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

The number of voices raising concerns about the Government’s Fast-Track Approvals Bill is rapidly growing. This is especially apparent now that Parliament’s select committee is listening to submissions from the public to evaluate the proposed legislation.

Twenty-seven thousand submissions have been made to Parliament about the bill. This is one of the highest numbers ever submitted about legislation, which reflects how community anger is growing against the controversial bill.

Background to the bill

The Government’s Fast-Track Bill has been created to help speed up and streamline the ability to build things in New Zealand. Everything from dams to roads to housing developments are expected to be put through this new mechanism which essentially bypasses New Zealand’s relatively slow and challenging resource consenting processes.

Most controversially, the new mechanism empowers three ministers to make the final decisions on infrastructure proposals. Those ministers merely have to be convinced that an application contains “significant regional or national benefits”. In agreeing to a project, the ministers can override the expert panel assisting them as well as existing environmental laws.

I’ve already written about the processes in these three columns:

1. The Government’s new fast-track invitation to corruption
2. Time for “Fast-Track Watch”
3. The Case for the Government’s Fast Track Bill

The Select Committee process

The Government introduced the Fast Track Approvals Bill into Parliament for its first reading in March. It now has to be examined by a select committee, which will report back on its recommendations on September 7.

The bill is currently being considered by the Environmental Select Committee, which has allocated six weeks to consider public submissions and presentations. However, due to the extremely large number of submissions, the select committee has had to cut back on hearing from everyone.

Of the 27,000 submitters, about 2900 have requested to appear before the select committee to discuss their feedback on the bill. Given these vast numbers, a decision has been made to restrict oral submissions to just 1100. The Committee has decided to allow appearances from 550 organisations who want to speak to the committee. They will get ten minutes each.

Regarding the individuals, 2,350 submitters have requested to be heard at the hearings, but only 550 appointments will be made. To decide who gets these, the committee has opted for a ballot to be used as a mechanism for random selection. Some higher-profile individuals, such as former MPs, will be automatically selected. All individuals are being allocated five minutes each.

The opposition parties have opposed curtailing the process, saying that the hearing schedule should be extended to accommodate all the requests.

Green MP Lan Pham says: “I think the fact that this bill runs across so much other legislation, and impacts so much of what we understand, and sort of like, the legislative baseline of how Aotearoa works, we thought that it was really important that everyone got to have their say” – see Giles Dexter’s RNZ report today, Fast-track submissions: Hundreds will miss out on speaking at committee

Similarly, Labour’s Rachel Brooking says that it’s even more vital to hear the submissions than usual: “one of the things that the bill does is stops public participation and processes where there normally would be public participation. So it’s even more important that those people are heard”.

As the RNZ report explains, the chair of the committee – National’s David MacLeod – points out the Fast Track Bill has attracted an exceptionally high level of individual submissions that are essentially just duplicates of the templates that organisations like Forest & Bird and the Environmental Defence Society encouraged their supporters to send in. MacLeod says: “clearly, a form submission, once you’ve read one, you’ve read the whole lot. It doesn’t particularly add more value to that process.”

The situation has been labelled “absurd” by veteran political journalist Richard Harman. In his daily email newsletter yesterday, Harman criticised “pressure groups” trying to “flood” the parliamentary process with low-quality submissions. Although the process should involve “depth and time spent questioning submitters”, according to Harman, this won’t occur.

Submissions mostly oppose the Fast Track Bill

It is clear that the vast majority of submissions oppose the Fast Track Bill—mostly because thousands of individuals have submitted them at the urging of various environmental groups. Of course, there is something of a dichotomy in which environmental groups oppose the bill and business groups support it.

Yet this dichotomy has been less apparent than might be expected. So far, several business and farmer groups have provided some critique and recommended significant changes to the bill.

The Employers and Manufacturers Association presented to the committee yesterday. Although they support the bill in general, they criticise it and say it is vital that the new processes are only temporary. This is best covered by Richard Harman’s article today, Our slow regional councils (paywalled)

Harman reports that Alan MacDonald representing the Employers Association at the select committee hearings, and said the real answer to the problem with consenting processes was to replace the existing Resource Management Act with a new environmental consenting process that had buy-in from all: “that’s something that we need to agree on cross-party and very quickly.”

MacDonald explained that his lobby group had been working with environmentalists such as the Environmental Defence Society to progress this, and he didn’t want to see the Fast Track Act deflect from this urgency. Therefore, he suggested that the legislation should contain a subset clause to ensure the Fast Track doesn’t become permanent or stick around too long.

The Association also expressed discomfort with ministers making final decisions on resource consents, saying that “We’ve had them in the past, and they’ve been challenged all the way to the High Court and beyond, where they have been gotten wrong on both sides of the House.”

According to Harman, MacDonald also criticised the bill in what it proposed for the makeup of the various authorities involved in the new consents process: “We do think that the panel and both the ministerial side and the advisory panel could do with a bit more balance, perhaps including the Minister of Environmental Conservation and also in the advisory panels.”

The presentation yesterday from Federated Farmers was also surprising. Although they support the Bill’s objectives, they have serious concerns, especially around excluding the public from the Fast-Track decision-making process. The farmers’ group emphasised the importance of “fair process” and the community’s ability to feed into decisions, especially if infrastructure projects involve private land use.

Harman reported that the Federation’s principal policy advisor, Natasha Berkett, said broader community consultation and debate were needed: “These types of projects don’t occur in isolation; they occur in communities… And, if people feel that land has been taken in an inappropriate way or a process has not occurred in an appropriate way, then there can be a lot of discord around that project. And that leads to this loss of social license and lack of support for the project as well.”

For more on business critiques of the Fast-Track, see Fox Meyer’s Newsroom article, Mining lobby: Fast-track bill’s ministerial powers ‘not unusual’ 

This reports that Meridan Energy, as with Federated Farmers, opposes the concentration of decision-making powers in Cabinet, “suggesting that the final say ought to rest with the expert panel.”

Likewise, for more on Federated Farmers’ submission and why they are reluctant to support it, see Fox Meyer’s Federated Farmers’ support for fast-track bill ‘ambiguous’

Environmentalists passionate opposed

Unsurprisingly, environmental organisations have been presenting the most passionate submissions against the Fast-Track. One group that stood out in their presentation yesterday was the Friends of Pākiri Beach, who have spent years trying to stop sand mining in the waters off their beach. They have had successes in the Environment Court but are concerned that companies such as McCallum Bros, who have also submitted in favour of the bill, will get the green light despite their previous failures to obtain consent.

The submission of the Friends of Pākiri Beach, amongst others, was covered yesterday in RNZ’s Pākiri residents would be ‘crushed’ if sand mining fast-tracked, committee told

For a more in-depth look at the campaign of these environmentalists and why they’re worried about the new bill, see Farah Hancock’s RNZ report, Why Pākiri locals fear the Government’s Fast Track Bill could steal away protection of their pristine coastline

But for the most passionate and articulate environmental submission on the bill, it’s worth reading Anne Salmond’s: My open submission on this radical, flawed fast-track bill

She concludes that New Zealanders, once they realise how the legislation favours companies over communities, will realise “that like the economy, Parliament is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, and our democracy is broken. Around the world, we can see what happens when this kind of cynicism and anger is ignited. It’s a frightening prospect.”

Finally, one of the main objections to the Fast-Track is about the influence of vested interests and the need for more transparency in businesses lobbying ministers to get their projects pushed through. And today, Newsroom’s David Williams reports that there are good reasons to doubt that the processes will be transparent and above board – pointing to the interactions between one potential Fast-Track applicant and one of the ministers who will have the power to grant consents – see: Jones suggested fast-track bid at undeclared dinner (paywalled)

According to this report, the Minister for Resources, Shane Jones, had dinner with a coal mining company boss, Barry Bragg, on the West Coast in February. Jones didn’t record the meeting in his officially released ministerial diaries because he says it was an unscheduled “last-minute” event. Three days later, Bragg wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure Christopher Bishop and said: I had dinner with Resources and Regional Development Minister Shane Jones last Friday and he suggested I write to you to ask that the Te Kuha coal project be considered for listing in the fast-track and one-stop shop bill.”

The article also reports the response of Forest & Bird’s advocacy group manager, Richard Capie, who says the fast-track legislation “opens the gateway to unbridled lobbying” and “This letter represents the tip of the iceberg.”

Dr Bryce Edwards

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

“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)