My selected quotes:
The Opportunity Party is vowing to “clean up politics” by regulating lobbying and reforming political donations.
It would look to cap political donations and establish an independent anti-corruption body to centralise and coordinate action against corruption.
The underlying principle of the policy was simple, she said.
"New Zealanders should be confident that political decisions are made in their interests, not because somebody has the biggest cheque book or the best access to a minister.
In order to regulate lobbying, the party would introduce a Political Influence and Lobbying Bill that would create a one-year cooling-off period, “closing the revolving door” between ministers, senior staff and officials, and lobbying roles.
It would also create a mandatory, public and searchable lobbying register, with quarterly disclosure of who lobbied which office-holders, as well as a statutory code of conduct for lobbyists and foreign lobbying safeguards.
The party’s proposal would introduce a $30,000 cap per donor per party per electoral cycle, limit donations to registered voters, lower the public disclosure threshold to $1000 and apply advertising spending limits across the full three-year electoral cycle for parties and candidates.
The party would also establish an anti-corruption body with “investigative, prevention, and education functions, integrating and co-ordinating existing anti-corruption responsibilities”.
I’d be keen to see limits on political advertising from non-parties. Free Speech Union. Taxpayers Union. Hobson’s Pledge.
I’m sure there are some that aren’t far-right that would be affected but it seems the far-right is where most of the advertising money is.
I would go so far as to limit all political advertising to registered political parties only.
Any political adverts from non-parties carry heavy penalties; prison/fines.
The way to determine if it is political advertising; simple. If the advert isn’t selling a product or service that you can actually buy; then the message is likely political. This could then be scrutinized much further.
Undermining democracy; is effectively trying to pervert society for your own gain.
The Taxpayers’ Union have a political strategy that they employ that wouldn’t fall afoul of these rules. When the opposition is in government, they provide the seeds to article after article to be published in the media about how this government department is wasting money here or there. You saw them every week when Labour was in power, about how Corrections spent hundreds of thousands on slushy machines (ignoring that the alternative was millions in air conditioning) and other crap like that.
I haven’t seen that sort of thing since National were in, but you can be sure those articles about the government “wasting” money will be back once the left bloc is in power again. The articles are never attributed to the Taxpayers’ Union, but occasionally they will be cited as the source (“an OIA by the Taxpayers’ Union”).
That is very sneaky.
Maybe a ‘transparency coordinator’ needs to be be in place to counter these tactics. Who would see this kind of story and get the real story out there; along with pointing out the party responsible and their efforts.
Show the public service is not out there wasting money. But conversely, also be there to confirm if the story correct.
The problem is that these stories are all true. Corrections did spend over $300k on stocking slushy machines over 6 years. Which is $50k a year, peanuts to an organisation with 10k staff. You could save far more money by having a single person on home detention instead of prison. The numbers appear big to the average person, partly because they sum up many years to make the number sound bigger, and partly because the average person is running their household on a much smaller scale than the government runs on. But it’s tiny, and almost certainly was cheaper than the alternative (installing air conditioning for prisons to cover the hottest January on record).
In this case the article cites the source as an OIA requested by “a member of the public”. I have no evidence that the Taxpayers’ Union are behind this article, but they are often cited, and these articles are a lot more common when National isn’t in government, because they want to sell Labour as being irresponsible with money despite the national debt always growing under National (because of irresponsible tax cuts).
Response headline:
Corrections saves $millions; with innovative slushy solution.
Then the correction to the wasteful spending shit…
Oh year you’re right. That article had corrections respond, but with better PR they could have twisted that around. Instead of waiting for an OIA, they could be proactively highlighting this stuff to the media. In my experience the media will be happy to publish press releases pretty much as is, in order to feed their 24 hour news.
Yes. I am disheartened by the financial support the far right has. I’m surprised Labour hasn’t tried to fight this battle, personally. They can’t think they’d ever attract that funding from those particular funders themselves, so why hold back?
They’re the same neolib cocksuckers as everywhere else and they will go the same way. Labour UK, SPD Germany, the Dems in the US, all dead-in-the-water, once great, political institutions that abandoned their base in the persuit of cash are now consigned to the dustbin of history - they won’t come back. Workers hate them and the capitalist class they courted for 40 years actually prefers fascism. The working class leftie has no true representation anymore, just a series of managerial parties that exist to sell them the shit that their masters dictate while they rob our societies blind.
A bit exotic and flowery; but well put.