Mr Banks and Prime Minister John Key are resisting calls that he stand down from his ministerial roles on the grounds that no wrongdoing has occurred. To me it's the memory lapses they should be concerned about. Failure to remember helicopter trips, dinners, phone conversations all point to the need for an urgent health check-up.
While his political opponents and my journalistic colleagues are having great sport with Possum Banks, trapped in the headlights with nowhere to go, there is a risk the bigger issue of electoral funding reform will get sidelined in the too-hard basket yet again. Parliamentarians did try to clean up their own house after the fiasco surrounding Owen Glenn revealing details of his "anonymous" donations to both the Labour Party and Winston Peters, back in 2008.
However, the rules for local elections remained untouched, leaving local politicians open to exposure if or when their anonymous donors chose to go feral. Until the creation of the Auckland Super City, political funding at a local level was on a limited scale. But the new Auckland mayoralty, with an electorate containing a third of the country's population, was a totally new beast. No other politician, local or national, had to directly contest such a huge constituency, and the cost of campaigning was equally large. But the only significant change to the electoral spending rules was to increase the spending limits for candidates in the Auckland contest.
Mr Hide, who was minister of local government at the time, must be chuckling now that his failure to align the Auckland Council campaign spending rules to the new parliamentary ones has caught out the man who later knifed him.
Just why Mr Banks insisted on Mr Dotcom's $50,000 donation appearing in the "anonymous" category of his mayoral campaign returns is a mystery. Unless Mr Banks had been tipped off by the FBI that the Megastuff empire was in its sights, it seems rather an attractive, new-age industry to have the support of.
You can understand why his campaign hid the $15,000 he got from SkyCity Casino, given his tirades in the past about the evils of gambling. But let's not forget that Mr Dotcom's $50,000 was just part of $520,086 Mr Banks listed as "anonymous" in his returns. A further $103,926 of the $948,937 in donations he received came from "fundraising" with no names attached. The biggest named donor was Mr Banks himself, on $87,000. He was not alone in his secrecy.
The winning candidate, Mayor Len Brown, was even more discreet, with $499,000 of his total $581,900 war chest anonymised within a bank account called the New Auckland Council Trust. Mr Brown did declare his $15,000 from Sky City. After the election, spokesman David Lewis claimed "Len Brown had no knowledge of who donated, let alone the amount", to the trust.
Personally, I find this as hard to believe as Mr Banks' amnesia over the Dotcom donations. It's human nature - and common sense - for a donor to make sure the candidate knows you have given to his campaign - whether it be $5 or $5000, or in this case $50,000. Why wouldn't you? And when you do, it would be very churlish of the beneficiary to shove their fingers in the their ears and say, "go away, I don't want to know". Churlish and foolhardy, if they don't want the cheque to bounce.
The trouble is, by saying thank you before shoving the cash in the anonymous basket, the politician leaves himself hostage to the rules and a later falling-out with the donor. The solution is simple enough. The politicians wrote the existing rules. They can rewrite them. A good first step would be to make any donation over a "petty cash" threshold public knowledge.
