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”.
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).