KEY POINTS:
One of the unforeseen and unintended consequences of the Electoral Finance Bill is that wealthy individual donors and corporations are running a mile from having anything to do with political donations.
Look at poor Owen Glenn - the very politicians who swooned over his cheque book three years ago have essentially disowned him. Now he is in self-imposed exile in Monaco, without even an honorary consul's job he fancied to show for all the thousands he dished out. In normal circumstances he would have parted with another $500,000 for the Labour Party campaign this year.
If Foreign Minister Winston Peters had come through for Glenn, he'd now be swooning around big-time at the best European diplomatic champagne parties and no doubt drop a substantial donation to New Zealand First. Despite Peters' earlier denial that he has ever received a donation from Glenn, the email correspondence between Glenn and a New Zealand First bagman clearly showed he did make a down payment.
But Glenn must be wondering what hit him. He seems a nice enough chap but is clearly politically naive.
Glenn, like many self-made businessmen, doesn't quite understand that the rules of business - where everything is making deals and buying what you want - doesn't necessarily apply in politics - at least not in public.
I'm sure Glenn in his own mind wouldn't have thought being appointed in an honorary post among the jetset was a big deal. The fact is he'd been throwing money all over the place at politicians. It has damaged his reputation and his despair is clearly real when he says he may never return to New Zealand. The real message is that wealthy individuals will now realise they would probably be better off not making political donations if they want to get ahead.
I'm sure if Glenn hadn't made a donation to Labour and kept his donations to sporting bodies and the Auckland business school he probably would today be sipping champagne with the glam Monaco set. I'm sure he would have made a pretty good job as a charmer on our behalf.
One of the juicy tidbits which has clearly been missed by the mainstream press is that Maori Party leader, Tariana Turia, mentioned last election that an overseas businessman had offered her party a quarter of a million dollars if they would back Labour.
I think it would be a pretty safe bet to narrow down that suspect list. It is clear now that any big noter with bucketfuls of money who wants something had better be careful.
Which leads on to the real problem we have in New Zealand politics: secret donations are clearly outlawed and the legal requirement to limit and declare all corporate donations means that the parties cannot rely on private cash to finance their campaigns.
It is an open secret that most of the centre-left parties are broke. In the past it didn't matter too much because they were able to use taxpayers' money via parliamentary funds. But the Auditor-General has ended that little scam and their own-goal over the Electoral Finance Bill has dried up the unions and other friendly institutions from financing campaigns.
For decades, the bigger parties have sneered at their political party activists and tolerated their pesky and irritating behaviour because at least they got out during the election campaign to help their party.
But they never needed their activist base because the party leadership always had access to corporate and taxpayer money to finance their electoral careers. But without the mass parties and the inability to raise real money the electoral process and possibly even parliamentary democracy is in peril. We smirk at the discomfort of our politicians but the truth is the public profiles that these party-funded campaigns owned will disappear and the control will move to those who own and run the media.
News editors and producers will determine which politicians are worth public exposure. This of course leads to a dumbing-down of politics and disconnection between politicians and the people.
It is no accident that as television exposure of politicians increases, active participation of political parties and movements has lessened. In just about every Western country, mass parties have disappeared, party activists no longer exist and the people who even bother to enrol, let alone vote, have dived.
Three months from election day, 300,000 New Zealanders who are mainly young and poor haven't bothered to enrol. If even a third of these marginalised people saw a reason to enrol they would change the outcome of this election. The Electoral Enrolment Centre is launching a campaign next month targeting 110,000 people between 18 and 20 not enrolled. But these numbers could be improved if businesses that employ many of these people offer a hand.
The five main fast-food companies in New Zealand employ more than 20,000 young workers. If they handed every employee an enrolment form, they would do more to help democracy in a few days than everyone else's efforts this year.
