoing leaks about the donations received by NZ First, and what look like attempts to at least circumvent political finance laws, saw the Electoral Commission refer the matter to the Police, who have now passed the scandal onto the Serious Fraud Office for investigation. At question is the role of the NZ First Foundation, which Winston Peters argues is separate from the party, but which appears to have been used to collect the donations in a highly questionable way.

This has the potential to damage to the reputation of not just NZ First , but the Government as a whole, and could have a significant influence on the election year.

Serious questions are now being asked about the influence that hitherto secret donations have had on various Government policies and decisions. The latest details about the donations were published yesterday by RNZ’s Guyon Espiner and Kate Newton – see: NZ First Foundation received tens of thousands of dollars from donors in horse racing industry.

This article details some of the many donations made by those in the racing industry that were given to the party in a way that meant they weren’t made publicly available. And although the article stresses that the law may not have been broken by these donations, it links them to policy decisions by this government.

Here’s the key part: “In this government’s first Budget in May 2018, Peters announced $4.8 million would be spent over four years for tax deductions to be claimed for the costs of acquiring ‘high quality’ breeding horses. Then in the 2019 Budget the government repealed the betting levy. That meant that a 4 percent levy on betting profits – which previously netted the Crown about $14 million a year – would not be paid to the government, but would be redirected to the racing and sports sectors. Peters signed off on the move despite the opposition of Treasury”.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that racing industry donors bought these policy decisions. But the lack of transparency, and the apparent attempts made to hide the donations, are enough to raise suspicions about the democratic process. The article quotes Otago University’s Andrew Geddis about the importance of the public knowing who funds parties: “Unless we’re able to see who was putting money into the system, and then see who’s getting benefits out of the system – you simply aren’t able to draw those connections and ask, you know, is there a problem?”

Geddis is also quoted in another article by RNZ’s Espiner and Newton, saying information about donations is “very important for the public to know” in a democracy “where we’re entrusting political parties and their representatives with a great deal of public power” – see: Wealthy and powerful NZ First Foundation donors revealed.

This article also provides further details of how the mysterious NZ First Foundation raised more than $300,000 in the 2017-19 period in the form of donations of around $15,000 or just under. The $15,000 figure is the threshold for when donations have to be made public. Espiner and Newton point out that “in some cases, multiple such donations were made by related entities or individuals during a year”. The possibility exists that larger donations might have been broken into smaller donations to evade the law.

Winston Peters hit back, doing a Facebook Live Q+A on Wednesday night in which he argued that “donors to the New Zealand First Foundation are entitled to keep identities secret” if the sums involved are under the threshold – see Derek Cheng’s Winston Peters says donors are entitled to anonymity. Peters added that such donations are necessary “if we don’t have such a system of public fundraising, taxpayers would have to pay and we’re diametrically opposed to that”.

In terms of the Government’s racing industry reforms, Peters said: “no one is buying any policy here” because as Minister of Racing he had simply implemented an independent racing policy. And he’s been backed up by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who says accusations on this are “not fair”. She has said: “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.”

National’s finance spokesperson Paul Goldsmith has called for some reassurance that money isn’t buying policy: “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” – see Jo Moir’s Winston Peters on Foundation donations: ‘I did not receive any money’.

In this article, Shane Jones is reported as arguing that the controversy is just a witch hunt against the party, and denies racing or fisheries policy is for sale: “No, I think that’s really petty to talk to like that… I’ve been a recipient of Sealord’s and the Dalmatian leadership in terms of fisheries, and I resent any suggestion that decisions or statements I make about fisheries are driven because of donations.”

Some defence of the arrangements are also found in Barry Soper’s column yesterday – see: Winston Peters’ Trumpian moment. He relays Peters’ point about why he’s helping the racing industry: “he’s fought for the survival of the industry for the last 30 years, he told us. Significant changes to it last year came from a review of it by an overseas, independent advisor who said it needed urgent reform and would be irreparably damaged if it wasn’t carried out.”

Soper points out that other political parties also take donations from sectors that expect policy wins – for example, “the significant support of the trade union movement for Labour. And they don’t do that for nothing, neither does the racing industry for Winston Peters or big business for the National Party which gets the lion’s share of donations.” He concludes that party donations “should be seen for what they really are, paying for the sympathetic ear of a lawmaker.”

Jacinda Ardern has also defended NZ First’s connection to the racing industry on the basis that is “no secret to anyone in New Zealand that Winston Peters has a strong knowledge, understanding and long-standing connection to the racing industry”.

In response to this, National-aligned blogger David Farrar says: “Yes she is defending NZ First having massive secret donations from the racing industry and in return delivering huge financial windfalls to the racing industry with taxpayer money” – see: Has Jacinda read her own coalition agreement?

Farrar also makes the point that NZ First cared so strongly about their racing policies that they demanded them be installed as part of the coalition agreement: “Jacinda needs to read the Labour and NZ First Coalition agreement. It requires Labour to ‘Support New Zealand First’s Racing policy’. There is no other portfolio which has the agreement requiring the Government to support one party’s entire policy. This shows how massively important it was that NZ First could guarantee to its funders their policies would be implemented.”

Newsroom editor Bernard Hickey says the public should take these racing industry financial connections seriously: “Winston Peters is Racing Minister and has pushed through reforms to the NZ Racing Board and the industry that are expected to see the TAB sold off to Australian betting companies in a way that breeders and trainers want. He has also cut levies paid by the industry” – see: Winston Peters should stand down as Racing Minister.

He argues therefore that “Winston Peters should stand down as Racing Minister, at the very least, while those donations are being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.” Furthermore, “the Government should put its Racing Industry Bill, which is in the select committee stage after its first reading in Parliament last month, on hold.”

Hickey is also interviewed on the whole connection between money and politics in another article, in which he says the lack of transparency that appears to exist in the current arrangements in political finance law means that “the scrum is screwed, if you like, by people who are wealthier than the rest of us and can ask for special favours, and have influence over a project larger than they would have if they were just another citizen who was voting in an election. One of the ways to protect yourself is to make sure everyone knows who’s donated what to whom” – see Alexia Russell’s New Zealand First in party donations furore.

Finally, for the best dissection of the NZ First leader’s eight-minute appearance on Facebook in which he promised to tell the “truth about the NZ First Foundation”, see Ben Thomas’ So many questions as Winston Peters goes live on Facebook.

By Marguerite Afra Sapiie in Jakarta

As tensions intensified between incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto over the expected results in the Indonesia election last week, the rival camps scrambled on their own to prove that their respective candidate was the rightful winner of the poll.

The Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin ticket, which is predicted to win the election as shown by the quick-count results, has even decided to up the ante against Prabowo’s victory claims, as the campaign team publicly opened their own process of final vote counting.

The campaign team also alleged that Prabowo, who had declared himself the new president, citing his own camp’s internal real count, has manipulated the public by not using complete data on the vote counts.

READ MORE: Indonesian election exposes ethnic, religious divides

Jokowi’s camp has employed around 250 people working on three different shifts, 24 hours every day to count the C1 vote tally forms from polling stations across the country in a “war room”, located in Gran Melia hotel in South Jakarta.

The room, which featured TV screens showing real-time vote counting, is open for everyone who wants to monitor the real vote count, Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin campaign team executive Moeldoko said.

-Partners-

“We have nothing to hide here and we want everything to be open, so there won’t be doubts or scepticism anymore […] our mechanism and standards for the real count are also accountable,” Moeldoko said on Sunday.

Similar to the real count by the General Elections Commission (KPU), the team working in the facility counts votes based on a digitised version of the C1 forms, which record the final vote count of each polling station at the district level, from hundreds of thousands of polling booths across Indonesia.

Real time data
The witnesses at all polling stations sent the photo of C1 forms to the team, established under the Witness Directorate of the campaign team, which would input the data in real time. The coordinator of witnesses in each district was responsible for overseeing and clarifying the data sent by the witnesses.

As of 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, the team had input around 23.8 million votes from 119,216 polling stations, or 14 percent of the 813,350 across Indonesia.

The data so far showed that Jokowi-Ma’ruf lead with 56.16 percent against Prabowo-Sandiaga’s 45.84 percent.

Early vote counts conducted by a number of pollsters, including the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Cyrus Network as well as Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) showed the Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin ticket had 54 to 56 percent of the vote against Prabowo-Sandiaga Uno’s 44 to 46 percent.

In a controversial move, the former Army general declared his victory hours after the election and said the camp’s internal real count showed that he had won the race with 62 percent of the vote from over 320,000 polling stations across the country.

Prabowo-Sandiaga Uno campaign team spokesman Andre Rosiade explained that the real count was derived after their witnesses sent the photos of C1 forms to the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team as well as to the headquarters of political parties in the coalition.

Witness Directorate deputy director Lukman Edy, however, said the team had found that Prabowo’s claim was not supported by reliable data and in the revealed cases, the rival camp did not put the results from all polling stations in the province into the equation.

Quick-count results
In Lampung, for instance, the war room has gathered around 50 percent of votes, which put Jokowi in the lead with 57.6 percent against Prabowo’s 42.33 percent. The tally was already similar to quick-count results by pollsters, such as SMRC which put Jokowi at 57.7 percent.

“[Prabowo’s camp] put our votes at 40.91 percent while they won with 59.09 percent [in Lampung]. After we looked into it, turns out they only used data from 30 polling stations,” Lukman said.

A similar situation happened in Jakarta, with Prabowo’s campaign team declaring victory in the province by only counting 300 out of thousands of polling stations, he said.

Prabowo-Sandiaga Uno campaign team spokesperson Dahnil Anzar Simanjuntak said the team did not think too much about the analysis done by Jokowi’s camp, and said they would keep focusing on monitoring the real count. The KPU is expected to announce the final results on May 22.

Meanwhile, in what could be seen as an attempt to diffuse tensions, Jokowi has appointed Luhut Panjaitan — a retired Army general — as his envoy to engage in talks with the Gerindra Party patron.

According to Luhut, he and Prabowo had talked on the phone, describing their conversation as “full of laughter” with “a little bit of nostalgia”.

“Pak Prabowo is a good man […] I know him as a very rational man who can think clearly,” Luhut told journalists on Monday, “So I just want to suggest that he does not listen too much to those whose ideas are somewhat baseless.

“I truly want Pak Prabowo to leave behind a legacy as a leader who participates in strengthening democracy in Indonesia and respects any decision by the KPU,” Luhut said.

Marguerite Afra Sapiie is a Jakarta Post reporter.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

by Dr Bryce Edwards

The Police passing over the National Party’s electoral donation case to the Serious Fraud Office is more than a “bad look”, even though that’s the phrase being used by commentators to describe this latest headache for the National Party and Simon Bridges.

The best coverage of this latest issue can be read in Derek Cheng’s article, Simon Bridges on Serious Fraud Office probe into National donations: ‘My hands are clean’.

And the best analysis so far, comes from electoral law expert Andrew Geddis in his blog post, Simon Bridges, National and the Serious Fraud Office – what does it all mean? In this, Geddis argues that, despite the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) becoming involved, it’s not possible to make judgements about the guilt or otherwise of those involved in this case. But he concludes that the optics are still very bad for National and Bridges: “as any political commentator worth their salt will tell you, not a good look. At all.”

It’s also a “bad look” for the integrity of the political system as a whole. For the public, this will fuel greater suspicion about unethical financial arrangements in New Zealand’s political parties and elections.

It’s likely the current rules and arrangements will now come under more scrutiny. For regardless of what the SFO now does, we are already seeing other revelations and allegations about corrupt practices and the ineffectiveness of the current laws to keep the system honest.

For an immediate indication of this, it’s well worth listening to former politician Peter Dunne comment on political parties and wealthy donors circumventing the electoral law by splitting up large donations into smaller ones. His five-minute interview about this on Magic Talk can be heard here: Ryan Bridge and Peter Dunne discuss Serious Fraud Office investigation.

Dunne makes some stunningly strong allegations about corrupt practices, essentially arguing that all the political parties are guilty of evading electoral law. On being asked about the SFO looking into parties evading the rules, Dunne says: “Every party has done it since time immemorial. So, there will be quite a lot riding on this.”

He explains why the parties might want donors to split their large contributions into smaller amounts: “If I’m a large donor then either I make the donation in a way that protects my anonymity, if that be my wish, or I don’t make it all. But the political parties are keen to get the money, and if someone says ‘I’m happy to donate but I don’t want my name splashed all over the paper’, then it’s almost logical that the parties then say ‘Well here’s a way that you can do it and not have to do it’. Now, is that unethical? I think that some people would say ‘In some senses, yes’. And in other cases there might be very good reasons why someone doesn’t want their name disclosed. It might be that they are giving similar amounts of money to other parties as well, for instance.”

Dunne elaborates on the fact that parties say to potential donors, “Don’t give us one big donation” because he says “people often don’t want to disclose, for various reasons. So, you say to them, ‘Give it to us in a series of smaller donations’. So, if the Serious Fraud Office takes the view that that is fraud, then that will not only affect the National Party but will affect just about every other party as well.”

It has to be remembered that Dunne is an extremely experienced politician, having been in Parliament from 1984 until just 18-months ago. He had a long career in the Labour Party, then as leader of United Future, and also as a Minister in various Labour- and National-led governments. So his knowledge and experience is substantial and credible.

When asked if party donors are often asked to split their large donations into smaller amounts to avoid disclosure, Dunne says, “As a general point the practice was common across political parties.” And he talks about his own experience detecting it: “I can honestly say that I didn’t [know this was happening in United Future] but you could work out after the event when the disclosures are made, you know when the records are declared after the election, you can work out that actually that was a series of donations.”

The interviewer, Ryan Bridge asks Dunne: “So you might have been aware that there was an offer of a big donor and then it comes out in the wash ‘oh look we had ten amounts of ten thousand dollars that equals one hundred, I assume it’s the same guy’.” Dunne replies: “Well I never got a donation that large, but essentially yes.”

Dunne’s account of what appears to be a corrupt practice, is that it is the norm amongst parliamentary parties: “This practice has been more honoured in the breach than anything else. And if the Serious Fraud Office finds that it is a fraudulent behaviour – which will be contradicting the Electoral Commission’s handling of it over the years, incidentally – but if they do, then that will set the cages rattling amongst all the parties, and that may be not a bad thing”.

I’ve responded to Dunne’s interview and talked generally about the latest developments in the donation scandal in an eight-minute interview this morning with Brendan Telfer – see: National Party ‘have major headache’ with Serious Fraud Office.

In this, I argue that “corruption is corruption” and if this is found to be occurring in more than one political party then that’s no defence for anyone who is caught out. I also call for further debate and a review of whether New Zealand’s electoral finance laws are fit for purpose.

After all, the current allegations are not just about a potential “technical” breach of electoral law. Disclosure about who donates large sums of money to politicians and parties can be seen is a fundamental cornerstone of any democracy worth the name. It doesn’t take much to work out why large donors may want to keep their identity secret. Those reasons are precisely why the public is unhappy with donations being made in secret.

Finally, in the case of the National Party, much will hinge on whether the $100,000 that was apparently donated to National was really from one person or many. Did the one wealthy donor essentially divide up the $100,000 and have it distributed to National in these smaller amounts in order to keep the whole donation from having to be declared? Or were all the eight donors that individually gave $12,500 (which combined to $100,000) genuinely using their own money? The first scenario would be a corrupt practice, while the latter would be fine. And the configurations of what went on will determine who has liability if any laws have been broken. For a good discussion of this, see David Farrar’s Donation legality.

Accusations have surfaced alleging the current National Party leadership conspired to politically destroy Jami-Lee Ross – this after details of his affair with a fellow party MP became known to them. The allegations raise serious questions. Those questions include: what did National’s leader and deputy leader know and when did they find out?

A sworn-to timeline of events is now essential so that the public interest can be satisfied. This must be a crucial element that is cemented in to the methodology of Simon Bridges’ inquiry into the culture of the National Party. Above all, it must be independent and publicly accessible.

The inquiry must examine the National leadership team’s actions and culture, test whether they acted in a proper and timely manner, and assess whether their actions considered a concern for the welfare and mental health of an MP they had previously supported, promoted, and embedded within their leadership team.

It follows that allegations suggesting a “hit job” was orchestrated from inside the National Party leadership must also be independently explored.

If the inquiry finds that either the leader, or deputy leader, was part of a destructive and inhumane attack on Jami-Lee Ross – while it was known that he was at high risk of being pushed over the edge, was ill, and verging on suicide – and that they acted without reasonable regard for his welfare, then it must be accepted by the National Party caucus, its membership and the public, that this National leadership team is at the very least morally bankrupt.

This inquiry ought to be conducted amidst a background whereby Ross declared his role in the destructive side of politics; following the orders of Sir John Key, Bill English, Paula Bennett and Simon Bridges. Ross was afterall a ‘numbers man’ for Bridges, and benefitted from the patronage that the Bridges-Bennett leadership team offered.

There are a number of ‘ifs’ in this analysis, but the public interest demands that they be considered.

The allegations have surfaced on the blog-site Whaleoil which is owned and edited by controversial writer Cameron Slater.

Some may dismiss the allegations on the basis of tribalism, or ignore the allegations because Slater was centrally involved in National’s so called Dirty Politics as revealed in 2014. But the nature of the allegations are as serious as they get in politics, and, if accurate played a part in the sudden deterioration of Jami-Lee Ross’ mental health, the sectioning of Ross for his own protection, and the erasion of credibility of a potential political opponent who was determined to continue as a critical member of New Zealand’s Parliament.

This analysis’ argument suggests any such bias, on behalf by Cameron Slater’s opponents, ought to be ethically and morally put aside until such a time as the truth and facts are tested. Such an inquiry, preferably judicial but essentially independent, must be robust and critical in its analysis.

To reiterate; numerous elements of this saga elevate the issues to a matter of serious public interest.

And it must be noted at this juncture, that the party’s leader Simon Bridges insists he has acted appropriately and denies taking part in any political “hit job”.

Let’s examine what Evening Report has learned from contacts close to events.

Alleged details of events between Saturday-Sunday October 20-21

There is a txt-chain of events that investigators can forensically examine that are central to understanding who was involved in the sectioning of Jami-Lee Ross.

If the txts are examined they will determine if it is fact that the National Party MP, with whom Jami-Lee Ross had a three-year affair, rang the Police and that as a consequence of that call the Police used mental health laws to take Jami-Lee Ross into custody and contain him within the mental health unit at Counties Manukau Health.

Txts will also show whether it is fact that the female MP then called Simon Bridges’ chief of staff at 9:15pm on Saturday October 20 informing him of the events. If so Bridges’ office was aware of an alleged suicide attempt. Investigators would then be able to assess whether a txt message from Jami-Lee Ross’ psychologist, who Evening Report understands messaged Jami-Lee Ross at 9:28pm on Saturday October 20, asking if he was ok, and that the psychologist had minutes prior received a txt message from Jamie Gray, Simon Bridges’ chief of staff.

It is a matter of public record that Simon Bridges appeared on NewsHub’s AM Show on Tuesday October 23, denying all knowledge of events on the Saturday night – that is until a wider grouping within the National Party became privy to what had happened to Jami-Lee Ross.

It appears reasonable to form an opinion that Bridges’ chief of staff would have informed the leader of such an event. If he didn’t, why didn’t he inform Bridges?

The sectioning of Jami-Lee Ross ended a week where many National Party MPs, and a wider network of those loyal to the party, appeared to be actively orchestrating a coordinated campaign to destroy the so-called rogue MP’s political chances and to discredit his claims of corruption within the National Party leadership. Had Jami-Lee Ross abused his position as the senior whip within the party? It certainly appears so. Did he abuse the power he was afforded? Media reports would suggest this was so. Did he have an affair with at least two women? Yes. But it appears that the public attacks began, not at the time when senior members of the party were informed of Ross’ actions, but, once Ross began to attack the leadership. This is significant.

An Opposition’s Role As The Public’s Advocate

As senior representatives of New Zealand’s Legislature, leader Simon Bridges and deputy leader Paula Bennett can arguably be regarded as the public’s advocates within Parliament. Their job is to keep the Executive Government on its toes, challenge its policy and rationale, to be Parliament’s keepers of the public’s interest.

As such, the public deserves to know if the leaders, as a team or individually, conspired to destroy the political chances of an MP and former colleague, who they considered to have gone rogue, and who they knew was suffering a crisis of mental health so serious that it could have ended in death.

It is in consideration of the public interest, that this editorial is written.

We now know as fact, Jami-Lee Ross had a three year affair with a South Island-based National MP.[name withheld]. Like him, she has two children and was married.

While the affair was going ‘well’, contacts inside the National Party have told Evening Report that Jami-Lee encouraged Bridges to promote his lover above her standing and reputation in caucus, well above some high profile MPs like National’s Chris Bishop who are respected among colleagues and media and seen to have been doing their job well. The promotion was seen to give leverage, to sure up the numbers to stabilise Bridges’ and Bennett’s leadership team at a time when they sensed support was delicate.

Meanwhile, Jami-Lee Ross continued to pull in big donations from wealthy Chinese residents in his Botany electorate. As a reward, Bridges embedded him into his inner core, the top three. Politically, this is really an unsound move by a political leader. With Ross being senior whip, he is supposed to be directed by the leader to pull MPs into line, to do the leader’s bidding, and to do this without necessarily knowing the deep and dark details underlying the leader’s moves.

In effect, with Jami-Lee Ross becoming a central figure, knowing all the details, the dirt, the strategy and tactics, it centralised too much power into the whip position and elevated a real danger of a whip using the position for his own gain. To reiterate, this appears a seriously stupid move of Bridges and Bennett to pull a whip in on their machinations. And, in a significant contact’s view, it appears they risked this because Jami-Lee was pulling in the donor money.

Jami-Lee Ross had been on the rise for a time. Former Prime Minister John Key promoted him to the whips office. Then PM Bill English secured Ross’s rise by maintaining and elevating his whip role. Bridges and Bennett further empowered Jami-Lee Ross by cementing him into the whip position, a move that suggested National’s power-politicians were well satisfied with his service.

It’s hard to tell how far back it was when Jami-Lee Ross began to record Bridges. And, at this juncture, it’s difficult to know if he recorded Bennett as well. The public is left to fathom whether it was when his affair with the National MP went sour and perhaps Ross sensed Bennett having become close to her.

In any event, when Jami-Lee Ross fell out with his colleague and lover, sources say Bennett played a crucial role in the analysis of his conduct, in particular women who had allegedly been burned by Ross. Two women, contacts inside National state, were staff of the National Party leader. The MP (whom Ross had a three-year affair with) and the two staff members are said by National Party contacts to be the subject of NewsRoom.co.nz’s investigation into Ross’ activities, an investigation that is believed to have spanned up to one year in duration. Evening Report raises this aspect as the public interest demands to consider whether it is reasonable to believe that two staffers in the leader’s office never told nor informed Bridges, or the chief of staff, that they were cooperating in a media investigation into the leader’s chief and senior whip?

Contacts state that Bennett gained the women’s confidence, received information so it could be prepared as part of a disciplinary process. Did Bennett choose to engage media with this information? If so, once media received the information, what involvement did the deputy leader have or continue to have, or engage with, the complainants and media?

Sources inside National state Bennett then seeded info about Jami-Lee Ross having had an affair. They point to her having hinted at behaviour unbecoming of a married member of Parliament during an interview before TV, radio and print journalists. Did she do this without Bridges knowing or being forewarned.

If true, in effect, this would have driven the narrative ahead of the leader. If so, it is reasonable to fathom that a senior politician would know Bridges would be forced to defend the character-attack campaign that appeared orchestrated and designed to destroy Ross. Amidst the firestorm, National MP Maggie Barry spoke out against Ross with significant indignation. This will have been digested by the public that National had expelled a human predator from its midst. It also gave the impression National’s female caucus members were unified. However, respected MP Nikki Kaye kept out of it. Why?

Next, Bridges was forced to field political journalists’ questions about breaking the old convention that you keep affairs and family issues under the covers.

Bridges was then compelled to inform media that he had “told off” his deputy leader for giving credence that an affair had been ongoing between Ross and a Nat MP. This made Bridges look even weaker.

The future of National’s leadership

National Party contacts suggest Bridges is positioned where he will be forced to absorb the political fallout for what is seen by some as a character assassination campaign gone wrong. One contact states that once Bridges is rendered useless, and the issue dies down, Bennett herself will be well positioned to remove Bridges as leader in 2019.

It is reasonable to form an opinion that senior National MP Judith Collins will also be available if the leadership were to fall vacant. Her popularity is again on the rise.

At this juncture, for Bridges and Bennett, it appears wise for them to expect more National Party dirt to emerge before the end of the year. Evening Report’s sources say: “ample dirt lingers just below the surface.”

For a party that once stated it had no factions, it certainly seems its personality factions are now in all-out political warfare.

Judith Collins’ star has been rising since she returned to the front-bench in opposition. And it has been bolstered by a favourable Colmar Brunton Poll. It’s fair to suggest she has laid heavy hits on Labour’s Housing Minister Phil Twyford. As a consequence, her standing within the caucus has improved. On investigation, it is clear she has not had the loyalty of Jami-Lee Ross since he was promoted by John Key. He, along with Mark Mitchell, then supported Bill English for the leadership. Bennett and Mitchell are politically close. It does appear that moves by some media to connect Jami-Lee Ross’ revelations with a Judith Collins plan as not based on fact.

While there’s an expectation among interested public that Collins will be the next leader, she will need the support of what’s left of National’s social conservatives and those loyal to Nikki Kaye.

For Collins to succeed, she will have to be seen to inoculate the party from damaging information that may be in the possession of Jami-Lee Ross. All the while, she, like Bennett, needs Bridges to continue to fail as a leader.

It is fair to accept, the recordings and damaging information are now with Cam Slater and Simon Lusk. It is also reasonable to suggest that Bridges is a disappointment to some who once supported his bid for leadership. Cam Slater is clearly appalled at what he refers to as a “hit job”.

Slater is adamant that he is not motivated by an agenda, nor by a pitch by a fiscal conservative faction to gain leadership of the National party. Rather he said, he is motivated to help an old friend who the current leadership moved to destroy. He added on his blog-site, if the current leadership continues “to lie” he will continue to reveal the truth.

Meanwhile, Jami-Lee Ross is being reassured and cared for by a mutual friend of his and Slater’s who is a pastor with the Seventh Day Adventists.

Contacts say, with regard to Jami-Lee Ross and his National Party former lover and colleague, the three year affair was a relationship that in the end didn’t deliver what either banked on – despite promotions and connections and having benefitted politically from their association.

It’s fair to say, Jami-Lee Ross was out of his experiential depth and in part abusive from the point of view of how to handle political power, networks and consensual relationships.

Two other women who laid complaints about Ross, worked in the leader’s office.

Bridges is adamant he didn’t know about the abuse of power nor the complaints. Did Bennett know? At what point was she privy to the information?

One National Party contact said: “It defies reasonable belief that Bridges didn’t know.”

It is right that Bridges has initiated an inquiry into National’s culture. But that in itself falls short or what the public interest demands. Why? Because the inquiry reports back to Bridges, who as leader may well be one of the protagonists. Also, the report will not be released to the public which leaves it as a golden prize, the holy grail, for any journalist and, irrespective of who it damns or exonerates, will become a currency for any MP with leadership ambitions.

As it now stands, Bridges’ worst nightmare must be not knowing what Jami-Lee Ross recorded and at what point did he begin taping the National Party leader’s conversations.

If those recordings contain further embarrassing or damaging content and references, then he will be finished as leader. Bridges, as leader, even if he has a clear conscience, must be wracking his memory as to past conversations and comments while knowing the conversations may be in the hands of people with whom he has lost their trust.

And the question remains unanswered: Was Paula Bennett recorded as well?

If her actions are found by inquirers to have led an orchestrated political response to Jami-Lee Ross’ revelations, whether that be at the behest or otherwise of the current leader, then this will destroy any higher ambitions that she may have ever contemplated.

It follows, that if the report concludes that the rot inside National extends to its current leadership, then it may well be that Judith Collins will become the leader of the National Party, unopposed.

Whatever the future holds for the National Party, it is in everyone’s interests that an independent judicial investigation into this National affair be conducted in a spirit of openness and propriety.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Evening Report invites any individual connected to this analysis to have a right of reply. Footnote: Interview between the author and Jami-Lee Ross on his role as a new National Party MP (August 13 2012):