How an MP became ‘good friends’ with the CCP
Saturday, 29 June 2024
Does Jami-Lee Ross have the credibility to offer expertise on politics? Probably not, and he’s the first to admit it. In fact, it took Stuff Circuit a year to convince him to be interviewed for our investigation into Chinese Communist Party interference in New Zealand. He eventually relented, because he thinks what happened to him is a lesson for us all. Paula Penfold and Louisa Cleave report.
Such a spectacularly public, multi-faceted fall from grace.
It was 2018 and Jami-Lee Ross, the National MP with a mighty ambition and an even bigger talent for attracting big wads of cash for his party, was pissed off with his leader, Simon Bridges, for overlooking him for promotion.
In a carefully staged strategy, Ross went public with nuclear allegations of breaches of donation rules, quit the party, and became an independent MP.
But instead of taking down his boss, Ross wound up facing fraud charges himself, alongside three Chinese businessmen.
He said at the time that the charges were “outrageous”. Later that year, come the general election, he embarked with his Advance NZ party on an ill-fated partnership with Billy Te Kahika’s New Zealand Public Party.
They got slaughtered at the polls and the next morning Ross got slaughtered on TV in the now infamous Tova O’Brien interview.
So when Stuff Circuit met Jami-Lee Ross in 2021, as we were beginning our research into Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in New Zealand, Ross wanted no part of it.
After everything that had happened (and was still happening, the court case had yet to begin) he thought he didn’t have the necessary credibility to be taken seriously.
We agreed, but thought he’d be useful for background information.
Then as we sat and talked for almost two hours about the machinations and relationships between donors and politicians and who’s getting what from whom, we found what he had to say illuminating and fascinating.
He remained adamant, though, that he would not go on the record. Why would he do anything to bring more attention?
Just days after that meeting, another political donor scandal blew up: charges over donations to the Labour Party. Several of the accused were the same defendants already charged in the National Party case.
The picture was getting more and more intriguing and there was one person in a unique position to help us understand it: Jami-Lee Ross.
But still, the answer was no.
The trial when it eventually arrived took seven weeks, and in the end the verdicts went his way.
Ross was found not guilty. He made a brief statement to reporters waiting outside court, saying he was relieved to be cleared of the charges, and thankful to those who had supported him along the way, including his lawyers.
And that was that.
But in the meantime, we’d been gathering more and more material about the CCP’s influence operations in New Zealand, and we had questions we knew Ross could answer.
We asked one more time. And this time, he said yes.
‘Kamikaze’
Ross’ actions in the lead-up to his downfall were described in court as “kamikaze”. Even he appears to agree with the description.
“The media statements that I was giving out back in 2018 were heavily influenced by an extreme dislike and disloyalty towards Simon Bridges. And the court evidence also strongly showed that I was suffering from acute mental health issues at the time,” he says.
“I’m not saying that’s an excuse for how my political career ended or anything, but if you ask about that donation and the events of the time, that’s the evidence the High Court heard.”
In the years that have elapsed since, Ross seems able to see his behaviour for what it was.
“I was motivated by the fallout between me and Simon Bridges. It was ‘take him down at any cost’. So when I was kicking and screaming on the way out the door, I was throwing any little bit of mud that I could, and [the donations] was a big bit of mud that I knew would gain your attention — you, the media. And it did ultimately come back to bite me. I ended up being the one charged with a crime.”
Which was, he says drily, “not fun”.
“The process of being charged is what screws up your life. Not so much the outcome. The outcome was not guilty. But getting there over a series of years is what destroys your life.”
Ross is a seasoned interviewee, and our attempts to let him fill the silence with how his life was destroyed fail, but for, “many things are different about my life now than what it was in 2018”.
There’s no women’s mag material then, which is fine, because what we really want to know is whether Ross now has any clarity on what it was he was involved in for the years he was an MP, what kind of transactional arrangement he’d entered into in the process of courting — and being courted by — Chinese political donors.
“It’s much easier to look at it all and go, ‘yeah, there is Chinese state influence or attempted influence in New Zealand politics. Yes, the money does come into play. Yes, these [Chinese] associations that are there to bring together the expat Chinese community, they probably do have a good social function in many regards, but there’s a wider agenda.
“And the wider agenda is influencing political parties. And by influencing political parties, you end up influencing the government of the day.
“What average New Zealander out there can get the leadership of a political party to go to their home for dinner? What average person out there could just click their fingers and command 10 MPs to come to their event? Most people can’t. Money buys their influence.”
What Ross is also now able to describe is first-hand knowledge of how it all begins: how a politician might find themselves targeted.
He was elected for Botany in a by-election in 2011, taking over from then-MP Pansy Wong.
“One of the first things she said to me was, ‘You must get close to the Chinese community’. My community was 50% migrant, most Chinese. That was instilled in me right from day one: get close to the Chinese community.”
He took to that like, well, a natural-born politician.
“To win over that portion of the population you have to get close to the Chinese state officials in the country. You end up becoming friends — well, I’ll loosely use the word friends — with the Chinese consul general in Auckland. I'd go round to their homes. I'd talk to them often. At every event you'd know you're being seen with the consul general.
“Everyone’s ‘good friends, my good friend’. If you went to the US or Australia and you saw US politicians in the home of the Chinese consul general or the Chinese ambassador talking about how good friends and mates they were, you'd think you were in some alternate reality.
“But that happens in New Zealand because we don't put up the barriers or the firewalls that we probably should. We don't have a culture of being aware of it like we should, and we have a culture of political parties chasing money in what now looks like really inappropriate ways.”
For a good number of years, it seemed those ‘friends’ had backed the right horse.
“I ended up on the front bench, so I was seen as having a trajectory forward. And I guess because I'd been going to those events, I was sort of picked as the one to get to know.
“They start to groom you almost from the beginning of your political career. They pick someone who's young, in a safe seat may be seen as having a trajectory upwards and they gain closeness.
“And so I started to go to the fundraising events. I started to organise fundraising events. I got to know a range of people. Zhang Yikun is the one that ended up in the High Court alongside me and others. But it's not as if he's the only person that's there giving large sums of money to political parties.”
He doesn’t know how many others there are like Zhang. “Probably quite a lot.” But he’s seen enough to observe — from the inside — what’s in it for donors.
Ross says he doesn’t think any New Zealand politician is overtly taking cash for anything specific. But with the burgeoning relationships come favours that ‘friends’ might do for each other.
“If something’s happening in the South Pacific regarding China, do we overtly speak out in the same way that our allies like the US and the UK and Australia do? No. We end up shutting our mouth. Is it partly because of trade relationships? Yes. Is it partly because we’ve had so many years of Chinese influence in our politics? Probably in part.
“If you’re the leader of the National Party, you’re not going to go out and kick around the Chinese government because you know you’re going to have to front up at the Chinese fundraising event that your Chinese MPs organise for you the next week.”
It’s because of the intangible nature of those relationships that Ross doesn’t believe improved legislation is the answer, or at least not the only one.
“You can write laws but the people giving the money will just try and find ways to legally change their approach. And you can’t write a law on personal connections between individual politicians and associations or a whole community.
“Sunlight is probably the best form of disinfectant. [Because] the end game is they’ll just keep trying to influence New Zealand politics. Having a better understanding of how things work … [is] really beneficial.”
Ross’s car-crash exit from politics taught him who his friends were, or more precisely, who they weren’t. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there were no more invitations to dinner with the consul general.
“My connections with the Chinese community were cut off instantly. I was persona non grata.
“I was of no value to the political parties because I couldn't fundraise for them. But I was of no value to the people that were grooming me and supporting me because I no longer had any influence in the political circles. The ‘good brother’, you know, ‘good friends’ — none of that’s actually real, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as you're out of the system, you're no longer of value, so no longer worth talking to.”
He’s talking to Stuff Circuit about it because, he says, he personally has nothing left to lose. He’ll never be on a ballot paper again, so no longer has to worry what voters think. And he believes what he now knows offers a lesson for the rest of us.
“I got too close to people and it benefited me in terms of being a fundraiser within the party and it benefited me in terms of connections and a trajectory forward. But in the end, it all came crashing down around me.
“But also we as a country have a political system that has foreign interference from a non- friendly country directly into the heart of the political system through the Members of Parliament, through the money that flows into our political system. Even if you can't pinpoint some direct link, some direct outcome, the whole system, over years, gets eroded.
“And if you don't open your eyes up to the end goal from the people that are pulling the puppet strings or sending the money through into New Zealand, then your eyes aren't open to what is actually happening to the country, which is foreign state influence in our political system.”