A Talley of NZ First's secret donations

Peter Talley - fishing industry mogul

I really don’t envy Jacinda Ardern’s position as Prime Minister of New Zealand sometimes. She’s probably got the hardest job in the country. Not only does she have to ensure her own MPs are behaving properly, she has to negotiate with Winston Peters and other NZ First MPs who seem to be dragging the Coalition Government into disrepute.

The NZ First Foundation’s funding scandal for instance, which is currently being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office, is making the entire Government look bad! This latest controversy involves, but is probably not limited to, NZ First being caught red handed accepting secret donations, via their foundation, from one of New Zealand's largest food production and supply groups, Talley’s.

On Tuesday, RNZ reported:

Concerns over secret fisheries donations to NZ First Foundation 

One of the country's biggest fishing companies, Talley's, and its managing director donated nearly $27,000 to the New Zealand First Foundation, which has been bankrolling the New Zealand First Party. 

The foundation received $26,950 from seafood giant Talley's and from managing director Sir Peter Talley between 2017 and 2019, according to records viewed by RNZ.

First off, let’s make something absolutely clear. There is nothing materially different between the NZ First Foundation and the NZ First political party. They should be treated as the same organisation in the eyes of the law.

It received the money from Talley's in four amounts - all of which were below the threshold for public disclosure and so have not been publicly revealed until now. 

Greenpeace was concerned by the donations and believed the New Zealand First Party had too much sway over fishing policy and the party was too close to the industry. 

Greenpeace executive director Russel Norman called on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to review key fishing policy decisions, which he said were favourable to the seafood industry, in light of the donation revelations.

Russel Norman isn’t wrong. Key fishing policy decisions should be reviewed in light of the industry making secret donations.

While the rest of us recreational fisherfolk are lucky to catch anything these days, large fishing companies like Talley’s have been allowed to plunder the ocean, taking what most would consider undersized fish in numbers that mean fishing stocks are badly depleted. Most of these fish, including the pick of the catch, are exported at prices most of us Kiwis cannot afford here at home.

On 4 April, 2019, Talley's deposited $2500 into the foundation bank account. The next day Peter Talley personally made a $15,000 donation - one cent under the level at which donations are made public. 

Talley's followed that up with a "fast deposit" of $2000 on 29 July, 2019. 

… 

Peter Talley refused to comment when contacted by RNZ.

It’s no wonder Talley refused to comment. He has effectively been caught out making secret donations to ensure that the interests of his private business trump those of recreational fisherfolk. I mean it's not as if Talley can buy another knighthood.

There’s also the issue of the video surveillance cameras that were meant to monitor workers on commercial fishing vessels. In 2016, 80% of them weren’t working and there’s been no substantial improvement reported, apart from 28 more cameras to safeguard Maui dolphins, since the Government changed in 2017.

Winston Peters - NZ First leader

Peters claiming that he knew nothing doesn't wash when there's now clear evidence that NZ First accepted backhanders. There’s simply no reasonable explanation concerning Talley’s splitting up numerous donations to the NZ First Foundation (who is essentially NZ First) other than to avoid public and official scrutiny.

Joining the dots between The NZ First Foundation receiving secret donations from Talley’s and NZ First favouring their business model is a very simple exercise. It’s literally a straight line that resoundingly shows a corrupt practice and usurpation of our political donations system.

It’s for that reason alone Winston Peters needs to stop playing the fool and answer the mainstream medias questions. Because if he doesn’t NZ First will be judged harshly by the public even if they’re found not guilty in a court of law.

UPDATE: Today, Stuff reported a longer list of secret donors to the NZ First Foundation/NZ First Party.

Hannah Tamaki can’t dance

I must say that it’s at loggerheads with the inclusive and free society we want to create in New Zealand that one of our largest media outlets, MediaWorks, would promote Hannah Tamaki and allow her to perform on their show, Dancing With The Stars.

Hannah Tamaki and her husband Brian are after all well-known bigoted evangelists who gained international media attention when they launched a hateful "They are not us" anti-Muslim campaign just after the Christchurch mosque massacre.

Brian and Hannah Tamaki - Cult leaders

There was always going to be a huge public outcry against her appearance, which was of course a not so subtle acceptance of the intolerance the Tamaki’s stand for.

Yesterday, the NZ Herald reported:

Destiny Church's Hannah Tamaki axed from Dancing with the Stars 

Destiny Church's Hannah Tamaki will not appear on reality show Dancing with the Stars, MediaWorks has confirmed. 

"Our announcement for this year's Dancing with the Stars cast is scheduled for the end of March, however we are taking the unusual step to confirm Hannah Tamaki will not be part of that lineup," a MediaWorks spokesperson said. 

"It was originally planned for Hannah to take part in the show. We now recognise this was a mistake and we apologise. 

"We have seen a very strong reaction, some of which has been extreme and concerning and MediaWorks does not condone bullying. We would be failing in our duty of care to everyone if we continued as planned.

All the comments in my feeds have been entirely justified…so I’m really not sure why MediaWorks is blaming their decision to axe Hannah on bullying! Clearly people speaking out against a cult leader being normalised isn’t bullying!

You can bet your bottom dollar that the Tamaki’s would have used the platform and Hannah’s increased profile to further their religious and political goals. They would have surreptitiously used the increased attention to promote and peddle more hate speech against minorities in the hope of attracting support for their deluded causes.

There’s no question that cutting the blatant homophobe, Hannah Tamaki, from Dancing With The Stars was the right thing to do. Hopefully this is the start of other news outlets also deplatforming similar hate speech merchants as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Attention seeking Simon

It seems we can’t even get through a week these days without the National Party's leader, Simon Bridges, making some sort of silly announcement about a policy that doesn’t actually exist.

Usually concerning Bridges’ gut instinct and the undoing of whatever the Government has recently announced, National’s reactionary opinions and uncosted policy announcements are scant on details and often don’t make much sense from an economic let alone political standpoint.

However every once in a while Bridges really outdoes himself.

Yesterday, RNZ reported:

National considers reciprocal deportations for Australians 

Opposition leader Simon Bridges says a National government will look at amending the law to allow Australians convicted of serious crimes in New Zealand to be deported.

Doesn't Bridges know that Australians convicted of crimes here can already be deported?

Bridges said, if elected, National would explore a policy based on amendments to Australia's Migration Act in 2014 which allows for people to have their visas cancelled on character grounds. 

He said, legally, the Australia government can deport Kiwi criminals and New Zealand needs to look into a reciprocal policy. 

"While Jacinda Ardern has labelled this issue as corrosive to our relationship with Australia, I don't agree," he said in a statement.

With the biased mainstream medias help, National is relying on people not digging any further than easily digestible little sound bites to gain the attention they clearly don’t deserve.

The reciprocal deportation idea for instance, where the difference between the two countries rules is in reality very minimal, has provided Simon with a platform to pretend to be tough on crime. Leaving Kiwis in New Zealand after they've been law abiding citizens for 10 years seems only fair and in my opinion we shouldn’t go changing our laws just because Australia refuses to change theirs. After all, two wrongs don’t make a right.

So this is obviously just another ploy to gain the medias attention to add to the growing list of all the other National Party's empty bravado and hollow promises.

Here’s another recent clanger that Bridges received widespread criticism for.

On Friday, Newshub reported:

Good news for Simon Bridges - his big tax idea is already happening 

And then he declared: "People on the average wage shouldn’t be paying almost 33 per cent in the dollar." 

Incredibly, simply by making that point clear, he managed to travel back in time and reset the rates of marginal and effective tax rates, and fortunately for several years now nobody has had to pay anything like that level of tax.

So Bridges can’t even get National’s big tax announcement right and has become a joke!

The opposition leaders' bumbling is causing National to flounder on topics they usually dominate on like law and order and tax reform. With nothing more than his own anecdotal evidence, Simon Bridges is failing to convince voters that his ideas are sound and therefore worth supporting.

Let’s take a look at another brain-fart from last month.

On Jan 29, RNZ reported:

Simon Bridges to announce potential coalition partners 'soon' 

Asked whether he would be giving the Epsom seat to ACT's David Seymour or anyone else from another party, Bridges again repeated he would be making an announcement. 

"As I say we'll make an announcement soon, I said we'll do that in election year because I think New Zealanders do require certainty but patience is a virtue and today's not the day." 

Pressed further about when that would be, he said: 'Soon my friend, soon.'

Does there have to be an announcement that National would work with the Act Party if they have the numbers? Or has Bridges realised that making an announcement about something everybody already knows makes him look like a damn fool?

Unfortunately for the media they also get egg on their faces every time they play along with Simon’s attention seeking. Perhaps in the future they might like to distance themselves a bit to gain some objectivity, because running off to Simon Bridges to get his hot take on every single issue is becoming extremely tiresome!

NZ First undermines the Coalition

You’ve really got to wonder what the NZ First Party was thinking and drinking last Friday? Not only did they hamstring the Greens by halting one of their main environmental policies, the electric vehicle fee-bate scheme, a policy that the public was led to believe was a done deal…but they also had the audacity to brag about it online.

How does the ‘National Party’ think they can really change anything when they are in the...opposition? pic.twitter.com/FBJkr2jcK6

— New Zealand First (@NZFirstNews) February 22, 2020

It doesn't make much sense to brag about stopping a policy that the Government you're a part of proposed. It makes less sense to do what the opposing team wanted and then criticise them for it. Sort of like doing a victory lap after scoring an own goal.

The Green Party should be spitting tacks at Winston Peters right now, for ignoring his obligations to his political partners and more importantly the environment. Campaigning to undermine your political opponents is all well and good in election year, unless there’s a coalition agreement that specifically forbids it.

With the SFO's investigation into the NZ First Foundation's dodgy donations and the shenanigans over journalists being photographed and then those photos being leaked to attack blogger Cameron Slater's new website, NZ First is the weak link currently destabilising the Coalition Government. So what are Labour and the Greens going to do about it?

On Friday, RNZ reported:

NZ First axes Government's 'feebate' electric vehicle subsidy plan, while Greens vow to take the policy to the election 

The Government's headline policy to cut the price of electric vehicles by up to $8000 has stalled in first gear after NZ First ministers halted it. 

The policy had two parts: a Clean Car Discount, or "feebate" which would subsidise the cost of cleaner vehicles by making polluting vehicles cost more and a Clean Car Standard, which was designed to encourage importers to import cars with better emissions standards. 

Green co-leader James Shaw said if NZ First ultimately decided to block the policy, his party would take it to the election.

At least Labour and the Greens are still honouring their coalition agreements. But it would be good to hear James Shaw get a bit more outspoken instead of just relying on another election to rectify the political problem that NZ First has become. In the meantime the effects of Climate Change, which is apparently this generations nuclear free moment, are getting exponentially worse.

Don’t take my or the scientists word for it though. Just look at the evidence from across the ditch where Australia’s unprecedented bushfires are the costliest ever, the polar caps melting with Antartica hitting its highest ever temperature of 20.75ºC in February this year and closer to home where most of New Zealand is caught in the grip of another severe drought.

Winston Peters - Leader of the NZ First Party

These things are not normal people.

However according to NZ First the Climate Change emergency knocking on our door is something you can ignore or worse yet play bipartisan politics over.

Sure, being a part of the Coalition Government is all about compromise. But that principle doesn’t hold much water when the compromise involves putting our children’s futures at risk.

This is a bad move by NZ First on numerous levels.

Firstly there is a limited (in both senses of the word) pool of people who’re climate change deniers and clearly National and Act already have this market cornered. Secondly Winston Peters looks like a backstabber by reneging on a policy that he most assuredly agreed to implement. Thirdly it makes New Zealand look like a backwards nation compared to the rest of the world and fourthly it does nothing to help us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, which is required if we want to continue being a major producer and exporter of food. The agriculture industry will simply die without water.

So what the bloody hell was Winston Peters thinking?

Political disunity will cost the election

Winston Peters - Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the NZ First Party

We all know that politics can be pretty messy at times. Just look at the Dirty Politics saga in New Zealand, the misgovernment during the Australian bushfires or the recent Trump impeachment debacle in the US. In a macabre sort of way it's what makes politics so fascinating!

It’s amazing how the public reacts to certain controversies. Take the National Party’s ongoing scandal concerning secret donations from prominent Chinese businessmen for instance. The latest Colmar Brunton poll illogically puts National with the Act Party edging ahead and able to form the next Government.

Simon Bridges, who is deeply implicated in the donations fraud, has amazingly gone into double digits as preferred PM for the first time. A whopping 11% of the population now thinks he’s OK. Perhaps this has something to do with him never criticising National's only friend David Seymour, even when the Act Party accepts donations from far-right extremists who want to blow up New Zealand mosques.

Paula Bennett - National Party MP

If the political polling is to be believed, the corruption case hasn’t taken any wind out of National’s sails at all. But what might is senior National MPs taking the limelight from and upstaging the so-called leader of the opposition, Simon Bridges.

After the former National Party Chief Whip, Jami-Lee Ross, was officially revealed as one of the four people charged in the National Party's $100,000 donations fraud case before the courts, Paula Bennett and Judith Collins didn't even bat an eye before going into super spin mode to actively attack Jacinda Ardern for not standing Winston Peters down over the SFO's investigation into the NZ First Foundation. The hypocrisy of National Party MPs was astonishing!

Distracted and put under pressure, Bridges isn’t performing at his best for obvious reasons either. After Bennett upstaged his keynote speech, Collins had to clarify his statements concerning National, if elected, cancelling the planned increases to the minimum wage, which led to some raising questions about who exactly is leading the National Party?

With this sort of public backstabbing going on and the SFO donations fraud case hanging ominously over Bridges' head, you’ve got to wonder if a pre-election change of National Party leadership is on the cards? In terms of who might take over, it’s a two horse race between Bennett and Collins with Christopher Luxton nowhere to be seen.

However it’s not just National’s usually private infighting that’s causing public political ructions. NZ First has decided to undermine the Greens by cancelling the electric vehicle fee-bate scheme, a policy the Greens had campaigned on that was also strongly promoted by Labour. Thankful for the disunity, National MPs even congratulated NZ First’s ostensible betrayal of their coalition partners.

Yesterday, Stuff reported:

NZ First axes Government's 'feebate' electric vehicle subsidy plan, while Greens vow to take the policy to the election 

It is understood this measure was weighed up by the NZ First caucus and it decided such a policy needed to go to the electorate. 

"We can confirm NZ First are holding up the rollout of policy that would mean cheaper electric and hybrid cars for New Zealanders," Shaw said. 

So a misleading headline. Holding up or going to the electorate isn't exactly axing a policy.

During the consultation it came under intense scrutiny from the National Party, which launched an aggressive online ad campaign, labelling the policy a "car tax". Complaints were made against the ads, some of which were upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority.

... 

NZ First was lobbied by rural industries that it would have a regressive impact. 

Perhaps Winston views the position of coalition partner as a competition and undermining the Greens, who let’s face it have little in common with NZ First, is worthwhile in the long run even though it damages their common goal of keeping National out.

The Greens haven’t had a great time getting their environmental policies, some of which are part of their coalition agreement, over the line. In 2018 they also looked ineffectual after Labour gave oil drilling companies more leniency on the conditions of their expiring drilling permits, effectively nullifying the Government’s previous anti-exploration stance.

Has Labour also been lobbied by vested interests and perhaps browbeaten into changing it’s mind by National’s numerous and dishonest attack ads regarding the fee-bate scheme? Perhaps they simply don’t want to forgo the considerable revenue stream that petrol vehicles generate for the Government?

Hopefully there will be some clarification about where everybody stands on this important policy issue. Either way, it isn’t a good look for the Government’s Coalition partners to be ignoring their agreements and squabbling about already announced policies just seven months out from a general election.

Simon Bridges contradicts Stats NZ

It’s amazing just how many attack ads $100,000 buys you these days. The National Party has really been going to town, with their latest propaganda campaign making a number of questionable and blatantly false assertions, one being that poverty has worsened under the Labour led Government.

The National Party's claim that poverty has increased by 12,000 people came as a huge surprise; being that it was made just days after the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, informed us that 46,000 Kiwis had been lifted out of poverty last year.

So who's telling the truth...Simon Bridges or Grant Robertson?

On Tuesday, the Minister of Finance reported:

Kiwis better off under Coalition Government 

New Zealanders are increasingly better off under this Government as wages rise and families have more disposable income, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. 

Stats NZ reported today that average household disposable incomes after housing costs rose 4.9% in 2019. This was the highest rise in four years and came as Stats NZ said average housing costs were unchanged over the year, while wages rose. 

… 

Today’s data also showed: 

46,000 people were lifted out of poverty in 2019 based on moving above the measure of 50% of disposable income after housing costs.
The median household disposable income after housing costs has risen 10% over the past two years. In 2017, this measure had fallen 1.8%.

46,000 Kiwis better off is a damn good indication that the Coalition Government is getting things done.

National's opposition to the Government's achievements however, including their numerous attack adverts paid for by secret donations, are terribly misleading.

The problem with National’s latest attack advert, which was authorised by Simon Bridges, is that it’s plain wrong! If you read the barely legible fine print they also reference the Household Income and Housing Cost Statistics for the year to June 2019, which shows that the number of people in the low-income bracket actually declined from 18.6% to 17.5% in 2019.

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to argue that poverty under the referenced data* has increased under the Coalition Government.

So either Simon Bridges simply doesn’t understand that a smaller percentage in the low-income indicator bracket is a good thing, or National is straight up lying!

The only way you would get to the 12,000 more people in poverty figure (11,500 to be exact) is if you compared 2016 to 2017, which is a shift of 0.3% of the working population. However the data is from June each year, so we’re talking about comparing National in 2016 and 2017 with only 3 months of a Labour led Government in 2017.

Surely Bridges wouldn’t be stupid enough to count and compare what are effectively two sets of data under a National Government showing that poverty increased? Talk about an own goal.

National is clearly terribly desperate for things to attack the Government over and have perhaps gone a bit crazy! Nobody in their right mind would argue that 3 months is enough time for a new Government to effect significant administrative change to reduce poverty.

Under the Coalition Government the unemployment rate has dropped to an eleven year low and the average wage reached an all time high of $32.83 per hour in the fourth quarter of 2019. This is significant because wage increases affect the median wage. Even the MBIE understands (PDF) that the minimum wage increasing also helps people earning above that level as relative wage rates between different roles are addressed and also increase.

With more people being engaged in low paid employment and the average wage increasing significantly, we should see further reductions in the low-income poverty measure. We should also see a reduction of poverty through increased benefit payments, which the Coalition Government has tied to wage growth.

Perhaps Simon Bridges might like to actually try doing his job as opposition leader for once instead of continuously misleading the public? Otherwise all this clasping at straws and lying just looks like sour grapes from a political Party that's clearly not fit to govern.

*The percentage of people living in households that have an equivalised disposable income after housing cost of less than 50% of median household equivalised disposable income after housing costs.