Stuff: The curse of cosyism in public life is hurting us all

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Cosyism: a new word for one of the most chronic problems in New Zealand public life. We are largely spared, thankfully, the envelopes-stuffed-with-cash corruption that infects other countries. But we’re suffused with overly close relationships: nepotism, jobs for the boys, all that jazz.

Some call it cronyism, but that doesn’t quite fit here: “cronies” sound too much like Mafia hitmen. “Cosyism” better describes those insidious processes by which public positions, jobs and contracts sometimes go not to the best-qualified applicants but to the friends, contacts and family members of people in power. It’s an apt term for a famously small society in which cousins and mates are always – cosily – rubbing up against each other in public life.

Cosyism isn’t solely an injustice to the well-qualified but poorly connected people who lose out; it can cost us all, since the winners – the well-connected but poorly qualified – often do bad work, expensively.

A cosy society also tolerates the most colossal conflicts of interest: situations where power-holders’ decisions could be biased by a personal incentive, be it to protect a business connection or aid a relative. Even just a public perception of bias can be harmful, corroding trust and promoting political disengagement.

Here’s a cosy example: the head of the Film Commission, David Strong, was earlier this year revealed to have a show in development with Great Southern – a production company that bids for funds administered by the commission. Strong declared this conflict upfront but, given his obvious interest in the firm’s success, how could junior commission staff feel comfortable saying no to it? Under intense pressure, Strong eventually quit, but this conflict shouldn’t have been tolerated for a moment.

Another example: last year, the Reserve Bank thought it was a bright idea to hire as a contractor, and then appoint to its board, Roger Findlay, the chairman of NZ Post, which then owned Kiwibank – one of the institutions the Reserve Bank is supposed to regulate. Findlay’s term at NZ Post has since expired – but again, how could this conflict ever have been allowed?

In politics, cosyism has a long and undistinguished history. In 2013, Paula Bennett appointed a new families commissioner, Belinda Milnes – the sister of Bennett’s Cabinet colleague Amy Adams.

Last term, NZ First MP Shane Jones was a walking conflict of interest, once even contacting the New Zealand Transport Agency about a case it was taking against a relative. More recently, according to reports, National MP Mark Mitchell found his sister a job in his electorate office.

The latest conflict-of-interest accusations concern minister Nanaia Mahuta and the nearly $200,000 in contracts awarded to her husband and his family by ministries where she had at least associate responsibility. These contracts are now – at her instigation – being examined by the Public Service Commission.

Mahuta seems to have done what’s currently required, declaring the conflicts of interest and taking no part in the contract decisions. But two agencies, Kāinga Ora and the Ministry for the Environment, have already acknowledged major mistakes – including the failure to even realise there were conflicts of interest when hiring the associate minister’s husband.

No doubt the agencies will improve their protocols, at least to meet current standards. But given what they allow, are those standards fit for purpose? Could any public servant, in any department, deal confidently with a contractor – including, if necessary, rejecting substandard work – if they knew the latter were the minister’s relative?

What, too, about the advantageous information a minister could convey to their contractor relative? There may be no reason to doubt the integrity of current ministers, but that’s not the point. We must design systems for the most corrupt actors, not the least.

Some people respond to such problems with a shrug: in a small society, they say, these conflicts are inevitable. But that’s back-to-front: we have to be tougher on these problems precisely because we’re a small society, and they will crop up so often.

The current default is to “manage” a conflict of interest by leaving the room, sometimes literally, when a particular issue is discussed – as if this removes every opportunity to influence the decision. That default needs to change.

By and large, we shouldn’t manage conflicts of interest, we should avoid them. If you want to run a government agency, for instance, you just have to ditch your contract with the firm the agency regulates. Or they hire someone else.

Remember there are four million adults in this country, albeit many are held back by poverty and discrimination. By fighting those forces, we could create a talent pipeline that feeds a wider pool of applicants, and lets recruiters cast their nets further.

A cosyism crackdown would, of course, be hard on some people. Too bad. That’s the price we pay for probity, and for public faith in our institutions.

Stuff: Two decades of donations scandals – so where are the convictions?

Co-written with Lisa Marriott. Read the original article on Stuff

It looks awfully like one law for the rich and one for the poor. At one end of the justice system, people can be fined or jailed for relatively minor crimes such as the driving offence of “wheel-spinning”, where no injury is caused. But there seem to be few legal consequences for breaking the laws around donations to political parties, something which typically involves the rich and powerful.

Because political donations can lead to influence and favours, big donors – those giving over $15,000 – are required to disclose their names. But New Zealand faces a growing number of scandals in which donors and parties seemingly go to great lengths to keep those names hidden.

People connected to both Labour and National, including the disgraced former MP Jami-Lee Ross, are currently on trial in the High Court at Auckland, facing donations-related charges. The New Zealand First Foundation was in the same court a few weeks ago for similar reasons.

While it is unusual to have two high-profile cases at the same time, New Zealand’s history presents no shortage of such incidents, as the (non-exhaustive) list below demonstrates.

• 1996: An ACT donor attempts to split a six-figure sum into small amounts to avoid disclosure.

• 2005: Labour ministers lobby for, and approve, citizenship for party donor Bill Liu, against the advice of officials. The process for approving Liu’s citizenship was later criticised by the auditor-general.

• 2007: National uses the Waitematā Trust to channel millions of dollars of donations to the party anonymously; Labour responds by using law firms to achieve similar purposes, albeit with lesser sums.

• 2009: NZ First’s Winston Peters is censured by Parliament’s privileges committee for failing to declare a $100,000 donation from businessman Owen Glenn.

• 2010: ACT leader John Banks files a false electoral return, with donations shown as anonymous when they were made by Kim Dotcom. Banks’ conviction was overturned on appeal.

• 2014: National minister Maurice Williamson loses his portfolios after intervening in a police investigation into party donor Donghua Liu​.

• 2016: A complaint is made about Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s 2016 election expenses and a $366,000​ auction, which included a book sold for $150,000​. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) later investigates the use of auctions in Goff’s election campaigns. The investigation closed with no charges laid.

• Late 2010s: Controversy surrounds the Labour Party practice of getting donors to bid large sums for artworks but registering the donation in the name of the artist, thus apparently obscuring the donor’s identity.

• 2019: Chinese citizen Lin Lang avoids curbs on donations from non-residents by (legally) routing a $150,000 donation to National through a New Zealand-based firm, the Inner Mongolia Rider Horse Industry (now in receivership).

• 2021: Conflict of interest questions are raised when Labour Party MP Stuart Nash receives nearly $25,000 in donations for the 2020 election from forestry and timber companies, shortly before being made minister of forestry. The funds are not repaid.

• 2022: The SFO prosecutes the New Zealand First Foundation for failing to declare donations. The defendants were found not guilty. The Government is now urgently closing the “loophole” discovered in the case.

• 2022: People associated with both Labour and National are on trial for allegedly concealing donations, through sham art auctions and donation splitting.

From this grim catalogue we can draw several conclusions. First, the pace of such incidents seems to be accelerating. This may be because dwindling memberships leave parties increasingly reliant on large donors and increasingly willing to bend or break the rules.

Second, we generally have the media or whistleblowers to thank for bringing these cases into the public domain, not our regulatory agencies. Presumably, countless more scandals are going undiscovered for lack of a whistleblower.

Third, despite no shortage of evidence of wrongdoing, there has yet to be a successful prosecution for political donation transgressions. On occasion, a minister loses a portfolio, but other serious sanctions are absent.

What does this mean? Either the law is insufficient, or our public agencies are incapable of enforcing it.

The current regulatory framework is probably not fit for purpose. The agency tasked with ensuring compliance with the Electoral Act, the Electoral Commission, has insufficient powers. It does not have a prosecutorial role; instead, it can only refer breaches to the police for investigation, if it believes an offence has been committed. It does not even have the power to compel parties to provide documents or answer questions.

Meanwhile, the penalties in the act are often relatively minor, at least from the point of view of wealthy individuals. Admittedly, a party secretary convicted of any corrupt practice faces a prison term of up to two years, or a fine of up to $100,000.

But wilfully misleading the Electoral Commission attracts a maximum fine of just $2000 – and many other offences similarly have maximum fines of $1000 to $2000. This is roughly the same maximum penalty that applies for tagging a tree.

And although it is hard to prove this claim, it is widely believed in politics that the commission, and indeed other bodies, such as the police and the SFO, are reluctant to pursue donations-related cases because of their highly sensitive political nature.

An independent panel is currently reviewing New Zealand’s electoral law, and has been tasked with building public trust and confidence in the system. We hope one of its recommendations is that the Electoral Commission needs greater powers, and that the penalties for breaking electoral law should be made stronger.

What can be done about the legal system’s general tendency to punish the powerless more than the powerful, however, is not clear.

Stuff: An heiress's birthday and a support worker's meagre lot

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For most people, a 30th birthday party might be a celebration at a community hall, or at best a long weekend away with friends. But not if you’re a Rich List heiress.

According to recent media reports, Aucklander Ali Andrews, whose family built the $500 million Bay Audiology fortune, marked her anniversary by renting a €100,000-a-week villa in the French resort town of St Tropez.

She and her friends, many of them also the children of multimillionaires, availed themselves of the villa’s helipad and outdoor cinema, and danced the evening away “amid thousands of rose petals and a string band”.

It’s a far cry from the lives of women like Tamara Baddeley, a Napier community support worker whose job it is to visit the elderly and the vulnerable in their homes and get them through the day with dignity.

From lifting clients out of bed and helping them to shower, through to fitting catheters and colostomy bags, the work requires an extraordinary combination of mental, physical and emotional ability.

Yet she earns just $26.50 an hour. This leaves her feeling “taken for granted, underappreciated, overworked and underpaid”, she told me earlier this week.

Strange to say, Baddeley is not living it up on the French Riviera. Indeed, her only foreign trip in the last two decades, aside from an Australian holiday, was a European visit for which she saved for eight years.

Such contrasts underline the immense unfairness of modern New Zealand life.

As the daughter of Rich Listers, Andrews will have had countless unearned advantages; and if she is well paid, it won’t, in my opinion, be because her work – doing PR for luxury resorts and botox practitioners – has any great social value. (Indeed I dare say the world would cope just fine without it.) Andrews will be well paid because she caters to the desires of the rich.

Baddeley, by contrast, does some of the most important work imaginable, for some of our most vulnerable citizens, in some extremely complex and demanding situations. (People who think it’s easy work should give it a go, and see if they last even a day.) Yet she earns little more than the minimum wage.

Baddeley belongs to a class of workers, spanning community support, rest-home care, and mental health and disability assistance, whose complaints were supposedly settled after the celebrated Kristine Bartlett case.

In 2012, Bartlett, backed by her union, launched a court action alleging that rest home care and the like was grossly underpaid because it was seen as women’s work.

She won, forcing the National government to agree a $2b settlement that began in 2017 and expired the June just gone. Lifting rates by up to $7 an hour for more than 55,000 workers, the settlement was a triumph of fairness, and other pay-equity deals soon followed. The problem is everything after.

Many of the sector’s employers – the usual mix of private contractors and NGOs – undid the settlement’s impact by cutting hours or forcing staff to take on more tasks. (Such difficulties in controlling private providers are, incidentally, another argument for Health New Zealand to bring the services back in-house.)

For all the talk of pay equity, carers’ wages have never caught up with those of equivalently skilled but male-dominated jobs: prison officers, for instance, earn closer to $35 an hour. Baddeley’s compensation for time spent travelling between clients’ homes is painfully inadequate.

And although Labour deserves credit for making pay-equity settlements easier, and signing billions of dollars’ worth of further deals, its response this year to the community support workers’ plight was a 70c-an-hour pay offer – a 3% increase when inflation is at 7.3%.

“I felt insulted,” Baddeley says. “If I didn’t care about the clients, I’d consider leaving. But we have lost so many carers already, to burnout and other things.”

Her union, E tū, has since joined others in lodging a new claim, aiming to create a genuine pay-equity successor to the Bartlett deal.

But until pay rates for care workers are somehow formally linked to those of their male equivalents, the unions will always be in catch-up mode, climbing a mountain that grows ever-higher under their feet.

This pay discrimination is a national disgrace.

People like Baddeley – whose work answers our shared desire to ensure the old and vulnerable can live well – are serving the public good, and the public should ensure they are properly paid.

Labour’s big problem is finding the money to lift their wages, when New Zealand’s tax take is around $20b-$30b less than a comparable European country would raise.

Many of those countries, of course, levy taxes on the very largest estates, arguing that those lucky enough to inherit vast sums should compensate those less fortunate.

Maybe we should do the same here. I, for one, would rather live in a world where Ali Andrews contributes more, and Tamara Baddeley is better paid.

Stuff: Goodbye Marx, hello doughnuts - a new image for a better world

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Writing from prison in 1930, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci defined his era as an interregnum – literally, a period between rulers – and argued: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

Intellectually, we could say the same of our age. The market-driven, hyper-individualist certainties of the last four decades are crumbling. The political project of leaving individual consumers to “buy” public services, and getting government “out of the way”, has not, in the developed world, delivered greater stability, lower inequality or even enhanced economic growth.

Its legacy has instead been an ever-growing number of financial crises, culminating in the GFC; wider disparities between rich and poor; weaker economic growth than in the postwar period; and of course the wholesale degradation of the planet, most obvious in the creeping devastation of climate change.

By widening economic disparities, and thus leaving many poorer communities stranded, hyper-individualism has also contributed to the vicious, reactionary populism convulsing the globe. Even if it can boast some wins, like cheaper consumer goods and wider market choices, the above failings still constitute a hefty charge sheet.

Yet while this intellectual edifice has crumbled, nothing concrete has risen in its place. Why so? Partly because there is no one predominant figure to lay the foundations. In the past, social democrats could rely on John Maynard Keynes, libertarians on Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, and Marxists on, well, Marx.

Today’s absence of an intellectual prophet is no bad thing: such figures invite over-simplification, and represent a single point of failure. But without them, the future can be harder to discern, leaving us to patch together a new paradigm from a disparate band of thinkers.

Among this multiplicity, it often feels like the best new thinking is based, explicitly or not, on the image of the circle. British thinker Kate Raworth, for instance, uses the metaphor of a doughnut to symbolise the end goal of economics. The hole in the middle represents a failure to develop sufficiently, leaving basic human needs unmet; outside the doughnut is ecological overshoot, harming the planet; in between, the body of the doughnut itself is the safe space, a point of balance where human needs are met but the planet is preserved.

Another concept rapidly gaining ground is the circular economy – the subject of a major report earlier this week – which aims to ensure products are reused (passed around between users in a circle, as it were) rather than thrown away.

Why does the circular image hold such power? For one thing, it symbolises the connectedness implicit in the very functioning of nature: think of the classic cycle of water running off mountains into the sea, evaporating upwards, condensing into clouds, and precipitating back down onto the mountains. Circular metaphors ground us in regenerative, restorative thinking.

They also emphasise equality: at King Arthur’s mythical round table, everyone was equally placed, because the table could have no “head”. Circles are balanced, stable, harmonious. And in this harried world – its jobs ever-more precarious, its climate ever-more fragile – who couldn’t use a bit more harmony, stability and balance?

Circularity can have negative connotations: think circular arguments, or people going around in circles. But one can easily draw, rising up from a circle, a spiral, one that lifts towards ever-greater opportunity and more flourishing lives.

The world needs, for instance, to create a positive, self-reinforcing spiral between greater economic equality and enhanced democratic participation. If more people feel included in their society, they are more likely to vote, which in turn orients politics towards enhancing equality, and so the spiral rises. (Too many countries, currently, are on a self-reinforcing downward spiral of widening disparity and declining political engagement.)

Upward spirals encourage us to think about exchanges – whether in markets, communities or public services – that are mutually enhancing, exchanges in which the participants uplift each other’s dignity and personal development, in a positively escalating reciprocity.

Combined, the circle and the spiral provide both stability and dynamism, security and growth. It’s an optimistic image for a century that, for all its turmoil, holds extraordinary potential. The developed world learned last century how enhanced material prosperity, and widespread access to public health and welfare, can transform human well-being; now we just need to deliver those goods without simultaneously trashing the planet.

We can already see, in this century, the potential for increased education and technological creativity to further transform our lives; now we just need to ensure those forces benefit everyone, and not only the top 1%. Equality, harmony, balance.

All this is abstract, of course, and hard to translate into the everyday. Any prime minister suddenly spouting the language of spiral politics would be swiftly derided. But still these are images that can underpin a new paradigm, helping us make better sense of this century, and this world.

Stuff: Terrible landlords aren’t ‘bad apples’ - they’re endemic

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Among my generation, it’s a grim joke that an outstandingly good landlord is one who fulfils their basic legal responsibilities. That’s how low the bar is. Rental housing is routinely so awful in this country that mere compliance with the law elicits superlatives.

A flat that Stuff profiled last year in Hanson St, Wellington, is typical of our rental stock: not just damp and mouldy, but degraded by holes in the walls, malfunctioning lights, draughty windows and earthquake damage.

Property investors would have you believe the landlords of such places are a few bad apples. But every reputable survey reveals a garbage dump of ghastly flats.

A few years back, building researchers BRANZ uncovered damp in one-third of rentals and mould in half of them. An Otago University trial found one in two would fail a basic warrant of fitness.

More recently, a 2020 stocktake by Stats NZ showed one in three rentals had large gaps around windows and doors, more than one-third were always or often cold, and nearly half were mouldy. One in two required moderate or major repairs. Similarly, a Habitat for Humanity survey this year found many rentals needing repairs either internally (38%) or externally (42%).

In short, somewhere between 30% and 50% of our 600,000 rentals – that’s 200,000 to 300,000 dwellings – are in terrible condition.

The Government’s grand plan to deal with this social catastrophe centres on the Healthy Homes Standards, which – in theory at least – require landlords to insulate their properties, install​ a fixed heater (ideally a heat pump), fit fans in kitchens and bathrooms, fix holes in walls, and ensure water isn’t pouring in. These are not overly taxing demands.

A law that is not enforced, however, is no law at all. And in the past, rental rules, like too many New Zealand regulations, have relied largely on the affected individuals complaining.

This policy – again, like too many others – has been a disaster. Even though they are now theoretically protected against no-fault evictions, few New Zealand renters want to complain about their landlord, who can make their lives hell in many different ways.

But, in a potentially seismic shift, the Government has given itself the power to not just respond to tenants’ complaints but to proactively identify and target the worst landlords. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, to investigate 200,000-300,000 terrible rentals, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has employed a frontline inspectorate numbering ... 37. Each inspector will have to check somewhere between 5000 and 8000 rentals.

This reminds one of the fanciful calculations showing Santa Claus would have to be a high-speed blur if he really visited each of the world’s 2 billion children on Christmas Eve. Less humorously, it recalls the sole inspector employed to check mine safety around the time of the Pike River disaster, which killed 29 men.

The comparison is apt: health experts estimate that damp, mouldy, unsafe houses – many of them rentals – cause 230 deaths each year, and put thousands more in hospital. They are one major reason why diseases eliminated in most developed countries, such as rheumatic fever, continue to haunt our children.

Just 37 inspectors could still make a difference, with the right attitude. And in the year since the Healthy Homes Standards came into force, MBIE has – it tells me – “proactively” engaged with 300 landlords. But just 43 have been issued with improvement notices, and none has been successfully prosecuted in the Tenancy Tribunal, though cases are under way.

In the ministry’s defence, it has faced Covid, and various set-up challenges. Rentals, moreover, have to meet the standards only when their tenancies are renewed, meaning tens of thousands will not yet be covered. But tens of thousands will be.

One big problem is that, like most New Zealand regulators, the ministry insists on starting gently. Initially it just informs landlords of their obligations, before “encouraging” them to comply, and only after that starts thinking about enforcement.

Even when enforcement is chosen, it happens on a slowly ascending scale, from warnings through to “enforceable undertakings”, improvement notices, infringement notices and, finally, the Tenancy Tribunal.

Though this may sometimes be the right approach, it creates unendurable delays for the tenants of slumlords. It is also inefficient. While one landlord slowly complies, the others look on, unthreatened and unlikely ever to face one of the celebrated 37 inspectors.

In France, they used to say of the English that from time to time they like to shoot one of their admirals, pour encourager les autres: to encourage the others. Without going so far as actual shootings, the ministry should bring some big, high-profile cases against slumlords, and levy enough fines to put them out of business.

The others will rapidly be frightened into full compliance. Only that way can renters expect the scourge of substandard homes to be tackled in their lifetime.

Stuff: Undisclosed money threatens next election

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If anyone wanted to channel hundreds of thousands of dollars to a political party, and do so without the public’s knowing the first thing about it, the High Court has just shown them how.

In a judgment last week that has caused consternation among the political class, the court ruled that the activities of the New Zealand First Foundation, a fundraising vehicle for the Winston Peters-led NZ First party, were completely legal.

The foundation had taken nearly $700,000 from wealthy donors who believed they were giving to the party and had annotated their bank transfers with tags like “donation” and “Good luck Winston”. The foundation then used this money to pay bills incurred by the party: $140,000 here for its 2017 campaign, $10,000 there for boxer Joseph Parker’s conference speech.

Before last week’s ruling, most people assumed the sums given to the foundation would be deemed political donations, and the donors’ identities disclosed, so the public could see who was giving what to whom, and make up its own mind as to whether any influence had been secured. Given the ever-present potential for money to buy political favours, this openness is an essential means by which a democracy’s integrity is maintained.

The public had a right to know that, when NZ First was preparing to block a capital gains tax, the foundation had received tens of thousands of dollars from people associated with billionaire Graeme Hart, who gave partly because they were opposed to said tax.

It had a right to know that Peters, a two-time racing minister, was regulating an industry that had given tens of thousands of dollars to the foundation. Failing to disclose these sums should, in my view, have been a flagrant violation of electoral law.

In the NZ First Foundation case, however, the two defendants, who have name suppression, escaped punishment. Not on the substance, though: Justice Pheroze Jagose found “comprehensive evidence [the defendants] deployed the dishonest scheme in order to deceive the party and party secretary”.

They were cleared, rather, on a troubling technicality. Justice Jagose ruled that payments are donations only if they are given directly to a political party or to people engaged “in the administration of the affairs of the party”. Because the defendants were not involved in NZ First’s day-to-day running (at least, not in the capacity in which they received the money), the payments were deemed not to be party donations, and there was no obligation to disclose them.

When the Electoral Act was drafted, no-one anticipated a scheme quite like the NZ First Foundation. The result? Anyone, from any political party, is free to set up an aligned but technically separate organisation, make sure they themselves steer clear of party “administration”, collect big donations, and pay the party’s bills in complete secrecy.

To say this has troubling implications would be to put it mildly. The door is open for all manner of undisclosed money – including unlimited foreign donations – to pour into political party coffers before next year’s election. Transparency and integrity have both been put at risk. The urgent task now is to shut that door – indeed to lock it, and bar it with steel.

Fortunately, a great danger is met with a great opportunity. Alarmed by the rising tide of donation-related scandals, the Government has just introduced a bill that would require more donors’ names to be disclosed and force parties to publish annual accounts.

Though it has its flaws, the bill nonetheless presents the perfect chance to add provisions that would close the NZ First Foundation loophole. The steps needed are simple. The definition of “party donation” must be widened to include any donation designed to assist a party, regardless of the recipient’s job title. That would clearly identify the problem.

Failure to pass those donations on to a party must be made a criminal offence (not just a technical breach, as at present), and one that attracts sweeping penalties. That would properly punish the bad behaviour.

Lastly, as the Electoral Commission recommended in its review of the last election, the law needs a general “anti-collusion” provision, similar to the broad anti-avoidance clauses in tax legislation. That would ensure any future deceptive schemes are caught, even if not explicitly anticipated in law.

New Justice Minister Kiri Allan ​has asked officials to look at this urgently. Some fear the rush to close the loophole before next year’s election will lead to bad law. But that is surely a much smaller risk than the risk of doing nothing at all, and thus giving undisclosed money free reign.

Stuff: Here’s how Labour could outflank Luxon on tax

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“To tax and to please, no more than to love and be wise, is not given to men.” So wrote the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, and if the postwar embrace of high taxes seemed temporarily to contradict his claim, the last few decades have given it proof. Certainly no modern-day Labour Party likes talking tax.

After autumn’s intense debates, the tax conversation has been more muted, but we can expect it to flare up again – and perhaps even dominate next year’s election campaign. If so, questions of fairness will be central.

National’s plans to axe the top tax rate and reinstate interest deductions for landlords are not, I suspect, especially popular; they look too much like a handout to Christopher Luxon’s rich cohort, and he now seems to mention them less. But even his call to adjust the tax brackets suffers from the same problem.

Luxon would raise the thresholds, so that the 17.5% rate applied only to income above $15,600 rather than $14,000, as currently; the 30% rate would kick in at $53,500, not $48,000; and the 33% rate at $78,100, not $70,000. But even these changes, though superficially aimed at middle New Zealand, would benefit high earners the most. The saving for a public-sector manager on $120,000 would be $1042, but for a minimum-wage checkout operator just $112. From a fairness point of view it is unfathomable.

Labour’s response could be to simply deny the need for any change. The typical Kiwi is not overtaxed: far from it. According to the OECD, just 19.4% of the average New Zealand salary goes in taxes, the lowest in the developed world except for Colombia and Chile.

If middle New Zealanders are struggling, it is rather because wages are low, firms that face little competition can raise prices sky-high (hello, supermarket duopoly!), and public services are patchy. (If anything, average Kiwis would be better off paying slightly more tax, as long as they got significantly better public services.)

Labour could take this line, and hope that cost-of-living payments and wage rises can ease middle New Zealand’s inflation anxieties, especially if any coming recession is relatively mild.

If, though, people feel themselves to be overtaxed, the clamour for change may continue. Labour may then need to contemplate tax reform – but the kind that favours the bottom and the middle, not the top.

One must park, for a moment, the problem that New Zealand simply does not raise enough revenue. If we taxed like the European countries whose public services we admire, the Government would have another $20-30 billion a year for education, welfare and health. But having ruled out a capital gains tax, and being disinclined to implement levies on wealth or inheritances, Labour has few options there.

It can, though, fix the tax system’s tilt against the poor. GST hits low earners hard, and they are taxed on every cent of income. Conversely, many of our multimillionaires pay a lower tax rate than people on the minimum wage.

Labour could take the $1.7b cost of Luxon’s threshold adjustments and – as former party staffers such as Clint Smith have suggested – redirect it towards more progressive tax cuts. For the same cost, Labour could make the first $5000 of income tax-free. This would save a minimum-wage worker 10.5% of $5000, or $525 – nearly five times Luxon’s offer. Average earners would get the same tax cut.

But so too would the very wealthy. And losing $1.7b in revenue would be a blow for Labour. Could it recoup the tax cut from the rich? It has promised no further taxes this term, but could make pledges for 2024 onwards – lowering, for instance, the threshold at which the 39% rate cuts in from the current $180,000 to $120,000, and introducing a new top rate of 45% on income over $250,000, similar to Australia’s. That could recoup roughly half the $1.7b cost.

Labour would then need only another modest proposal – a levy on unimproved land value, say, or curbs on multinational tax avoidance – to make its changes revenue-neutral. Of course, the tax increases might then seem to be mounting – especially if one includes social insurance. So Labour might have to park any further tax proposals and accept some revenue loss overall, or rely on the tax take outpacing expectations (as it has done recently).

There are no easy options. Still, Labour has ways to protect much of the $3b in new spending set aside for future years, while outflanking Luxon by offering most Kiwis a much larger tax cut than he ever could. This would be a long way from the ideal world in which all forms of income, including capital gains and inheritances, are taxed fairly. But it might at least prove Burke wrong.

The Conversation: ‘They’re nice to me, I’m nice to them’: new research sheds light on what motivates political party donors in New Zealand

Co-written with Lisa Marriott. Read the original article on The Conversation

Proposed changes to New Zealand’s political donation rules have put the spotlight on donors who give thousands and the motivations they have for their generosity. Our current research into New Zealand’s political donations system aims to shed light on this often obscure process.

Last year, just over NZ$2.73 million was donated to ten of New Zealand’s 15 registered political parties.

Current rules require the public disclosure of any donations over $15,000. The government has proposed dropping this public disclosure threshold to $1,500 (a move opposed by both the National and Act parties).

The proposed reforms to the political donation rules follow Serious Fraud Office investigations into the handling of donations received by the National, Labour and NZ First parties. All three investigations have resulted in court proceedings, with the first case just ended with the judge reserving his decision.

Given the apparent confusion and disputed legal requirements around transparency, a basic question needs to be asked: why do wealthy New Zealanders donate to political parties?

As part of our research into political donations, we have interviewed several party donors across the political spectrum.

We asked them why they donate, whether they expect to exert any sort of influence from their donation, and what views they have on other features of the current system, such as the disclosure of their name and the size of their donation.

Our interviewees were not concerned about transparency. Having each given over $30,000, their names were published online within ten days of their donation.

All accepted this transparency as a necessary part of a democratic system. Some even believed it had positive effects, for instance in encouraging others to donate.

Our interviewees’ reasons for donating varied. Most invoked some desire to “participate”. Participation took different forms – from supporting a party that had similar values to the donor, to just being part of the political process.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic research suggests political influence is expected from donations – although supporting existing policies is also a factor. But the donors we spoke to said they did not gain extra influence as a result of their donation, nor did they seek it.

A couple of cautions are in order, however. The fact they were willing to be interviewed by researchers may suggest our interviewees were more comfortable with their donations than other donors might be.

Second, even while insisting they did not gain extra influence, some made other comments suggesting some level influence was a consequence of the donation. One noted interactions with multiple prime ministers and party leaders, some of them directly connected to fundraising. Such figures had, for instance, been to the donor’s house for meals.

Another donor said making a large donation would generate the opportunity to arrange a direct meeting. Even if policy is not explicitly discussed in such contexts, donors and politicians are clearly building close relationships.

These are the conditions in which the interests and beliefs of political leaders may gravitate towards those of donors, especially since ordinary voters do not generally get such privileged access.

Some donors alluded to such closeness. One said, speaking of the party to which they donate, “They are nice to me, and I’m nice to them.”

Another acknowledged that while donations were made in self-interest, “The self-interest is [seen as] public interest.” That is, donors rationalise actions designed to further their own interests by arguing this overlaps perfectly with the public interest, even though such a correlation is far from guaranteed.

Some would argue the process for regulating donations works, evidenced by the ongoing court cases. However, those cases were triggered by whistleblowers, not because of regulatory oversight in the first instance. We cannot rely on whistleblowers to report all instances of alleged wrongdoing.

Much electoral reform work is currently taking place, including the contested changes to donation disclosure rules and a wider independent review of the Electoral Act.

With two more donations-related court cases to come this year, pressure is mounting for changes to the way political parties are funded.

Such reform appears necessary to create greater transparency about donations and ensure that trust in Aotearoa New Zealand’s political funding system is not permanently eroded.

Stuff: Ardern’s low-key school food revolution

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On a grey midday at Mana College, brightly coloured trolleys begin to appear outside classrooms, bearing crates of food. It’s the latest instalment of the free lunches programme, a signature Jacinda Ardern policy that feeds 220,000 children in low-decile schools across the country.

Mana’s acting principal, Greg Sharland, tells me the lunches have been “a real game-changer” in a school that previously had pupils going hungry or subsisting on the cheapest junk food. In times of poverty and rising prices, families’ food budgets often suffer. “Having a good, healthy, packed lunch is really challenging for some of our students,” he says. “This has broken down some of those barriers for us.”

Eloise Bason, a senior pupil, agrees. A typical lunch now might be teriyaki chicken and rice with vegetables, or a bean and roast beef burrito, with fruit to follow. “Personally, I have been really enjoying school lunches. I have found them very balanced [nutritionally].”

Ardern’s scheme has a twofold rationale. It ensures the country’s poorest children are fed, but is also designed to raise school results. Hungry kids make poor learners: a recent evidence review found that school food programmes, commonplace in other countries, lift pupils’ marks.

The first national evaluation of Ardern’s version, published last year, had too little data to make claims about attendance or grades. (Further research is under way.) But it found pupils had better diets, felt more settled, and were far less hungry.

Sharland says that, although the ravages of Covid have rendered rigorous evaluation impossible, anecdotally the scheme is raising achievement. “It definitely helps with energy levels in our last period classes,” Bason adds.

At nearby Porirua College, principal Ragne Maxwell is another enthusiast. “In all the years of educational initiatives [I’ve seen], this is the one that has made the single biggest difference for our kids,” she says. Their eating habits have changed – “they aren’t filling up on pies and $1 bottles of fizzy drink” – and having fewer hungry and “wired-up” kids means fewer playground incidents.

She even thinks it’s reducing obesity. “It’s phenomenal in terms of well-being.”

The programme’s success is all the more startling given this Government’s struggles to deliver core policies and its tendency to fold under political pressure. Not that long ago, conservatives were ardently opposed to a scheme that, as they saw it, trespassed on to an area of parental responsibility and let lazy families off the hook.

But once Ardern made it clear she was undaunted by this anger, it rapidly melted away, leaving the political landscape permanently changed. (One wonders what such staunchness might have achieved elsewhere.)

It helped that there were overseas models to emulate. The scheme’s design, too, has been near-ideal: it was piloted first, then adjusted; it provides lunches to all children at qualifying schools, removing stigma; and it is flexible, so that the 170-odd schools with working canteens can make their own lunches, while the remaining 700 or so buy them in. Big change, done slowly: it’s how the “radically incremental” Ardern government was supposed to work, but mostly hasn’t.

The scheme’s early weakness was waste: news reports detailed thousands of meals going uneaten. But the problem seems to have been brought under control. At Mana, the caterer surveys students and tweaks the meals. “We haven’t seen the tuna wrap back on the menu,” Sharland says wryly.

Official data from a small sample of schools suggest just 10% of meals are wasted. Many parents, contemplating the mouldy packed lunches they have discovered under their child’s bed, will feel that nine from 10 is a decent hit rate.

The scheme’s left-wing critics sometimes claim it would be redundant if the Government had solved child poverty. But it is, Sharland says, “about so much more than just having food in your belly”. Students and teachers eat together. “It’s an opportunity … to connect – particularly in this Covid world, where we have found connection difficult.”

It’s also “a great way to educate people”. Showing beats telling: “It’s easy to say, ‘You should eat more healthily’, but what does that look like? Now they are [seeing] it every day.”

Maxwell agrees. “It’s part of building whānau and learning about appropriate eating – that it isn’t always about sitting in front of the TV.” She reframes a conservative talking point: “You are not just giving them fish, you are teaching them about fishing.”

Porirua College makes its own lunches; Sharland hopes an upcoming refurbishment will allow Mana to do likewise. From there, he envisages a quiet revolution that the Government itself has perhaps only glimpsed.

The free lunches could, in time, become the hub of a holistic, interconnected system in which the school grows some of its own food, pupils help prepare it, and that work earns them qualifications. “We’d love to do that,” he says.

Stuff: White men are being asked to be humble, not silent

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The best-selling crime writer James Patterson, as you may have read earlier this week, has just had to apologise for saying that white men face “another form of racism” and are being pushed out of the publishing industry. His claim echoes that of another cultural kingpin, the superstar podcaster Joe Rogan, who last year said straight white men were being “silenced” by woke activists.

These are perilous days indeed for a near-billionaire author who outsells Stephen King and Dan Brown combined, and for his fellow victim, the host of a podcast downloaded 200 million times a month. But jibes like this, though satisfying, only get us so far.

Rogan and Patterson are expressing a fear increasingly held by older males: that society no longer seeks their views. Indeed, they feel their opinions to be scorned and denigrated. This frightens them deeply because they, like us all, are social beings, reliant on the regard of others; not to be heard is almost not to exist. (A point, of course, that traditionally marginalised groups have often made.)

The upswell of this fear is worrying, in at least two ways. First, it may lead to an aggressively masculine backlash. Second, it represents, I think, a misunderstanding of what is actually being sought.

Even if there were an attempt to cancel older white men en masse, it has clearly failed, given their constant presence on platforms like those that Patterson and Rogan enjoy. (And in this column, indeed.) More to the point, I don’t think the demand is actually that white men fall silent.

In some corners of the internet, one may hear calls for them to be forever quiet; phrases like “pale, male and stale” can be deployed in ways that imply every older white man is past his use-by date. For the most part, though, what I hear is a request for something subtly different: humility. It’s not the speaking that’s the problem, it’s the dominating: the need of so many men to hold forth at length, to speak over others, to assume theirs is the most interesting and most important voice.

As Anne Elliot, one of Jane Austen’s finest heroines, says in the novel Persuasion, “Men have had every advantage in telling their story ... the pen has been in their hands.” In my own working life, some of the most excruciating scenes have come in meetings where a woman is clearly trying to say something, but a succession of older white men talk over her until their attention is, slowly and belatedly, drawn to her existence.

All this could be avoided if they – if we – were more attentive to the wisdom and life experiences of others. We might better acknowledge their contributions, rather than feeling that we must claim all insights as our own. Slower to speak, and quicker to listen, we would learn more, have our perspectives better illuminated and shaped by others, and find defter solutions. (Most problems benefit from the attention of different – and diverse – minds.)

Consider this, though: for a certain class of highly educated men, the speaker’s authority is all – or most – of what they have. Strip that away, and they are left bare, exposed, even humiliated.

Nor can we pretend that greater equality will be painless. Contemplating the Patterson case, the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld is of course right to criticise “the erroneous belief that an expansion of opportunities for under-represented groups is an oppression of white men, rather than a necessary and long-overdue correction of imbalanced scales”. And when things are expanding – more jobs, more positions, more opportunities – this correction need come at no-one’s expense.

But many of the most prestigious spots are in limited supply: corporate management positions, senior academic roles, top public-sector jobs. As we remove the barriers that once stood before highly capable women, Māori and other candidates, the less able white men – who previously got their positions through confidence, contacts or simply sounding the way we expect experts to sound – will, as things stand, lose out.

But that phrase, “lose out”, points to a deeper problem. No white man – no-one of any stripe – should feel themselves a loser if they cannot climb a given hierarchy. If our whole identity were tied less closely to our perceived occupational success, the rebalancing of the scales would not seem such a threat.

That state of mind, in turn, would be more readily achieved in a less competitive world, one that still values excellence but supports everyone to achieve it, and celebrates it in all walks of life, not just among the great and good. Then it would be easier for older white men to see the current moment for what I think it is: a call not for silence, but for humility. For something, in other words, that makes us better people.