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A new study has found that state funding of political parties now vastly overshadows private donations in New Zealand elections.
Otago University political scientist Bryce Edwards told a sociology conference in Auckland yesterday that the controversial Electoral Finance Bill, now before Parliament, was based on a myth that corporate donations could "buy elections".
In fact, declared donations over $10,000 to political parties at the last election totalled only $3.2 million - the same as the amount paid by taxpayers for free broadcasting time, and only one-eighth of what taxpayers paid through the Parliamentary Service for "party and member support" plus MPs' travel and communications.
Although parties spent far more than their declared donations, their total declared election spending of $13.3 million was still only about half of the $25.7 million paid through the Parliamentary Service, which does not count as official election spending.
Dr Edwards said critics were correct that business had a strong influence on New Zealand politics. But he said its influence came mainly from the need for any Government to maintain "business confidence" in a capitalist economy.
"That's where the political leverage of the wealthy is exerted - not in donations, which are utterly insignificant in comparison," he said.
He said the National Party had traditionally been funded by donations from business people, and Labour by donations from unions.
But he said the figures on donations over $10,000, which tended to be from business people, showed that such donations were now only a small part of total party funding, even for National.
Union funding for Labour had also declined from $190,000 a year in the mid-1980s to what Labour general secretary Rob Allen described in 1999 as "a very, very tiny proportion of funds - almost insignificant".
"This shift reinforces the party elite's decreasing reliance on volunteer activity," he said. "Since the 1980s party membership numbers have been decimated - Labour has dropped from 100,000 in the mid-1980s to about 10,000, and National has gone from a high of 250,000 down to as little as 20,000."
He said membership fees and donations had been replaced by taxpayer funding such as the "party and member support" budgets that were used for staff, publishing, postage and other activities.
Dr Edwards himself worked for the Alliance Party's electorate liaison unit in Parliament in 2001.
"All the work we were doing was totally political," he said. "We were looking after membership. We were running the party basically from within Parliament. It meant that the membership didn't really count any more. We didn't need to care about them."
He said there was no clear relationship between party spending and votes. For example, Act spent more than any other party except Labour and National at the last election ($1.4 million), yet received only 1 per cent of the vote, while the Alliance gained its highest vote (18 per cent) in 1993 when it spent only $500,000.
On the other hand, the weight of taxpayer funding of parties in Parliament now gave a huge advantage to incumbents.
Dr Edwards said the parliamentary funding should be much more tightly controlled to make sure it was only used for parliamentary duties, but controls on donations from supporters should be loosened.
