Political parties have banked $468,160 so far this year through a scheme that hides the identity of the donor from the public and, in theory, from the parties themselves. Every cent of it arrived in the first six months of the year.
Figures published by the Electoral Commission show National has taken $316,160 of that total, roughly two thirds. The Opportunities Party has received $70,000, New Zealand First $57,000 and ACT $25,000. Labour, the Greens and Te PΔti MΔori have never received a donation of this type since the mechanism was created in 2009.
The scheme is called a donation protected from disclosure. A donor who wants to give a party more than $1,500 without being named sends the money to the Electoral Commission instead of the party. The commission checks the donor is based in New Zealand, pools the money and passes it on. The party is told how much it has been given but not who gave it. Donors do not have to explain why they want secrecy.
The law goes further than simply withholding the name. Donors are banned from telling anybody at all that they have donated, or that they intend to, including the party receiving the money. A donor who breaks that rule faces a penalty of up to $10,000. For a candidate or party official the penalty rises to $40,000. Outside the scheme, a donation from someone who wants to stay hidden from the party as well as the public is capped at $1,500, and donors giving more than $6,000 by ordinary means must be publicly named.
What the commission’s own register shows, and what has not been widely reported, is how sharply this money clusters around elections. In the quarter ending March 2026 the commission received $242,237. In the quarter ending June 2026 it received $225,923. Those two quarters account for the entire $468,160. In the eight quarters before them, covering the whole of 2024 and 2025, the commission recorded just $16,000, and six of those eight quarters were nil.
The same pattern appeared last time, only more extreme. The entire 2020 to 2023 cycle produced $326,390, and every dollar of it landed in a single quarter, the one ending September 2023, weeks out from the October election. Across the current cycle the scheme has now moved $534,160, already well clear of the previous cycle’s total with the campaign still ahead.
National’s share has come in eight separate payments. The party received $45,000 in October 2023, then five payments in March 2026 worth $60,087, $42,750, $55,000, $24,400 and $60,000, followed by $34,000 in April and $39,923 in June. That brings National’s cycle total to $361,160.
Donors can give up to $61,425 to any one party between elections through the scheme, a figure that rose on 1 January 2026. There is also a ceiling on how much any single party can take. RNZ, which reported the latest figures on Friday, put that ceiling at $405,900 and noted National is the closest of any party to reaching it. Protected donations make up 20 percent of National’s declared income once donations over $20,000 and protected donations are counted together.
The Independent Electoral Review, commissioned by the previous Labour government, recommended in 2023 that the scheme be scrapped altogether. Its final report also proposed barring companies, unions and trusts from donating and capping any donor at $30,000 per cycle. Those recommendations were largely left on the shelf.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith told RNZ the government had considered the review’s recommendations. “Abolishing protected disclosure donations is not a priority, just as it wasn’t for the previous Labour Government either,” he said. Goldsmith said the changes his government has made are aimed at making elections run efficiently. The Electoral Amendment Act 2025, which took effect at the start of this year, raised the threshold for naming a donor from $5,000 to $6,000 and gave parties 20 days rather than 10 to report donations above $20,000 in an election year.
Professor Andrew Geddis of the University of Otago law faculty sat on the review panel. He told RNZ the scheme was built on an argument borrowed from American academics, that anonymity might guard against influence better than disclosure does. “If a donor gives National, Act, Labour – whoever – a large amount of money, that then creates a worry that the party will feel beholden to that donor and will reward the donor through policy or decisions,” Geddis said. If the party genuinely does not know where the money came from, that worry disappears.
The catch is that the whole design rests on nobody quietly passing the word along. “If that’s happening, it’s the worst of all worlds because we’ve lost the benefit of transparency while still allowing for this money to flow through in a way that can have an influence in terms of obligation,” Geddis said.
Chile tried a similar anonymised system and abandoned it. A World Bank case study found that “as became clear with the 2014-2015 scandals, in practice candidates knew exactly who was making large donations, and only the public was left in the dark”.
Geddis said that while it is an offence for a donor to reveal what they have given, nothing obviously stops a party from pointing a would-be donor towards the scheme in the first place. The commission’s chief legal adviser Kristina Temel told RNZ it has never referred an unlawful disclosure to police and has had no complaints about it. Only a small group of authorised staff handle the donations, and Temel said she does not see the donors’ identities herself. She is not aware of any other country running a state-operated anonymiser of this kind. “It will be interesting to see whether, if the donations regime is reviewed in the future, whether this is an element that stays,” she said.
Transparency International New Zealand executive director Julie Haggie was blunter. “It’s just got out of hand. It’s become a kind of loophole now that seems to have now got larger than it was originally intended to,” she told RNZ. Haggie said the rising numbers suggested the scheme had become a route around scrutiny rather than a privacy protection, and that voters notice. The New Zealand Election Survey for 2023 found 43 percent of respondents thought donors exert undue influence on politicians, 18 percent disagreed and 40 percent had no view.
“They’re thinking that big money influences government more than their vote,” Haggie said.
With an election due later this year, and the pattern from 2023 suggesting the biggest quarter is usually the one closest to polling day, the totals are likely to climb again. Detailed donation records for 2026 will not be published until May 2027, well after the votes are counted. If you want to check where the parties stand on this and other issues before you vote, our voting tool compares party positions across the policy areas that matter to you.
Should a donor be able to give a political party tens of thousands of dollars without the public ever learning their name? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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