KEY POINTS:
In the United States, the scandals surrounding electoral financing are the stuff of Greek tragedy. Here all we get is bad French farce. Not for us, shady oil and armament moguls queuing to buy a politician's attention. Just lonely old millionaires craving attention.
Has there been anything more unedifying than Wellington landlord Sir Moneybags Jones dragging himself around the media bleating on about the $175,000 he's doled out over the years to his old buddy Winston Peters. He's grumping on about the fate of the last $25,000, which, he says, he agreed to one alcohol-lubricated night three years ago in order to make the politician go away.
It's been like looking through the windows of the Sunset Home for the Befuddled as two creaky inmates squabble about who bought the last round, 20 years before. As though anyone else cares. As they bluster away on the box, one prays for a nurse aid from Shortland Street to bustle in from the adjacent channel to wipe the dribble from their chins - then tape up their lips.
Meanwhile, up in the Mediterranean, another self-made expat is licking the wounds he suffered from his efforts to spread a little cheer to both Mr Peters and to the governing Labour Party. Just why international freight forwarder Owen Glenn gave Labour $500,000 in the run-up to the last election and $100,000 towards Mr Peters' legal battles soon afterwards is a mystery. Perhaps it was a purely altruistic gesture to the country of his boyhood.
Whatever, the payoff for the homesick boy from Mt Roskill has been awful. Denied by Mr Peters and publicly snubbed for all to see by Labour's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, when they jointly attended the opening of his biggest benefaction, the Owen Glenn Building at Auckland University's business school.
It's human nature to enjoy a humbug unmasked, and to see Mr Peters, the scourge of secret donors and exposer of Machiavellian plots, outed as a beneficiary of backroom money exchanges himself, has been rather delicious. This is the man who thundered during the Electoral Finance Act debate that "we are not going to have the kind of covert money that is destroying democracy in some countries in the Pacific today".
But Mr Peters' discomfort is also ours. What does it say about our democracy when the big two political parties - and some of the minnows - are dependent for much of their funding on private handouts from a few rich, anonymous businessmen. It's hardly a new phenomenon. In the world turned upside down of the mid-1980s, merchant banker Michael Fay, not then a knight of the realm, was so grateful for the Rogernomics reforms he is said to have poured $2 million into Labour's coffers.
Before the last election, American hedge fund millionaire Julian Robertson, owner of luxury golf courses at Kauri Cliffs and Cape Kidnappers, refused to confirm or deny his support to National Party funds. Nicky Hager's book The Hollow Men listed a raft of "high value" secret donors to National before 2005, including fishing industry heavyweights Peter and Michael Talley, as well as names such as Alan Gibbs, Craig Heatley, David Richwhite, Doug Myers and Peter Shirtcliffe.
National laundered its near $2 million of secret donations in 2005 through entities such as the Waitemata and Ruahine trusts. Both National and New Zealand First have also been outed as beneficiaries of the racing industry. Last year's Electoral Finance Act has done away with the secret slush funds. Its big shortcoming is it failed to provide the political parties with an alternative source of funding.
Early versions of the legislation did include state funding of electoral campaigns to compensate for ridding the system of the anonymous donors. But opposition from National and Mr Peters meant there were not the votes in Parliament to get it through. The end result is going to be a very frugal election campaign in coming months.
Democracy is surely the loser if parties don't have the money to develop and promote new policy. And be able to critique others. In 1986, the Royal Commission on the Electoral System recommended a form of state funding very similar to that already in existence in Australia.
Noting the increasing cost of the political process, the commission said "too great a reliance" on outside funders like trade unions and corporations would "be detrimental to our democracy and might ... lead to corruption of our political process ... " Nothing's changed.
In Australia, any political donation over $10,500 has to be declared by donor and receiver. State funding is provided based on votes cast. At last year's federal election the payout was $2.70 a vote cast. It's a cheap price to pay to keep the millionaires at bay, and democracy working.
