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th 23rd 29th2014 July 27 JanJuly - 3rd- Feb
FIRST ON THE STREET
www.lwb.co.nz
No 434 710 No
LAKES WEEKLY BULLETIN BULLETIN
1 J 4 O 9 IN B SI S D E
enquiries@lwb.co.nz
If I were in charge of the country for a day, do you know what would be top of my to-do list? Banning massive donations to political parties. Liberal democracies like New Zealand are, for all their flaws, the best method yet invented for running a country. But they have at least one major weak point, one gap in their protective fence: they can allow very large, and unjustified, levels of economic inequality. We see this in New Zealand, where the wealthiest 1% – that’s around 35,000 adults – own one-fifth of all the country’s assets, while the poorest half of the country have just 2%. This is a major weak spot for a democracy because, in crude terms, politics is costly. People running political campaigns have to pay for advertising, leaflets, party salaries, travel, and all kinds of other overheads. They need funders. Those who can provide them with funds – typically, wealthy donors – can thus exert significant influence. We can all recall examples of this. Think about the National MP Maurice Williamson having to resign as a minister after he intervened with police in favour of billionaire donor Donghua Liu. Both political parties openly sell access to politicians for wealthy donors through their Cabinet Club and Presidents Club. The authorities are also investigating claims by the now-independent MP Jamie-Lee Ross that donations can help candidates gain a higher position on National’s list.
Did you catch the Wakatipu High School First XV game live on Sky Sport at the weekend? Up and coming young star Morris Finnigan managed two tries against top-seeded Central Otago, team Dunstan High. Pictured with his brother Jake Finnigan. (Photo: Jodi Walters)
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Some people would say there isn’t a lot of money in New Zealand politics, compared to what you see in other countries. But that’s irrelevant. The only question is: are the sums given significant in the context of our politics? And they certainly are. In the run-up to the 2014 election, for instance, large donations over $30,000 totalled $12 million to the various political parties – enough to fund all the parties’ advertising campaigns, which came to around $9 million. The sums given are large enough to affect our politics.
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And beyond whatever individual favours are done, donations create a more pernicious issue: the interests of political parties become biased not in favour of a specific wealthy donor but in favour of wealthy households in general. Our whole politics becomes subtly reoriented toward the interests of a few.
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