Mike Williams: To fund or not to fund

Mike Williams

It doesn't seem entirely rational to me to say that one kind of state funding of political parties is acceptable but another is toxic.
THE RECENT controversy surrounding National Party fundraising has revived the issue of state funding of political parties and triggered editorials thundering against such a notion catching on in New Zealand.
What most of these writers don't seem to comprehend is that we already have such funding and that the concept is widespread in democracies similar to our own.
Political parties used to be much larger in terms of membership than they are now. National once stated it had close to 200,000 members and in the 1980s I recall the then Labour Party president, Jim Anderton, saying that Labour had got to 100,000.
The reality now is that both of the big parties have about 20,000 members and the other parties many fewer.
Peter Dunne's United Future Party was briefly deregistered by the Electoral Commission when it could not be certain of having the minimum of 500 members and the Maori Party has seen its membership plummet to about 800, well down from the heady time of its infancy when it said it had 30,000 members.
This is an international phenomenon and I haven't seen any good explanation for it, but with dwindling party membership bases, many democracies which know the value of political parties have opted for state funding.
Our nearest neighbour, Australia, has had state funding for about 30 years, brought in by a Labor government but left undisturbed by conservative coalition governments.
The formula here is a payment made to parties based on the party's vote tally at the previous election.
Most European democracies, with the exception of the United Kingdom, have had state funding of political parties for years, as does the United States with its federal government-provided matching funding for elections.
In New Zealand there are two main sources of state funding to political parties.
Every election year, the Electoral Commission divides up a pot of about $3 million which parties use to fund broadcast advertising during the campaign period. In the last election National and Labour got about a million dollars each and the rest was spread around the other parties based on previous election results, by-election outcomes and, to a lesser extent, polling.
The same law that sets up the fund also limits broadcast advertising to the amount funded so you don't get the wall-to-wall television and radio advertising that characterises Australian and American election campaigns.
Simon Power as Justice Minister reviewed electoral law on the election of John Key's National-led Government and left it largely undisturbed.
The second source of state funding is a payment made to the party leader's offices based on its number of Members of Parliament, known as the Leader's budget. This is a much larger sum and is used to fund political staff and research.
Helen Clark's chief of staff, Heather Simpson, and a group of researchers and advisers were funded from this budget, as was polling by market-research companies. The same applies to National, with Mr Key's chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson, and various staffers funded from the same source, as will be the National Party's research programme.
This payment to Peter Dunne's office came under the spotlight when his one-MP party was briefly deregistered, costing it $100,000 per annum and apparently resulting in the reallocation of two or three staffers into other parliamentary jobs.
These established state funding programmes seem uncontroversial and go largely unnoticed.
What New Zealand doesn't do is make payments to support the voluntary organisations which select candidates, develop policies, employ organisers and pay for advertising other than radio and television during election campaigns.
It doesn't seem entirely rational to me to say that one kind of state funding of political parties is acceptable but another is toxic.
Political parties are not big businesses and when I was Labour Party president we had about the same budget and staff establishment as my mate who ran a medium-sized orchard in Hawke's Bay.
All but the smallest parties need money to survive. The Electoral Act, amended for the MMP system, for example, defines a party secretary as responsible for compliance with the law but is silent on how this person is to be funded.
Lavish funding can be an electoral advantage, though not as critical as many seem to believe. Colin Craig's Conservative Party spent more than a million dollars, largely out of Colin's pocket and scored 2.65 per cent of the party vote in 2011.
The most effective election-winning strategy I have formulated was based almost entirely on organised and tightly targeted volunteer activity and the cost was trivial compared with its outcome.
Which begs the question why National needs the relatively vast sums it seems to be collecting from business sources.
Professional organisers are useful but can't match the commitment and enthusiasm of a large volunteer base and there are limits to the public's appetite for letters, robotic phone calls, print and outdoor advertising.
#Mike Williams is a former Labour Party president who grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is a director of Auckland Transport and the NZ Howard League chief executive.