National MP for New Plymouth David MacLeod (centre), flanked by colleagues Tama Potaka (left) and Dana Kirkpatrick, explaining himself to media after it was discovered he had not declared most of his campaign donations. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
You couldn’t make it up. The Government has a bill that undermines democratic processes. The MP in charge of hearings on the bill received far more donations for his election campaign than any other candidate, and failed to declare 85 per cent of them.
Some of the undeclared money came from interests who will probably benefit if the bill becomes law.
The MP is National’s David MacLeod, from New Plymouth, and he has now been stood down. But what was he even doing in the job in the first place? Isn’t his conflict of interest obvious?
MacLeod is new to Parliament but was put straight into the chair of the Environment Select Committee, which is considering the Fast-Track Approvals Bill. The bill will allow the Ministers of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development to approve projects, even if they have been ruled out by the courts and experts have advised against them.
MacLeod won the New Plymouth candidacy on October 31, 2022. Over the two months that followed, he received 18 donations worth $168,335, all of which he failed to declare.
In his 2023 declaration he also failed to include another $10,000 donation.
All up, MacLeod received $207,662 for his campaign, including seven big donations from Aucklanders. The recipient of the next-highest amount was National’s unsuccessful Manurewa candidate, Siva Kilari, who raised $110,483.
Even NZ First’s Shane Jones, who sometimes seems like a magnet for political donations, pulled in “only” $98,549.
MacLeod says it was an honest mistake: he thought his party had declared the money on his behalf. I believe him. It’s not credible, to my mind, that he would have deliberately tried to hide those donations.
But that hardly lets him off the hook, because he should have known better. What remains is a sense that he didn’t think it was important to know the rules.
But there are other questions. How was he able to raise so much money? What did he do with it? MacLeod’s declared election spend was only $22,826.
The discrepancy exists because, while candidates are allowed to spend no more than $30,600, that doesn’t apply until three months before election day. Parties and candidates are free to spend what they like before that.
It’s an absurd rule, and those who can take full advantage. As well as the money donated to MacLeod and other individual candidates, National received a record $10.4 million in campaign donations last year. That followed the $5m it raised in 2022: also a record, for a non-election year.
The result was plain to see: there was a blitz of billboards up and down state highways and throughout many electorates, and the spend carried over to social media, print ads and a torrent of radio advertising.
(Among the other parties, Labour raised $4.8m in 2023, Act $4.3m, the Greens $3.3m and NZ First $1.8m.)
There are many problems with the Fast-Track Approvals Bill, not least that it will enable bad decision-making and lead to environmental harm.
Its purpose, we’re told, is to free big infrastructure development from bureaucratic traps that delay progress. But if the Government thinks planning rules are too restrictive – too weighted to environmental concerns - the proper democratic response is for it to change the law.
Instead, it’s adopted an approach that means, at least for its own decisions, that environmental law won’t matter.
In my opinion, the worst thing about this is that the unchecked power the bill gives to three ministers will open the door to corruption.
You might think the Government would be going out of its way to avoid that charge.
In one sense, it has done that with MacLeod. He was dobbed in by his own party, when it discovered the mistake. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon then moved swiftly to demote him.
But MacLeod has been the recipient of considerable largesse from members of the mining, property and investment worlds, all of which stand to benefit when the Fast-Track Approvals Bill becomes law. It’s not credible that senior members of the Government were unaware of either the scale or the source of his financial backing – right from the get-go.
Again, why was he allowed to chair that committee? MacLeod’s sin, once revealed, was that he’d breached the disclosure rules. It wasn’t that he had an obvious conflict of interest. Why didn’t that matter?
Is it because too many politicians think that conflict of interest actually doesn’t matter?
When Auckland Council considered whether to sell its remaining shares on Auckland International Airport this month, three councillors declared that they or their spouses held shares in the airport company.
They also told the council they had taken legal advice, which assured them they did not have a conflict of interest and they would be free to vote. So they did.
I’m not contesting the advice, which I assume reflects the law. But if holding shares in a company you’re going to vote on is not a breach of the rules, then the rules should be changed.
When the Government announced it would repeal Labour’s smokefree law changes, many questions were asked about links between the tobacco industry and Government ministers.
As for Shane Jones, he’s the minister for regional development, fishing and resources (aka mining), despite his party receiving financial support from individuals and/or corporate interests in all three sectors.
It looks to me like he could be up to his neck in conflicts of interest, but the rules say he’s not.
I Am Hope, the Gumboot Fridays charity, has just received a $24m contract for health services, although there’s little independent analysis the charity does a good job. Its chair donated $27,000 to the National Party over two elections.
Act MP Todd Stephenson has a “special responsibility” for advising Pharmac’s minister, Act leader David Seymour, on Pharmac and the funding of medicines.
As my colleague David Fisher reported last week, Stephenson has spent 17 years in the pharmaceutical industry, has investments in three drug companies and retains close links to the sector.
It looks for all the world like he’s their guy on the inside. That may or may not be true, but for the democratic process to function properly, what it looks like matters. Seymour says Stephenson “is fully compliant with the Cabinet Manual and we are comfortable that there is no conflict of interest”.
But if this isn’t a breach of the Cabinet Manual, it should be.
Or is it just that politicians will always have expertise in one field or another, so inevitably they will have links to some of the people they get to make decisions about?
That really doesn’t fly. For starters, I believe, there’s a difference between having a background in an industry or sector group and being compromised by receiving funding from it.
On top of that, where the appearance of partisanship exists, it’s vital to have transparent and credible processes.
Every decent Minister for the Arts, for example, is a proud advocate for the sector. But nobody thinks the decisions about which performers, writers, movies and arts groups get funded should be made by the minister.
And what about the biggest conflict of all? Successive Parliaments have consistently voted for a tax system that favours property investment. This makes it ridiculously hard for people to buy their first home and provides tax-free rewards for people who are already well-off.
It’s also financially incompetent. The New Zealand economy is distorted so badly, 91 per cent of our national assets are tied up in housing. That’s a direct cause of our having one of the lowest levels of productivity in the Western world.
But MPs keep voting for this. And according to the Register of Pecuniary Interests released last week, about half of them own investment properties. Quite a few have several.
The Prime Minister has two “residential properties” in Auckland and another one in Wellington, as well as four rental properties. Act MP Simon Court has what he calls four “family homes”, in Auckland, Wellington and Rotorua.
National’s Carlos Cheung owns five rentals and two property management businesses. Todd Stephenson has an interest in six rental properties. And on it goes.
Why don’t investment property owners recuse themselves on all votes to do with tax? How is it not a conflict of interest when every vote related to tax is, in effect, a decision not to introduce a capital gains tax?
In politics, a conflict of interest is where you’re in a position to decide something for the greater good, but your personal interests get in the way, or could be seen to get in the way.
Appearances matter. It should not be hard for politicians to understand this.
Officers were photographed helping to paint protest signs.