Dark money (Patreon)

Donations. Political donations. Gross. Not a fan. I think we should ban them to be honest. Or make them compulsory. Give every New Zealander $500 or some amount and they have to spend it on a donation to an MP. This would completely level the playing field so that parties who might have policies that benefit the rich (coughNationalActcough) would not be able to cream it like they currently do.

My mind turned to donations lately because it's been in the media.

I saw this headline, which is just not a headline you want to be part of. Bad luck Luxo.



If you're opposed to something that increases transparency, that's usually because you want something to stay hidden. Why would National want donations to stay murky? One could only speculate.

I did some research (no, not into covid vaccines, though I am just recovering from covid hence why I've been very slack at writing, sorry). I went through and looked at every single Labour and National MP's donation returns from the 2020 elections. I found some weird shit.

In Part A of the donations form, every donation from an individual or group that adds up to more than $1,500 must be individually recorded. 

Where it gets peculiar is in the masking of some of these. 

Twenty-five of the 65 Labour MPs recorded donations from their Electorate Committees or the Labour Party. These might be fundraisers by the electorate committees. Or they might be a way of hiding bigger donors who may have given to the party and then the party dishes it out to MPs. We don't know because it's masked. 

In 2020, Labour MPs received $425,549.32 in money that is labelled as coming from either the Labour Party or an electorate committee. It's money we don't know the provenance of. That's a lot of money.

Thirty one of the 33 MPs that National has did exactly the same. In 2020, those National MPs received $695,969.09 in this dark money. That's a shit tonne.

It also becomes slightly weirder. You see the majority of those 25 Labour MPs recorded donations from others too, not just Labour. Of those 25 MPs, only 5 recorded the Labour Party or an LEC as the only donor. This totaled $128,724.44.

But for National it's a very different story. Of the 31 who recorded dark money donations, 23 only received money from either the National Party or their National Party electorate. This totaled $543,308.75.

One can only speculate about why National MPs seems to have received so much more money from National that we can't find the provenance of. It could be completely legitimate. It also might not. We just don't know because it's not transparent. It's just so baffling that only 8 National MPs were able to get donations from people that aren't the National Party isn't it?

Edit: Why would parties do it this way? $1500 is the anonymous donation limit for a candidate, but for a party it’s $15,000. So someone who wants to anonymously donate $15K to a candidate could just be funnelling the cash via a party.

Some weird highlights:

• Labour's Anna Lorck was by far and away the highest recipient of dark money for Labour with $77,000! Anna was in fact the highest recipient of dark money across all parties. Anna had no other donors.

• Christopher Luxon was National's highest recipient of dark money. He got $73,050.43.

• National MPs who got donations from places other than the National Party:

Nicola Willis

Stuart Smith

Maureen Pugh*

Melissa Lee

Harete Hipango

Nicola Grigg

Matt Doocey

Judith Collins

What's my point with all this? Dunno. I'm not accusing anyone of anything in particular, but that's only because donations are so goddamn murky. It's gross. This sort of dark money needs to be taken out of politics so we can see who is trying to influence policy with their chequebooks.


*Maureen Pugh's return has one hilarious inclusion. A donation of $1,501 from Chris Finlayson. Finlayson doesn't strike me as a man who doesn't do things deliberately, so I think his donation was made specifically so it would be recorded ($1,500 being the threshold); and given his animosity towards Simon Bridges I think that was the reason. I'm just speculating though.

If you want to look at the spreadsheet with every Labour and National MP who got dark money, you're more than welcome to. I sourced the data from the Electoral Commission website.