The hypocrisy of Peters
Claire Trevett in the NZ Herald does a first class job of skewering Peters with his own hypocrisy:
If Winston Peters had succeeded in getting a bill for tough disclosure laws through Parliament in 1995, he could now have found himself jailed by his own law.
Ouch.
Mr Peters has spent his career railing against secret donations, including presenting a bill to Parliament in 1995 which required disclosure of all gifts and donations above $500 from individuals and companies.
The Disclosure of Political Donations and Gifts Bill covered all kinds of donations to MPs, candidates or parties and any who failed to declare them faced jail for up to 12 months or fines of up to $20,000.
Wait, wait – let’s just make the law retrospective!
The bill was part of a campaign against links between big business and political parties that Mr Peters openly admitted was to “seriously damage the ability of the National Party to raise funds from corporate supporters without that fact becoming public knowledge”. In its first reading, he said “comprehensive and timely disclosure” of gifts and donations was essential to bring “undue influence … out of the shadows”.
So let us make sure we have this right. Peters proposed a law to bring donations out of the shadows, and then when the NZ Herald sucessfully exposes a $100,000 donation to his legal expenses, he calls on them to resign in disgrace?
“It seeks to reassure the public that influence cannot be bought when policy is formed before an election, that the voting intentions of those they elected cannot be subverted by powerful interests and that governments, once in power, cannot be improperly influenced by money pledged towards their re-election.”
Hmmn, improper influence. You mean such as having someone lobby to be given a diplomatic appointment who has publicly donated the PM’s party $500,000, secretly loaned them $100,000 interest free and secretly paid off $100,000 from the Foreign Minister’s legal expenses?
Or do you mean offering a small party $250,000 to support the Government after the election?
However, it is not the first time money from unknown sources has appeared to pay Mr Peters’ legal funds. In 1997 a mystery donor paid Mr Peters’ $125,000 bill in the Selwyn Cushing defamation case after Mr Peters was fined $75,000 in costs and $50,000 in damages for comments he made about Mr Cushing.
Seeing Brian Henry has revealed who donated the $100,000 in 2006, maybe he could reveal who paid the $125,000 in 1997?
Mr Peters has also criticised parties for appointing donors to Government-selected positions.
He said giving jobs in return for political donations was “the way it goes, unfortunately, in this country”.
He said a separate commission should be established to appoint people to such positions.
And Mr Peters would like to nominate Mr Owen Glenn and Mr Brian Henry to sit on that commission 🙂