2. Cabinet Appointments and Honours Committee—Chair
[Uncorrected transcript—subject to correction and further editing.]
2. JOHN KEY (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Is she the chair of the Cabinet appointments and honours committee, which considered the nomination of Owen Glenn to be an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK (Prime Minister) : Yes.
John Key: Was she or any other Minister present at the Cabinet committee aware that Mr Glenn had loaned the Labour Party $100,000 after the 2005 election, when they made the decision to recommend him for the honour?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I certainly was but, of course, the honour was made irrespective of such factors.
John Key: Why did the Prime Minister not correct Labour Party President Mike Williams’ statement made after Mr Glenn received his New Year’s honour that Mr Glenn had made no financial donation to the Labour Party since 2005, when that statement was clearly not true?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: Because I was overseas and had no knowledge of it at the time.
John Key: What assurances can she give the New Zealand public that Mr Glenn did not receive his honour as a mark of gratitude for bailing out the New Zealand Labour Party when it had to pay back $880,000 it took from taxpayers to pay for its pledge card?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: In fact, an honour is given in spite of such factors, and I would draw the member’s attention to the editorial in the New Zealand Herald on the matter on 1 January entitled “Honoured donor to our politics”, which went on to state that Mr Glenn “thoroughly deserves one of our highest national honours”. It further stated that he “doubly deserves his honour because he appears to have made no secret of his contribution.”, unlike the 3 million bucks’ worth of private contributors who fuelled the National Party’s campaign in 2005.
John Key: Can the Prime Minister confirm that she has approved Mr Glenn’s appointment as New Zealand’s consul in Monaco, and that she has, as reported this morning, told the Minister of Foreign Affairs to “get on with it”; if not, what is the position in regard to that appointment?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: No and no. The position, as I understand it from Mr Peters this morning, is that he is considering whether an appointment should be made at all to such a position.
4. Political Parties—Meaning of “Donation”
[Uncorrected transcript—subject to correction and further editing.]
4. Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) to the Minister of Justice: Is it the Government’s policy that the value of substantially more favourable than commercial terms and conditions for credit is considered a donation to a political party?
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Justice) : Yes, and the Government made the law specific in that respect in the recently passed Electoral Finance Act—something that was opposed by the National Party. It also made the law specific in terms of identifying previously secret donations from trusts.
Hon Bill English: Does the Minister agree, then, that the Labour Party president, Mike Williams, was completely incorrect as chief administrator of Labour Party funds when he said yesterday: “An interest free loan is not a donation under any electoral act, it is an interest free loan and we have a lot of them, mainly from rich branches of the Labour Party … it shouldn’t be treated as a donation”; if she does not agree with him, why not?
Hon ANNETTE KING: I am not going to comment on Mr Williams’ comments, but I will say to the member that under the previous Act, the old regime, that was very unclear, and, of course, what this Government has done is to make it very clear indeed. Of course we have also make it clear about secret donations from trusts, because that was not clear at all, not to most people—except for those in the National Party, which was very, very keen to use secret trusts whenever it possibly could in order to garner as many votes as it could without people knowing where the money was coming from.
