David Farrier has been writing about clamping enthusiast Michael Organ for nearly three years. In this latest installment, the logical thing finally happens: the New Zealand government rolls up its sleeves and changes the law.

Read the rest of the Bashford Antiques saga here.

When Michael Organ started passionately clamping cars, I don’t imagine he ever expected the New Zealand government to get involved. But that’s exactly what the New Zealand government has done.

“New rules to clamp down on overzealous wheel clamping and extortionate fees charged in order to release a vehicle have passed their final stage in parliament,” the press release announced.

The Land Transport (Wheel Clamping) Amendment Bill has passed its third reading and will become law, capping clamping fees at $100.

It is, perhaps, Michael Organ’s worst nightmare: a hellscape of his own making.

Earlier this year, I watched various readings of the bill on Parliament TV. I was on the edge of my seat, as various members of parliament weighed in. To be honest, there wasn’t much debate. Consumer affairs minister Kris Faafoi’s proposed changes to the bill that weren’t exactly controversial.

And while this bill took into account all rogue clamping in New Zealand, it was clear to me what this was really about.

Throughout the various readings, many politicians alluded to the clamp-obsessed man I’d outed as Michael Organ back in 2016. While many clampers in New Zealand had taken the piss in the past, Michael Organ took things to a whole new level, culminating in a record-setting clamping fee of $760 for half an hour parking.

New Zealand’s minister of defence, Ron Mark, was clearly aware of Organ – who strongly denies any wrongdoing – when he spoke back in April. “We’ve noted the distress felt families as they’ve come back to find not only their vehicle clamped, but be fronted with a bill of, in some cases, $750. Which seems to us to be quite outrageous.”

Clampers had “inflicted harm on citizens”, he concluded.

That harm was both financial and mental. When I spoke to the victims back in October 2017, they told me they’d felt left with no alternative but to call the police.

“We couldn’t deal with him. The manipulative way he talks is just … it’s chilling,” Sharn and Jamie told me. Of course, the law being the law, the police could do nothing about it – and so Sharn and Jamie paid up.

The mind boggles at how much Michael Organ would have made with this clamping business, often hitting multiple cars each night with escalating fees. He boasted openly about how many cars he’d clamped, and multiple victims told me he never accepted payments over Eftpos or Visa – it was always cash.

But it appears eventually someone did take notice. The New Zealand government.

Earlier this month, as the The Land Transport (Wheel Clamping) Amendment Bill edged closer to passing, Labour’s Paul Eagle told parliament about “an article around why unregulated wheel clamping is still a lucrative hobby. That was a story that talked about… the $760 for half an hour of illicit car parking.

“Not only that but the car clamping company was hiding in plain sight as a second hand shop, Bashford Antiques”.

And now the bill has passed. Wheel clamping charges will be capped at $100.

Michael Organ will no longer be able to demand $760 for half an hour parking, and he won’t be allowed to hold his victims’ property hostage for hours on end. What he will do is, I guess, feel very sad.

“Other changes require a wheel clamping operator to release a person’s vehicle within a reasonable period after a request to do so,” Minister Faafoi said.

If Organ and other rogue clampers starts clamping again, the police are now able to get involved too, because they have a law they can now enforce. “Wheel clamping operators who charge more than the $100 maximum fee or who fail to remove a wheel clamp in a reasonable period of time will be committing an offence,” Faafoi concluded.

So, that’s the end of that then. It’s all over. Six parts too many.

Except, no.

Stay tuned for Part VII.

If what has been reported is both true and not a breach of the rules for political donations, then New Zealand’s reputation for being squeaky clean looks like a joke, writes electoral law expert Andrew Geddis.

Anyone paying attention to New Zealand political parties and how they run their election campaigns has been able to see for a while now that there’s something a bit odd about how New Zealand First manages its affairs.

First up, there’s what is missing. For a party of its size and pedigree, there’s a curious lack of any reported donations exceeding the legally disclosable $15,000 threshold. The only such gifts reported in the past decade occurred in 2014, when its MP Tracey Martin and shortly-to-be-elected candidate Darroch Ball decided to support their party to the tune of about $19,000 each.

Apart from these two generous individual members, no one else has seen fit to give the party more than the legally disclosable amount in any given year. Which makes NZ First something of a stand-out amongst those parties with MPs in parliament. Everyone else, from the Act Party to the Greens, has had at least the occasional donor wanting to give them a big enough sum for their name and address become public.

And knowing their name and address, we then can see if that donor gets anything for its generosity. Which is how things should be in a properly transparent, clean political process.

Of course, maybe this absence of “big money” support for NZ First is just because it represents the little guy; the hard battlers of this country who don’t have all that much to rub together but are proud of what they have got. So, while somewhat curious, an absence of relatively large, publicly disclosed donations is not in itself proof of anything in particular.

But the absence then sits alongside something else we know about NZ First and its funding. As extensively covered here by RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, Electoral Commission records show that a trust called “the New Zealand First Foundation” made loans to the NZ First Party in the tens-of-thousands of dollars. Who gave the foundation the money used to fund those loans, or how much they gave, or why they gave it, is not revealed in the Electoral Commission’s information.

All of which begins to look a little bit more dodgy, even if still technically legal. Note that the foundation’s two trustees are Brian Henry (Winston Peters’ and NZ First’s lawyer) and Doug Woolerton (a former NZ First MP). It appears to operate, in essence, as a NZ First run vehicle lending money to NZ First as a party. That money is then paid back to the Foundation, ready to be used again when-and-if needed.

The only reason for structuring a party’s funding in this particular way would seem to be to stop the public seeing who originally donated the money. Which is, while technically legal, a complete undermining of the purpose of our disclosure laws.

And then yesterday, Matt Shand’s Stuff article told us a whole lot more about the relationship between this foundation and the NZ First Party. According to his reporting, documentation shows that the foundation has received some $500,000 in donations, much of which came in amounts exceeding $15,000. This money has then been used to not only make loans to NZ First as a party, but also allegedly to directly pay for various expenses connected with the party and its MPs.

If what is reported is correct, then one of two troubling conclusions follow. The first is that this use of the foundation breaches electoral law, in ways that Graeme Edgeler explained to Stuff. In short, the failure to either disclose the foundation’s spending on the party’s behalf as a donation, or the identity of those who have given to the foundation, may constitute a “corrupt or illegal practice”.

That, obviously, would be A Very Bad Thing. And if it is the case, we might ask why the foundation has been able to operate in such a manner for a number of years without attracting any regulatory attention. But at least it would show that our laws work, insofar as they prohibit this sort of arrangement.

For the alternative conclusion is, if anything, even more worrying. If it turns out that the foundation and the party somehow are operating lawfully, as we should note Winston Peters maintains, then that demonstrates our electoral law simply is not fit for purpose.

Let’s pause and look big picture. We have a political party that is a keystone of the current government. Its members are ministers, with responsibility for (among other things) distributing $3 billion in government largesse around the country’s provinces.

And now we are told that a legally-opaque foundation intimately connected to the party has raised hundreds-of-thousands of dollars from “primary industry leaders, wealthy investors and multi-millionaires”. That foundation allegedly has used the money for the benefit of the party and its MPs. And no-one outside of the party and those that gave the money are made any the wiser.

If this is legal, then there’s no way that it should be. You can’t have a country’s political system run in this way and be considered the second least corrupt nation on the planet. Or, at least, you can’t do it for long.