Every three years, New Zealanders are handed a ballot paper and told they are participating in democracy. And they are — up to a point. What they are rarely told is that by the time they walk into that voting booth, a small number of very wealthy individuals and corporate interests have already been pulling strings for months, funding the parties most likely to deliver policies that suit them. The voting public gets one vote each. Some donors get something considerably more valuable: access, influence, and a phone number that gets answered.
The evidence is sitting in plain sight on the Electoral Commission’s public register of large donations. Since 1 January 2026, the three coalition parties have collectively received $750,000 in declared large donations — National $250,000, ACT $350,000, and NZ First $150,000. Labour has received $22,333. The Greens $43,014. That is a ratio of roughly ten to one in favour of the governing parties. The election is still eight months away.
Parties in government always attract more donor money than those in opposition — that is hardly surprising. What matters is where the money is coming from, and what some donors might reasonably expect in return. When you dig into the actual names on the register, the picture becomes uncomfortable.
The most striking entry on the 2026 register is a company called GMP Environmental Limited. It donated $100,000 each to National, ACT, and NZ First in February 2026 — $300,000 in total, spread equally across all three coalition partners within days of each other. The name GMP Environmental has a reassuring ring to it. You might picture native plantings, perhaps, or riparian restoration.
You would be wrong. According to official documents filed with the New Zealand Companies Office, GMP Environmental Limited (company number 1688910) has as its ultimate holding company Greymouth Petroleum Mining Group Limited — a New Zealand-owned oil and gas company that, in its own words in a submission to the Commerce Commission, ranks second among New Zealand-owned petroleum producers and supplies around 10% of the country’s daily gas production.
The Companies Office filing, lodged in July 2024, shows that both companies share the same registered address — Level 9, 151 Queen Street, Auckland — and the same directors. A significant petroleum producer donated $300,000 to the three parties currently in government, using a subsidiary whose name gives no indication of what the parent company actually does.
Greymouth Petroleum’s relationship with government policy goes back further than most people realise. In 2018, when the then Labour government banned new offshore oil and gas exploration permits, Greymouth Petroleum went to court to challenge it. They lost. When the National-led coalition took office in late 2023, all three coalition parties had campaigned on reversing that very ban — and in August 2025, they delivered, enacting the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025, which lifted the exploration ban and simultaneously weakened the automatic liability oil and gas companies had previously carried for their own decommissioning costs.
That liability reform mattered enormously to the industry. It was the direct result of the 2021 Tamarind offshore disaster, in which a petroleum company walked away from its obligations, leaving New Zealand taxpayers facing a cleanup bill of around $400 million. The 2021 law was designed to ensure that could never happen again. The 2025 law unpicked it.
Months after that legislation passed, a Greymouth Petroleum subsidiary donated $100,000 to each of the three parties that delivered both outcomes. No law was broken. Nobody is suggesting a brown paper bag changed hands. But the sequence — sue the government over the exploration ban, watch the coalition reverse it, see decommissioning liability weakened at the same time, then donate $300,000 to the parties responsible — is not nothing. It is precisely the kind of sequence that erodes public trust in democratic institutions, whether or not there was ever an explicit conversation about it.
Auckland property developer Michael Grant Sullivan took a more blunt approach. On 20 January 2026, he donated $100,000 to National, $50,000 to ACT, and $50,000 to NZ First — $200,000 in a single day, split across all three coalition partners. The Electoral Commission register confirms all three donations. Sullivan declined to comment when approached by the media.
Think about what that actually means. This is not the act of someone who believes passionately in a political party’s philosophy. You do not, out of civic conviction, donate simultaneously to three parties with competing ideologies. This is a calculated hedge — an investment in access to whoever holds the relevant ministerial warrant after November’s election. For a developer whose profits depend on planning decisions, consenting pathways, and fast-track approvals, $200,000 spread across the governing coalition is simply the cost of doing business. And that is exactly what is wrong with a system that allows it.
In a genuine democracy, one person gets one vote. Wealth is not supposed to buy you a louder voice than your neighbour. But when a single donor can park $200,000 across the government of the day and reasonably expect that investment to be noticed, the principle of democratic equality is not just strained — it is mocked.
New Zealand does have donation disclosure rules. During an election year, donations exceeding $20,000 must be declared to the Electoral Commission within 20 working days. Outside election years, annual returns must list donors who contributed more than $5,000. There is no cap whatsoever on the total amount anyone can donate. None.
A billionaire could transfer $10 million to a political party tomorrow, and nothing in New Zealand law would prevent it.
But even the disclosure rules have a gaping hole. Queenstown-based technology entrepreneur Brian Cartmell told RNZ in March that he had donated equally to National, ACT, and NZ First during 2025 — with ACT alone confirming it received $200,000 from him that year. Those donations will not appear on any public register until annual returns are published in May 2026, seven months into an election year in which those parties are actively campaigning on platforms shaped, in part, by their donors’ priorities.
The only reason voters know anything about Cartmell’s coalition donations at all is that a journalist asked, and he chose to confirm some of it. His sole officially declared 2026 donation — $100,000 to the Opportunity Party — sits on the Electoral Commission register. The rest is invisible until after the damage, if any, is done.
Cartmell says he believes “voters, not donors, decide the direction of New Zealand.” He may well mean it sincerely. But voters can only make meaningful decisions if they have full information — and the current system is structured to ensure they do not have it until long after it matters.
I have spent many years arguing for a stronger form of democracy — one where citizens have genuine tools to hold governments to account between elections, not just a tick in a box every three years. The corrosive effect of large political donations is central to that argument. It is not simply that rich donors might get favourable policies. It is that ordinary citizens become progressively more cynical about whether their participation means anything at all.
When people believe the system is rigged — and surveys consistently show a majority of New Zealanders do believe exactly that — they disengage. Voter turnout falls. Democracy hollows out from the inside.
New Zealand has no cap on political donations. Canada limits individuals to around NZ$2,200 per year per registered party, bans corporate and union donations entirely, and requires public disclosure of anyone who gives more than NZ$250. Ireland caps donations at around NZ$5,000 per year. Most OECD countries have some form of limit. We have none, and the parties most likely to introduce them are the ones currently pocketing the donations, so they are unlikely to do so.
Three reforms would make a material difference.
None of this is radical. All three changes have precedent in comparable democracies. But there is a fourth reform that New Zealand has conspicuously failed to address. Since 2019, overseas individuals have been limited to donating no more than $50 to a political party — as if $50 buys nothing. It does not. The principle should be absolute: if you cannot vote in New Zealand, you cannot donate to New Zealand politics. Not $50. Not $5. Not a cent.
I know this from personal experience — I once tried to donate $50 to an American election campaign and was flatly rejected. No US citizenship, no donation, full stop. The Americans understand something we apparently do not: the right to fund a democracy should belong exclusively to those who live in it and are accountable to its outcomes.
The same principle must extend to companies. The current law explicitly does not close the route through New Zealand-registered companies. A foreign national who holds a directorship in a NZ company faces no restriction on political donations made through that entity. That company can donate freely, in any amount. Lawmakers knew this when the 2019 law passed — it was publicly acknowledged at the time — and did nothing about it.
The fix is simple: no company should be permitted to donate to a political party if any of its directors is not a New Zealand citizen. And that means all directors — including any with nominee or non-disclosed arrangements. No exceptions, no workarounds. If a company wants to participate in our democracy through political donations, every single person on its board should be a New Zealand citizen.
The alternative is a door left deliberately open for exactly the kind of foreign influence our electoral laws are supposedly designed to prevent.
New Zealand goes to the polls on 7 November 2026. The money flowing into political party accounts right now — most of it still invisible to the public — will help shape the advertising, the messaging, and the private conversations between donors and ministers that never make the news. By the time the full picture emerges in annual returns, the election will be decided, and the new government will be in office. The donors will already know which ministers take their calls.
Your vote still counts. But it would count a lot more if the playing field were level before you cast it.
Steve Baron is a New Zealand-based political commentator and author. He holds a BA with a double major in Economics and Political Science from the University of Waikato and an Honours Degree in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington. A former businessman in the advertising industry, he founded the political lobby group Better Democracy NZ. https://stevebaron.co.nz
Peter Walsh says:
The bit about wealthy individuals pulling strings months before the ballot box opens really lands for me. That’s the actual timeline most people miss. They focus on what happens during the campaign when the real leverage was already sorted well before.