$2.5m in donations from the property industry to political parties since 2021. 97% of which has gone to National, Act & NZ First.
In case you were wondering why National & Act were so keen to dump on poor people in order to give tax breaks to landlords, and are so keen to sell off more of our housing to overseas buyers, further doubling down on making NZ a basket case economy of selling houses to each other with a few tourism and farming bits tacked on.
So we do get the latest trends from the USA just 15 years later in this case…
Buying political favours has turned that place into a hot mess inside a dumpster fire on a train wreck. I don’t want to watch it happen here.
It’s pretty worrying. There are proposals to reform the donations system, but zero chance they’ll go anywhere if National/Act/NZ First are in power. Labour should have acted on that when they had the chance.
It would have been nice if they had picked at least one of the recommendations from the 2012 review to implement, but at least they stated another review (that National might kill?).
There’s also the more recent Independent Electoral Review, which including political donations/party funding: https://electoralreview.govt.nz/
The final report is due to go to the Minister in November. If it’s a National minister, the whole thing will likely go straight to the trash.
Actually, they will probably keep the referendum on longer parliamentary term… but nothing else.
Yeah that’s the one I was thinking of, I didn’ t realise they were nearly done.
I wouldn’t mind if they pushed forward longer parliamentary terms, at least that’s one recommendation that could be actually implemented.
It could be a fairly close if it went to a referendum. My problem with longer parliamentary terms is that it doesn’t seem to affect how many times a government wins re-election. So if you extend it to 4 years, you’ll regularly get governments in power for 12 years rather than 9, which means the politicians become even more comfortable/arrogant and less accountable than they are now.
If governments can make 12 year plans instead of 9 year plans, that’s a win in my book. Plus, they have even less of an excuse to not do anything.
I think if politicians need to be help more accountable, then having more regular elections probably isn’t the best way. It makes the government less stable, which gives them an excuse to not do things.
I guess I just look at countries like the UK (usually 5 year terms), and see all the same problems we have in NZ around governments not doing much, etc. So I don’t think longer terms will solve that at all. It just means you wait longer for a new government to come in, where they usually do stuff in the first term (often just the first year of their first term!) and then are too scared to do anything after that.
Do places with 5 years terms typically still get 3 terms? It’s hard to imagine a country not getting bored with the ruling party after 10 years.
Labour should have acted on that when they had the chance.
Sums up their second term, to be honest.
“Newsroom reported donations just under the declarable limit were made in March 2019 to the foundation after a public relations consultant orchestrated a meeting with Hart’s son-in-law Duncan Hawkesby and NZ First MP Clayton Mitchell. An email from the PR consultant with the subject line “re CGT” said Mitchell’s stance on a capital gains tax aligned with Hawkesby’s. A meeting Hart briefly attended between Hawkesby and Mitchell occurred and three donations of $14,995 were made from different companies aligned with the family. In April 2019, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed a capital gains tax would not be introduced saying consensus could not be reached between parties in government. ”
- a tiny investment for someone who holds billions in property. We are so easily sold out. And we’re about to be sold out yet again. Legal Corruption.
I’ve said it before: our politicians sell themselves so cheaply it’s embarrassing.
It’s like bribing children with lollipops.
The shamelessness is galling.
