In the heat of the moment, one of the attack lines used against Kim Dotcom was that he was trying to buy the election. Turns out that National spent more than KDC did, but National’s buying of the election doesn’t even rate as an issue…
Donations to the National Party in 2014 jumped by more than half on the 2011 election year, as the party’s fundraiser outgunned Kim Dotcom’s largesse.
On Tuesday the Electoral Commission revealed the annual party returns, disclosing every donation registered political parties received over $1500, as well as totals for anonymous donations.
The National Party declared donations of $3.98 million, 55 per cent more than the $2.57m it raised in 2011.
…the double standards of NZ politics always favour the right. Helen Clark signs a painting she didn’t paint and that’s a major event. Key’s Office falsifies and colludes with the SIS to smear the Leader of the Opposition months before an election and nothing. ACT and National use coat tailing feature of MMP for 20 years and hardly a whimper, Internet-MANA try it and it’s an affront to Western Democracy. National outspend Kim Dotcom in the election, but it’s not National framed as buying the election.
National’s excuse will be its all in the past now, we have to focus on the future now…blah blah waffle blah, etc.
The sleepy hobbits will open their eyes for a few minutes, blink a few times and go back to their blissfully ignorant slumber.
Let’s be clear what transNational and ACT did in the last election (and UF for that matter) wasn’t coat-tailing, it was more subtle and invidious than that.
Coat-tailing brings in a number of List MPs by enabling the party vote that didn’t reach 5% through achieving the threshold via an electorate seat.
It was very clear from polling that ACT would not get enough party votes to bring in more than one MP. The coat-tailing effect would have no advantage as they’d only get the electorate seat and no more from the list.
However, the mechanism they used added an extra seat to the NACT bloc. If Epsom had a transNational electorate their total NACT seats would be determined by the party vote alone. By adding the the faux transNational seat of ACT in Epsom they finagle an extra seat.
Given the recent Northland by-election we could be in a very different situation without this ploy.
Note: The proposed change to the coat-tailing provisions won’t close this loophole.
A new rule is required along the lines of “the party vote for a party must achieve at least 0.8% (roughly 1/120) for any electorate MP to be elected”. Under that rule, ACT and UF wouldn’t have got into parliament.
So you’re proposing to disenfranchise independents with strong local support? Nope, this will never fly.
The trick is for minor party supporters to vote Labour or National in electorates where they try to pull this shit. If they’d voted National in Epsom and Labour in Ohariu we wouldn’t be in this situation. Vote with your beliefs for your party vote, but vote tactically for your electoral vote.
I prefer Single Transferable Vote with 5-7 member electorates like they have in Ireland, but try explaining how it works to someone at the pub…. that’s the main reason it lost to MMP in the referendum.
Yes @Robert STV is a far better system and doesn’t have the anomalies of MMP.
Having both electorate MPs and list MPs and treating them as equivalent is a fundamental flaw in MMP.
MMP is a proportional representation system that is supposed to reflect in parliamentary seat allocation the votes at the ballot box but also limit the proliferation of small parties (to prevent tail wags dog). However, it is failing to do that in NZ. Given it s a flawed system, we are left with tinkering to try and overcome its anomalies. Best option would be to replace with STV but that’s unlikely as the debate gets cast between MMP and FPP/SM.
My immediate reaction was “disenfranchising is bad” but in the flawed MMP system someone (or some many) are going to be disenfranchised, that’s inevitable but maybe we can limit attempts to game the system.
In the 2014 election results, you can see that over 150,000 party votes were “wasted” i.e. disenfranchised, in fact worse than that they were distributed among the parties that reached the threshold (if you and 9 of your mates voted for a party that didn’t meet the threshold e.g. Conservative, IMP then 5 of your 10 votes went to National when allocating seats in the house).
So, disenfranchising is already happening and it’s happening big time. When 150,000 voters get “wasted votes” that are allocated to parties they didn’t vote for and voters in Epsom and Ohariu effectively get two party votes and the rest of the country only gets one then that voting system is not fulfilling its promise of giving us a parliament that properly reflects the vote.
When the party vote is the so-called more important vote then if disenfranchising strong local support is the price of fairer representation then I think it should be paid.
But Dotcom was a kraut left over from the last war whereas NACT funders are the backbone of the country; kiwi property speculators, parasites and FJK cronies foaming at the mouth for the next war.
Kim Dotcom is highly respected overseas and rightfully so. Listen to what Max Keiser has to say about him on his show on RT.com. I applaud Kim for his efforts in trying to expose the Dirty Politics along with Julian Assange ; Glenn Greenwald ; Leila Harre; Hone etc. These are people of integrity and they tried to help this country see the light and the truth.
New Zealand has been fed a bunch of lies and BS over Kim Dotcom.
Most are dead wrong about him and need to seek out the truths. What Kim is involved in right now is incredible and most have no idea at all what is going on with him nor how embarrassing it was – the way in which our govt. treated him and mislabeled him. John Key is dead wrong about Kim Dotcom and AGAIN this proves what a bafoon Jonkey is.
RT is one of the best and we need to bring our public MSM up to RT standards not the crappy right leaning TVNZ/RNZ we gat served up daily dripping with Joyce propaganda it is so sick I don’t watch much of it any more now.
It is well-known that the more donations a party gets the better its chances of winning. That is unsurprising. So the party of Big Business is always going to out-spend the other parties. Such a system is clearly undemocratic so needs to be changed. What we need is for every registered party to be given a State donation for every vote that it wins. When I was in Australia that was the system in operation and the donation then was $1.60 per vote, I think. Private donations are then strictly controlled.
Whenever this idea is suggested here the voters reject it because “no-one in their right mind will give politicians anything”. The voters cannot see that the alternative practically guarantees right wing governments. As long as we have such blind voters nothing can change in this country.
Mass collection of data by nsa
ruled illegal in us….time to make it illegal in NZ now!
Martyn, the article you link to is not about spending, it is about donation income.
A full analysis of Party spending is available at http://www.elections.org.nz/events/2014-general-election/2014-parties-candidates-and-third-parties/party-expenses-returns-2014, and shows that National spent $2,556,473, compared to IP’s $320,087. Labour spent $1,269,299, which was actually less than the Greens spending!
In my opinion the concern most NZ’ers had with IMP was not so much the amount spent, but rather that it was funded entirely by one individual, and was seen, rightly or wrongly, as that individuals vehicle to drive a personal agenda.
The case against megaupload is watertight. Megaupload did upload copyrighted material. And whatever you think of Kim Dotcom that’s a fact. Not only did megaupload upload copyrighted material knowing it was copyrighted but it was the reason megaupload got off the ground in the first place. Also megaupload conspired with third party sites to have links to files on megaupload placed on those site. Hence the conspiracy charges. Again, this is fact not opinion.
So it’s only a matter of time before Kim Dotcom will be required to leave the country. Unless of course he managed to gain enough political influence to get the minister of justice to tell him he could stay.
I agree. And I believe most NZer’s saw it exactly the way implied in your last sentence.
Errr. The Nats had $ donated by supporters – Dotcom threw millions of $ at whoever he thought he could buy to skew an election. There’s your difference. What was your point again? Really…. C’monnn. Slow news day?
And where does Colin Craig fit into this picture you paint?
While I’m not a fan of any single individual ‘owning’ a political party, I can certainly see a difference between Colin Craig and Kim DotCom, and that difference is well articulated in Kevin’s comment above.
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