Anonymous donations over $1,500 escape Electoral Commission view

New Zealand law permits donors to give more than $1,500 to political parties anonymously through intermediaries, with parties neither required to know nor report the original source. The Electoral Commission publishes quarterly reports showing aggregate protected-donation flows to each party but cannot identify the donors behind them. This mechanism creates a structural gap in the visible funding picture that electoral law specialists scrutinise as questions of proportionality between donor privacy and public transparency persist.