Why we need to reform electoral finance laws – including corporate donations.
Something is rotten in the state of Aotearoa.
We like to think of our country’s politics as pretty clean, but is it?
There is fundamental tension in our political system between democracy and money. Wealthy corporations and individuals can take advantage of the influence their wealth can buy to distort our democracy. This, in turn, makes it harder to address the many challenges we face, in particular the climate and biodiversity crises.
Democracy is supposed to mean that each of us has a roughly equal ability to influence government decision-making via our equal right to vote, making sure that governments govern in the broad public interest rather than any narrow private interest.
But time and time again we are seeing money pour into our democratic system, threatening to drown the broader public interest under narrow vested interests. Our democracy is at risk of drowning in a flood of money.
Consider these examples from the last two years, many of which would be illegal in other democracies:
Dairy giant stops a live court case
Fonterra, the country’s largest corporation, secretly, and successfully, lobbied the Prime Minister for a law change to block a live court case. Fonterra deliberately sent a key document to the private email address of the Prime Minister’s Chief Policy Advisor, rather than his public service address.
The court case had been approved to proceed by the Supreme Court and was brought against Fonterra because of the harm their climate pollution has caused. The Government not only adopted Fonterra’s suggested law change, effectively quashing the court case, the Prime Minister’s Office also didn’t reveal the existence of the lobbying documents until they were unearthed during the discovery phase of the court case.
Oil company donates after favourable law change
Greymouth Petroleum gave a combined total $300,000 to the three ruling coalition parties in February 2026, after the parties changed the law to allow new oil exploration and subsidised that exploration by allocating $200m in taxpayer money to oil companies.
Fast track applicants donate over $1 million
Companies and individuals associated with fast track applicants have given over $1 million to the ruling coalition parties. Chris Bishop was the National Party Campaign Chair for most of this period while simultaneously being the Minister who controlled entry to the fast track process.
In one of these many fast track cases, directors and companies associated with the Sunfield housing development gave over $200,000 to National and Act. After the project was fast tracked and approved, Auckland Council ratepayers are having to pay to go to court to try to stop the project being built on a flood plain.
Chris Bishop and Shane Jones continued to make decisions about fast track applications even after their parties received political donations of $180,000 from applicants in 2024 associated with mining, fishing and property development companies. Shockingly, the Cabinet Office does not consider political donations when assessing potential conflicts of interest, for ‘pragmatic’ reasons.
Money is doing the talking
Over $300,000 has been donated to NZ First in 2026 by individuals linked to the horse racing industry, at the same time as this industry is seeking even further taxpayer subsidies from the Racing Minister, NZ First leader Winston Peters.
Rod Drury, former Xero CEO, explicitly stated that in making large donations to political parties, he was “not looking to buy influence, but looking to be heard.” In other countries this is called “cash for access”.
The National Party was caught selling access to the Prime Minister for $10,000 and cabinet ministers for $8000 at a fundraising dinner, after one of their MPs mistakenly posted the invite to Facebook before quickly removing it (thank you Maureen Pugh).
Resources Minister Shane Jones was caught out not reporting meetings with fossil fuel industry groups in his ministerial diary. There is no enforcement of the rules around ministerial diaries and no consequences for Jones after a journalist uncovered the truth.
The fishing industry (Sanford, Talleys) has made major donations to NZ First over the years, some of which were channelled via the NZFirst Foundation and not disclosed. NZ First Fishing Minister Shane Jones introduced an amendment to the Fisheries Act in this term of Parliament that delivers on a range of industry lobbying requests such as not releasing footage from cameras on boats.
Political donations are increasing
Using the currently available donations data, we find that recorded donations have increased five-fold over the last two electoral cycles. We have data for the most recent non-election years (2024-25) which shows $25 million in donations compared to just $5 million for the comparable non-election years of 2018-19.
Background – politics and money
There is fundamental tension in our political system between democracy and money. When wealthy corporations and individuals are allowed to donate large sums to political parties it creates a fundamental tension in our political system between democracy and money. Donors can take advantage of the influence that their wealth can buy in order to distort our democracy. This in turn makes it harder to address the many challenges we face, in particular the climate and biodiversity crises.
Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigns on cutting climate pollution and defending and enhancing the remaining biodiversity in our country and around the world. We reach millions of New Zealanders to engage with them on these critical issues and have achieved majority public support for a range of pro-environment policies such as ending bottom trawling of seamounts.
Democracy should mean equal influence
When democracy is flourishing it should mean that each of us has roughly the same ability to influence government decision-making through our equal right to vote.This ensures that governments make decisions that meet broad public interest rather than advantage any narrow private interest.
But, time and again, we run into the problem that while large majorities of people support measures to achieve climate and biodiversity goals, governments do not act in the public interest of climate and biodiversity protection. Instead, they adopt policies and make decisions that advance the private interests of climate polluting and/or biodiversity destroying corporations.
One of the key reasons this happens is the nexus between money and politics.
How money influences politics
Political parties and candidates need significant financial resources in order to run successful modern election campaigns. If they are dependent on donations from wealthy individuals or corporations for those financial resources, then that gives those donors undue influence over the decision making process of government.
The influence comes in two forms
Firstly, politicians know that if they alienate their political donors they will struggle to fund their next election campaign. And they know that if they satisfy their donors’ wishes then they will likely have ample funding at the next election campaign. Funding for election campaigns is not a marginal issue – it is absolutely critical to electoral success. This inevitably influences the policy preferences that politicians are willing to pursue.
Secondly, the influence also comes from tilting the political field towards political parties that cater to the desires of wealthy vested interests rather than the general public interest.
For example, fossil fuel companies have a private interest in the government making decisions that support their industry or make it more profitable for them. That’s in spite of the general public interest in moving away from fossil fuels so we can achieve widely supported climate goals.
The public interest in climate mitigation can easily be overwhelmed by the private interest of fossil fuel companies who donate large sums to political parties who are aligned to their private interests.
The public interest is often wider and more future focused than narrow corporate interests, and lacks the concentrated financing to counter fossil fuel company donations.
This is a different form of corruption from bribery, where government decision makers take money from individuals or corporates in exchange for making decisions that benefit them. But it is no less corruptive of our democracy and general processes of government. If large donors can use that money to ger the government that they want, then they can get the decisions that benefit them ahead of the public generally.
This basic reality creates a tension between democracy and money.
It’s a global problem
Democratic societies around the world face the same problems, leading them to introduce a multitude of policies to attempt to reduce the corrosive influence of political party donations on democracy. There are many examples but they include:
- A cap on donations per person per year so that wealthy individuals have restricted ability to influence and access – Canada, France, Belgium, Iceland.
- Banning non-voter donations e.g. from corporations and unions so that corporations and other non-voters can’t use donations to influence political parties – France, Brazil, Canada, South Korea.
- Real time publication of donations to increase transparency to the general public – Queensland, UK.
- Tight restrictions on ‘anonymous’ donations, so that the public can see who is funding political parties – US, UK, Canada.
- Comprehensive spending caps on candidates and parties to circumvent an escalating electoral spending war, which results in parties needing more donations and parties with fewer donations being disadvantaged – UK, Ireland.
- Public funding of parties and candidates to ensure they are not dependent on private large donations – Germany, Norway, Sweden.
- Anti corruption commissions – Australia, Singapore and dozens of others.
- Lobbying registration, disclosure and enforcement – EU and money others
New Zealand is behind on reforms
In New Zealand, our law is behind best practice:
- No cap on donations;
- No restrictions on donations from corporations and other non-voters;
- Only donors giving more than $6000 must be publicly identified in the annual return of the following year;
- Rolling disclosure only of large donations over $20,000 during election year with a lag of a month;
- No restrictions on an individual donor splitting donations amongst multiple entities they control to avoid disclosure obligations (eg $15k directly, $15k via a family trust; $15k via a privately owned company);
- Donations of up to $61,000 can be ‘anonymously’ provided via the protected disclosure regime;
- Non-political party interveners in the election campaign (“third parties”) do not need to declare their donations;
- Political party spending caps only apply to advertising;
- Limited direct public funding of parties via broadcasting allocation and backdoor funding to already-successful parties via Parliamentary resourcing;
- No regulation of lobbying apart from the publication of ministerial diaries (though as we’ve seen with Shane Jones, no enforcement); and
- No independent anti-corruption commission (though there is a pilot cross agency anti-corruption taskforce).
How to tackle corruption – introducing a ten point anti-corruption plan
The New Zealand system of regulating electoral finance clearly needs to be improved if we are to protect our democracy from corruption. Here are ten policy proposals to save our democracy so that our government acts in the public interest rather than the private interests of fossil fuel companies and other large corporations.
- Stop non-voter donations
- Ban all donations to political parties and candidates from anyone other than actual voters.
- Only natural persons may donate to political parties and candidates.
- Cap all individual donations at $1000
- Place a limit on the annual donations to parties and/or candidates from natural persons at $1000.
- Provide state funding to registered political parties
- Introduce a system of supporting political parties financially so that they are not dependent on large donors to run their election campaigns. This is a small cost to protect government spending and regulation making from corrupt influence.
- Enforce spending limits on political parties and candidates beyond advertising costs
- Cap all electoral spending by political parties, not just advertising spending.
- Make it illegal to sell access to MPs and candidates
- End ‘anonymous’ donations including the ‘protected disclosure’ regime.
- Where the source of the donation is not publicly identified, there is no way to know if the party or candidate receiving the funding really knows where the money came from, whatever the law may say.
- Introduce real time disclosure of all donations
- Lobbying regulation
- We need a system in which lobbyists must register before they can approach government officials and a public record published of those meetings.
- Independent Commission Against Corruption
- As the most recent scandal with Fonterra shows, there is a lot going on that is invisible to the public. We need an institution with the power to investigate corruption.
- Process for Reforming Electoral Finance – Citizens Assembly
The proposals in this paper are a good starting point but there is a process problem which is this: the parties that need to be regulated are the same parties that control parliament and hence they have a conflict of interest.
What is a citizens assembly and why are they important?
The best way around this is to establish a citizens assembly (or citizens jury) to consider electoral finance reform and the other proposals here to clean up our democracy.
A citizens assembly is a representative body drawn from every electorate in the country which is provided with the time and resources to properly consider issues that are difficult for the existing system to solve. They have been used successfully overseas to deal with difficult issues eg abortion law reform in Ireland.
Electoral finance reform is one of those issues. Some of the political parties may have good intentions but they are all fundamentally conflicted.
There are lots of overseas examples of the use of citizens assembly and it was originally written into New Zealand law in the electoral finance act but never went ahead after the John Key government changed the law. It is time to revisit it.
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