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 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”).