NZ First receives $116,000 bequest from the late environmentalist Hugh Barr

Winston Peters' NZ First is the beneficiary of a large bequest. Photo / Alex Burton

New Zealand First is the beneficiary of a $116,000 donation from the estate of Hugh Barr, an environmentalist and tramper who died in 2021.

Party leader Winston Peters said he was “extraordinarily grateful” to Barr for the request.

“He was driven by practical environmental policy and a very deep thinking about it,” Peters said.

He said Barr was driven by “sound environmental policy”, which had attracted him to NZ First.

“We should be recycling rubbish and turning it into energy, not dumping it into the Earth,” Peters said.

Barr also took a sceptical view of the way the Treaty of Waitangi had been interpreted in relation to environmental issues.

He made a contribution to the One Treaty, One Nation anthology, which also featured an essay by former National Party leader Don Brash. He was sharply critical of the Marine and Coastal Area Act, the National Government’s replacement for the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

Under a new electoral law, donations from a single person worth $20,000 over the course of a year must be declared within 10 working days.

The biggest beneficiary of big-money donations this year was the Act party, which declared $950,000 last week.

Peters cast no aspersions on this.

“The reality is politics is an expensive business,” he said.

But the Labour Party has been quick to use Act’s haul as a reason to tap its own members for money.

General secretary Rob Salmond emailed members on Saturday and Monday about the money.

He invited donors to join Labour for “Chippies with Chippy”, a Zoom fundraiser, a play on the nickname of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.

Potential donors were offered several different tiers of donation: Cheap as Chips for $15; Chip in for $35, Friend Chip Goals for $50 and The Mother Chip for $100.

Hipkins said on Monday that the rich listers donating to Act “clearly think their interests are best served by the Act party”.

When asked whether Labour’s weekend emails suggested the party was having money issues, Hipkins said the party was “always out to raise money. We certainly don’t raise millions of dollars from an elite group of people”.

Labour has received one donation over the threshold this year - $50,000 from the New Zealand Dairy Workers’ Union.

Other declared donations include $20,000 from Steve Dent to DemocracyNZ, the party founded by former National MP Matt King with a broadly anti-vaccine or anti-vaccine mandate platform.

National has had a rather slow start to the year, recording only a single $20,040 donation from Vanessa Weenik, the party’s candidate in the Bank’s Peninsula electorate, where Labour has a healthy 13,000 vote majority.

While National is off to a slow start in 2023, it amassed a massive $2.3 million in donations over $30,000 last year, when the declaration threshold was higher.

The Green Party is yet to register a single large donation this year. Last year, its only large donations were in the form of tithes from co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson.