The 2023 candidate and third party electoral returns have now been released. There is a lot to analyse but already there is one entry that is raising eyebrows.
In West Coast Tasman an independent candidate, Patrick Phelps, received $32,600 from Bathurst Resources Ltd to run for the seat. There is nothing illegal about this. Bathurst is under the Electoral Act not considered to be an Overseas Person, even though it is effectively owned by Australian and Singaporean interests.
Phelps is a miner and ran a campaign criticising the Government for its mining policies on the West Coast. He picked up 5,903 candidate votes, which is pretty significant given that Labour’s Damian O’Connor lost to National’s Maureen Pugh by 1,017 votes.
And his campaign clearly fed into the Nanny State Labour branding and the sense that things were grim.
Jonathan Milne at Newsroom has the details. From the article:
It was the 1908 miners’ strike in Blackball on the West Coast that led to the birth of the Labour Party.
So there was a rich vein of irony last year when Stockton mine management stopped work, called a meeting and told all its 310 workers to vote for its own man instead.
“That certainly pisses me off, given the advocacy that I have undertaken for the mining industry on the Coast, through all my time in Parliament,” says Labour’s Damien O’Connor.
The veteran MP is smarting at a revelation in new disclosures published by the Electoral Commission: ASX-listed mining firm Bathurst Resources donated $32,600 to 29-year-old independent Patrick Phelps to fully fund his campaign for more mining on the West Coast.
Candidate spending limits were $32,600 at last year’s election. So Bathurst, unhappy with a Labour policy banning more mining of conservation land, funded Phelps’ entire campaign – every last dollar. It gave him a far bigger war chest than the more established candidates.
“Look, it was a very credible result for him. And I acknowledge that,” O’Connor tells Newsroom. “Clearly, across the wider West Coast region, people saw our policy as a blockage to further any further mining development.
“There are many international companies and organisations wanting to influence New Zealand elections for their own purposes – the smoking industry, the investment and real estate industry as we’re starting to see. And there’ll be many more.
“I think what people have to do is follow the money, ask the question: why such investments would be made? And for the most part, no business makes an investment without some realistic expectation of a return.”
Phelps works for an industry funded West Coast Trust whose role is to “promote, encourage, and support the people who work in the extractive industries on the West Coast”. The Chair of the Trust is Richard Tacon who is the Chief Executive of Bathurst Resources.
The experience raises the fear that in seats sensitive to single issues well funded corporate candidates could unseat candidates whose parties take policy positions opposed to the corporate’s interests.
Internationally it is not a new phenomenon. For instance the Clive Palmer United Australia Party has acted as a well resourced spoiler for some time. Its parties are very similar to NZ First’s, a collection of pro extraction and extreme counter culture policies the combination of which is quite jarring.
But the experience suggests that electoral campaign reform is required.
Otherwise well funded single policy candidates in strategic electorates could play havoc with senior politicians career prospects.
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