You can go back as far as Plato, who felt wealth should be kept away from politics, and quite likely beyond, to find people concerned at the influence that money could have on elections.
More recently Mark Twain cynically opined that we have the best government that money can buy, and Ronald Reagan pondered on why a Republican contributor was a "fat cat" and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money was a "public-spirited philanthropist'’.
New Zealand local body elections are a different kettle of fish entirely, but politicians campaigning for a council seat in this country face the same dilemma as a US presidential candidate — the need to spend money to put their faces and their opinions in front of the voters.
There are strict rules in New Zealand concerning how much money candidates can spend to advertise themselves for election; those rules attempt to strike a balance between the necessity to advertise and a desire for elections to be a contest of ideas, not of wallets.
Their adequacy, or otherwise, has been thrown into focus by the public declarations of Dunedin City Council election candidate expenses which have emerged over the past week.
It will have come as little surprise to readers that the leading candidates for the city’s mayoralty were, generally speaking, the largest spenders when it came to advertising.
Councillor Andrew Simms declared $45,628 worth of expenses for his own campaign — which sits comfortably below the legal total spending limit of $55,000 which applies to mayoral and council candidates in the three months before an election. As reported, much of that was spent with Allied Media, owners of the Otago Daily Times.
However, he also made loans totalling more than $70,000 to several candidates who stood as members of Cr Simms’ Future Dunedin ticket.
Whether this was a wise investment, or otherwise, given than Cr Simms was the only Future Dunedin candidate elected, is open for debate.
Ticket co-founder Bex Twemlow recorded $24,120.51 spent — $17,650 in team expenses and $6470.51 of her own expenses — but failed to win a seat. Many other ticket candidates, including some who left it before the election, spent in the thousands without success.
Some might consider that as proof that spending does not equate to success, but such spending might also have an indirect effect.
It can be argued that one possible outcome of Future Dunedin’s extensive expenditure — much of which was on advertising which lambasted the performance of the previous council — was that many incumbent councillors lost their seats in the October election. However, that ignores the fact that many sitting councillors lose their seats because residents are seeking change.
Given the low approval rating the council received in the recent residents’ opinion survey it is not beyond the realm of possibility that some or all of those defeated councillors might have lost regardless of Future Dunedin’s advertising campaign, but surely the volume of negative advertising made the task of incumbent councillors to defend their record all that much more difficult.
Newly-elected mayor Sophie Barker recorded campaign expenses of $26,467.78 and told the Otago Daily Times that she had had to save up for three years to afford her campaign. While applauding her thrift and commitment to public service, that represents a not inconsiderable percentage of an individual’s income, a factor which might well daunt future potential candidates.
Mayoral race third placegetter Cr Lee Vandervis’ expenses totalled $16,500.20, just ahead of former mayor Jules Radich’s $20,711.11.
Cr Vandervis, a veteran of local body politics, called the amount spent during the 2025 campaign unprecedented and showed that the rules needed to change.
There is no suggestion that Cr Simms, who did much of that spending, did anything outside of the existing rules. As he said: "If the rules need changing, that’s a matter for another day."
