Oh dear. Labour, the paragons of virtue who felt compelled to enact the Electoral Finance Act to minimise the effect of "big money" on elections have been forced to disclose a donation of $100,000 from Resource Finance, a company set up (what a surprise!) by Peter and Philp Vela. The donation was made on 31 October, and matched a donation of $100,000 to New Zealand First, the party that doesn't accept donations from big business.
So just what purpose was this money put towards? An all-expenses trip to Melbourne for a Super-Hero? The "Mary" advertsing campaign? Did it enable a "thank-you" payment to Kees Keizer? And why did Labour, the party who promised transparency in electoral funding not disclose the donation until AFTER the election - they were legally entitled not to disclse for two weeks, but what about morally? Were they ashamed to have to go cap-in-hand to Winston Peters' backer?
Ah, so many questions and so few answers. Perhaps though this explains why Helen Clark and Winston Peters were inseperable until the weekend before the election.
4 comments:
So we can expect a down payment on the $158K? I thought not.
"Ah, so many questions and so few answers."
On the other hand, it could have been a donation from a couple of very wealthy NZers who are pissed off with the right's campaign to eliminate Winston Peters. And it could just be that the money was spent on the election campaign. Sound plausible?
Also, note that the fact that Peters accepted money, etc, from wealthy donors, was a lying hypocrite and didn't deserve to be in Parliament does not logically exclude the possibilility that there was a determined and coordinated campaign to get rid of Peters, as you seem to suggest in an earlier post.
JP - I didn't suggest that there was a campaign against Peters - I commented on the column by your Galbraiths mate Trotter that there was a campaign against Peters, and noted that the said Mr Peters got everything he deserved and more. I just find it interesting that in a week when you would have been expecting thew Velas to be keeping their heads down, with all the helicopter allegations etc, they gave money both to Peters and to the party that kept him afloat.
I2, No, I said that you seem to be excluding the possibilitity of an orchestrated campaign: "The only person who "ruthlessly executed" attacks on NZ First was Winston Peters himself." My point is that you have not provided any argument against such a campaign -- Peters' culpability does not prove that there was no campaign. In the event a lot of the accusations proved groundless. (Although he did almost certainly lie about his knowledge of the $100,000 donation and therefore also did not declare the donation as he should have.)
If you accept that there may have been such a campaign -- and it was pretty obvious fairly early on that things were being coordinated -- then the Velas' likely anger giving rise to the donations becomes easy to understand. Occam's razor and all that.
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