I see Trevor Ammundsen did not take up the offer to expose potential corruption arising from the Coalition government’s Fast-Track law. Never mind, Trevor has a fresh Fast Track corruption scandal to take up in his column. This latest one involves a NZ First donor submitting amendments to directly benefit that donor in a legal dispute.
J Swap Company wants to quarry land protected in perpetuity under QEII covenants. The company is locked in a long-running court battle to access this protected land and has lost at every stage. They donated $11,000 to NZ First after the election, $5,000 to NZ First’s Shane Jones in August 2023, and $3,000 to National’s David MacLeod (former select committee chair hearing submissions on the Fast Track Bill) in September 2023.
Interfering with QEII covenants is a gross overreach into private property rights, so you’d expect the ACT Party to protest. But silence. This fiasco illustrates the inherent corruption in the fast-track law.
Looking forward to Trevor’s next column calling for this awful law to be tossed into the garbage bin. Because if not, we’ll need a specialised Anti-Corruption Commission to clean up this mess.
