National’s mandate will be so big as a result of this upcoming election that I don’t think it needs to consult other parties like Labour. It might run it past its coalition partners as a matter of courtesy. I’m guessing the main reform National would be looking at is to stop the Unions from rorting the system and “buying elections”. It will need to look at limiting the Unions ability to campaign in an election. It will also need to stop government sources of funding to Unions. Payback is fun.

It came from nowhere to auspiciously campaign for key elements of the dreadful Electoral Finance Act, and then quickly disappeared when the mess it helped create became so obviously apparent!

I would have thought it could have stuck around a bit longer to either defend its mess or try and take us a bit further with the issues of political finance. Despite COG’s impression that the issues of political finance are now all sorted and COG is no longer necessary, I expect the problems of political finance will remain central to NZ politics for a while.

Currently I’m involved with establishing the Political Finance Research Group, which will hopefully be a forum for such debate and ideas. I hope some of the former COG people will become involved in this non-partisan organisation.

And as to the question of whether Glenngate has vindicated the proponents of the EFA, it should be becoming very apparently that this is definitely not the case. What is increasingly obvious is how useless donation disclosure regimes are – there are always so many loopholes and caveats. But we should have already known that – based on how useless they are in places like the US, Germany, and France. As in these places, NZ donation disclosure provisions (both pre- and post-EFA) have acted to obscure the sources of party finance rather than illuminate, and they’ve given the public an unfounded confidence in the NZ party system and democracy.

Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz

(How many prosecutions have there been again…?)

It’s not so much ‘how many prosecutions, as “”how many apprehensions have there been.?”"

In both senses of the word…

(How many prosecutions have there been again…?)

How many voices have been silenced for fear of prosecution?

I’m not entirely sure it’s fair to say we were “strong advocates for the Electoral Finance Act”: we certainly supported reform, but we were strongly critical of the process followed, and our submissions on the Bill weren’t all accepted. (One that was, however, was about the importance of including transparency regarding political donations, and I think events are proving us right on that front – though again, we thought the disclosure laws should have gone further. In another part of our submissions, also ignored, we drafted statutory guidelines for the definition of “election advertisement”, and specifically recommended narrowing it to actual “advertisements” rather than “any form of words or graphics”.)

Yes, we defended the bill, despite our disagreements with parts of it – mostly because there seemed to be no voices explaining the important principles behind the bill and noting that a lot of the anti-bill rhetoric was misleading. (How many prosecutions have there been again…?)

For my part, I’ll certainly be making submissions on any proposals National comes up with. I’d hope that they’ll carry through with their promise to follow a much more inclusive process, and with their support for genuinely rigorous disclosure laws.