The incompetence of the Serious Fraud Office is breath-taking.
Faced with a simple case of electoral donation abuses by the New Zealand First Foundation, the SFO prosecuted foundation officials under the Crimes Act with charges designed to catch fraud and theft for personal gain. But there was no personal gain – just a brazen abuse of our electoral laws which require political parties to inform us when big donors provide political donations.
The New Zealand First Foundation were not operating a criminal ring to steal money donated to a political party – they were operating a deliberate, savage attack on our democracy by protecting their big donors from being publicly identified.
The SFO prosecution of the New Zealand First Foundation failed on Friday.
Big political party donors typically don’t want to be identified and the New Zealand First Foundation skirted electoral law to protect their identity. When big figures in the racing and fishing industries and people who don’t want a Capital Gains Tax are digging deep into their pockets for New Zealand First then we need to know – in fact we have a right to know. When there are close connections between donations and policy implementations there is an even greater imperative for us to know.
New Zealand First didn’t tell us and the SFO failed to protect our democratic right to know.
The SFO stuffed it up. It was so incompetent it almost looks as though the SFO are running a protection racket for those abusing our electoral laws.
It refused to prosecute another blatant abuse of democracy by Christchurch Mayoral candidate Lianne Dalziel after the 2019 local body election when Dalziel was exposed as filing a false electoral expenses return which didn’t identity the biggest donors to her election campaign.
Dalziel should have been required to put forward her flimsy defence in court (“my husband was to blame”) and been subjected to cross-examination but the SFO weren’t interested.
Our electoral laws are a shambles – designed to look reasonable but open to frequent and systematic abuse by our main political parties (National and Labour are also before the courts for electoral law breaches) It is in their interests to provide a wide range of loopholes to protect their biggest donors from being identified.
These loopholes are big enough for the political party busses from New Zealand First, National and Labour to drive through them without touching the sides – and without anyone knowing.
Labour’s proposed electoral law changes are weak and pathetic and should be abandoned.
This whole question of political party donations must come out of parliament and be decided through an independent inquiry. We can’t trust party politicians or government officials to protect democracy from big business influence. Just last week the Justice Department said it would not be making the Labour Party submission to its proposed electoral law changes public (National agreed for their submission to be made public) but it would release submissions from other groups and individuals. Outrageous. Just who is protecting who here?
We have no idea who is paying big money for big political favours via our political parties. It’s time we did.
Our electoral laws are toothless to the point that they can be broken with impunity. Be it advertising meetings or welcoming New Year in full party hoardings outside of election time frames to dodgy donations, all offenders are safe. Maybe that is why they went the Crimes Act route?
Interestingly I read that Siouxsie Wiles who has been the subject of some negative campaign by NZME in respect of the $20k NZ OnAir funding found that NZME had been on the receiving end of $8.5 million for Covid funding, has never paid it back and made an increased profit accordingly. Hypocrisy, yes, it stinks, definitely but does all this public generosity gifted to the most influential media outlet in Auckland possibly the country benefit Labour? Yep. Does it tame any head winds questioning them. Hard not to conclude that.
There’s many ways of rorting the system. NZ First was just more blatant!
I heard on Media Watch last night about the beat up over the Siouxsie Wiles money. In fact it was never ever $20,000 what is more NZME knew about this a long time ago. The money was for loading docs. and it was about $5000. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Still what do you expect from ‘munchie’ radio and the Herald.
More National party Dirty Politics, it has a Cam Slater flavour to it.
I mostly agree, John, but it would be naive to think that regulating direct political party donations would solve our corruption problems. Rick p***ks might have to pay small parties NZF up front, but your John Keys and David Cunliffes can count on getting paid later for their services.
Yes so true.
But then frankly they all get paid later with nice jobs – that fool who was the speaker on the highest salary of anyone in The House gets given a top job. And of course the Louisa Wall with her job in the pacific, offered before she came into parliament this time so they could get rid of her.
Well past time that politicians get plum jobs that are government funded.
Mr Minto has got to the core of this situation in mere a few paragraphs, unlike the thousands of words expended by the msm since the NZ First Foundation story became public several years back. The SFO was the wrong authority using the wrong legal framing to ever identify the actual problem here–namely, ANONYMITY for undue influence on NZ’s political process and outcomes by arseholes with deep pockets.
From National’s hidden trusts to Brethren and Destiny interference to dirty social media campaigns and paid tory mouths for hire on ZB, the average voter is up against a very powerful right wing filth pump on turbo boost.
Add in the National Party’s NZ Herald and the donors backing the propaganda their paper espouses, it’s hardly surprising N.Z. has such a biased right wing media. Hard not to conclude that.
yep when half the world’s money is tied up in hidden trusts controlled by ‘economists’ and ‘accountants’ and spinners of bullshit, God knows who they work for, some fellowship with the victorian values of a character straight out of a Dickens novel. http://mileswmathis.com/dickens.pdf
Seems like the developers, transport, fisheries, supermarkets and local and foreign lobbyists OWN our government and government agencies.
Most of NZ’s failing policy seems to be heavily influenced by certain bloated and dysfunctional industries, thus the rise in corporate welfare.
Just look at Talleys.
“Talley’s has donated to political campaigns in the past. When NZ First candidate Shane Jones was a Labour MP he declared donations of $10,000 apiece from Sealord and Talley’s. The Sunday Star-Times understands Talley’s is also helping fund Jones’ Whangarei campaign for NZ First.
During the 2014 election candidate donations shows Talley’s contributed $42,500 to the campaigns of nine candidates (mostly National) standing for regional seats.
Three of these – Chester Borrows, Stuart Smith and Damien O’Connor (the only Labour recipient) – are members of Parliament’s Primary Industries Select Committee. Each received $5000.”
NZ political parties should not be allowed to take any donations or do any fund raising, they should get a set amount from the taxpayer for marketing and keep it about policy not spin and make the MP’s themselves pay 10% of their salaries to the party as a donation, which used to be a Green Party initiative.
Likewise no public servant should earn more than the PM, thus water care and the alarming amounts of CEO’s in NZ working supposedly for taxpayers on $650,000 p/a plus, should by law only be allowed to go up to around $400k.
The transcripts from the Natz scandal are enlightening how appalling this actually is.
Attack Adds.
“I say we want to do some more attack ads – say we want to do another regional fuel one, say we want to do an industrial relations one. We just want to keep doing those things, right?”
Race and donation influenced list MP seats.
“SB: I mean, it’s like all these things, it’s bloody hard, you’ve only got so much space. Depends where we’re polling, you know? All that sort of thing. Two Chinese would be nice, but would it be one Chinese or one Filipino, or one – what do we do?
JLR: Two Chinese would be more valuable than two Indians, I have to say.
SB: Which is what we’ve got at the moment, right? Your problem there is you end up in a shit fight because you’ve got a list MP – you’ve got two list MPs – it’s a pretty mercenary cull – sitting MPs, all that shit. And then we’ve got the issue of – we could end up getting rid of some list MPs if we want and bringing in some of those new ones, and if you do that you’re just filling up your list even further with ones that you’ve gotta sort of look after – I mean I reckon there’s two or three of our MPs, not picking up obvious ones like Finlayson or Carter, but actually we just want them to go. You know? Like Maureen Pugh is fucking useless.”
@savenz I was looking for this very interchange of dirty politics to post for Sour Kraut but couldn’t remember the search criteria, so thanks for your post. I need to get a copy of Andrea Vance’s Blue blood to put on my shelf next to “The Hollow Men”
Too many people on the take and inconsistencies with how government departments are working.
Cash worker, illegal worker, company has multiple warnings, but somehow the company and people employing him illegally for cash, do not get fined and prosecuted.
Illegally working overstayer dies on the job – ACC payment made to widow in China
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/illegally-working-overstayer-dies-on-the-job-acc-payment-made-to-widow-in-china/OWADEJMGCUYM36WLF6YNKUA2SE/
“The investigation report found Star Echo had three previous interactions with Worksafe NZ with faulty and incomplete scaffolding cited in each instance. The company had received notices compelling improvement from Worksafe NZ but was not prosecuted.
In this case, there was a recommendation to prosecute the company for removing equipment and tools from the building site before either police or Worksafe NZ arrived in the aftermath of the accident.
The investigation found Yu was 45 when he died with no visa allowing him to legally work in New Zealand after arriving on a 30-day visitor visa in 2015.
Du told Worksafe NZ her husband paid $30,000 in China for legal work in New Zealand but realised on arriving here that he had been duped. After paying $1800 to another contact, Yu was connected with the builder who was overseeing work at the Hobsonville site.”
The NZ message is, hiring illegal workers and killing them, is ok but hiring legal workers and co-operating with work safe will get you prosecuted.
Meanwhile a similar death, and the company is fined.
Chch workplace death: ‘They got it horribly wrong’
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/chch-workplace-death-they-got-it-horribly-wrong
Many examples of how worksafe is enabling illegal/cash migrants workers to die in NZ without prosecuting the companies using them, often big, foreign companies like NZ Wastemanagement. The opposite should be happening – IRD, immigration, police and work safe should prosecuted to the highest they can, to end this practise which is so out of control, now nobody wants to work in many of these industries and the outcomes of the work, is often very poor.
For NZF it makes a change from accepting brown paper bags of cash from under the table at the Kermadec restaurant.
Nationals turn and oh those JLR and Bridges tapes, hold the popcorn.
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