The promise of democracy is that everyone has an equal say in influencing politicians and policies, but the reality is far more complicated than this.

A new series by BusinessDesk, Cash for Candidates, has revealed that since 1996, $52 million has been donated to our political parties by major donors above the threshold for public declarations.

Those major donations come from just 538 individuals, businesses and non-profit organisations.

Speaking to The Front Page podcast about her work on this serious subject, journalist Donna Chisholm says that $52m only scratches the surface.

“We don’t hear about the small anonymous donations that don’t have to be disclosed,” Chisholm says. “One of the concerns for the researchers in this field is the opacity surrounding a lot of the big donations that might be carved up into smaller amounts.”

At the end of last year, the Electoral Amendment Bill reduced the threshold at which a donation to a party must be disclosed from $15,000 to $5000.

This is a positive step in ensuring transparency, but researchers are still concerned about the level of influence that these big donors have.

“There is certainly a belief from the research that donors expect a quid pro quo in this,” says Chisholm.

“It’s more of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge approach. They wouldn’t come out and say that they wanted this policy changed and therefore gave $30,000. One of the quotes from the research said: ‘If I’m nice to them, they’re nice to me.’ Obviously, people will donate to a party they think is sympathetic to what they want. But what they are getting is access - and as we know, access goes with influence.”

Chisholm says the researcher was particularly concerned about the idea that money could give you access denied to other groups, who may have legitimate causes.

“One of the researchers, Simon Chapple, said there’s a reason we have ‘one person, one vote’ and not ‘one dollar, one vote’. It is essentially unfair if money buys you access and influence. So that is what the recommendations for change are looking at. They aim to reduce the impact of money and make it a more democratic process.”

• So what needs to change?
• Will political donors still manage to skirt around the rules?
• Do politicians muddy the water when they accept donations?
• And how do donors end up influencing policymakers?

Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear more about this issue. And be sure to catch the full series at BusinessDesk.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. It is presented by Damien Venuto, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.