Greens co-leader Marama Davidson has called for a range of changes to the political donation system, saying the current set-up is “a bit open for corruption at the moment”.
In the wake of the Jamie-Lee Ross donation saga , Mrs Davidson wants a cap of $35,000 for any single donor or donation, anonymity removed for any donation over a $1000 and a ban on all overseas donations, not including enrolled voters who live overseas.
Mrs Davidson said the changes would help people retain faith and trust in the political system.
“We’ve just seen in the past couple of weeks that big money and people with powerful vested interests want to make donations and those political parties can actually hide that and who it’s coming from," she told Breakfast.
“Now we can’t find a $100,000 donation that was revealed in the past week or so from National.”
Mrs Davidson said her proposed changes would help New Zealand avoid global examples of big business influencing the political system.
“People should know who is donating to who and how much and getting big money out of politics is really the deal, we don’t want to see going down the track where globally, we’ve seen big oil companies, for example, being able to influence action on climate change.”
“We’ve long had those sorts of influences, I mean the lobbying at the moment from oil and gas, we’ve got to have a look, is our access to the political system fair. Is everyone able to access and influence our political system in a way that’s democratic? I think that’s really up for question at the moment.”
"We’ve just seen in the past couple of weeks that big money and people with powerful vested interests want to make donations and those political parties can actually hide that and who it’s coming from."
“If you were to ask New Zealanders, they’d want to make sure that we are keeping big money either transparent or out of politics.”
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