More taxpayer funded lobbying

The Taxpayers’ Union released:

The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal through an Official Information Act request that the Ministry for Ethnic Communities funded $30,000 for Asturlab Cultural Centre to run a nationwide advocacy campaign, using taxpayer funds to promote pro-Palestinian narratives on the conflict in Gaza.

The campaign was a political lobbying campaign encouraging people to lobby the PM and MPs on this issue. I’m all for NGOs lobbying using their own money, but here we have bureaucrats handing out money to NGOs to lobby the Government on a highly contested political issue.

“The fund’s own rules say it does not support political objectives, yet this application was approved within days, with a Ministry advisor even helping tweak it to get over the line.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

It gets worse. It appears from its financial statements filed on the Charities Register that this charity also received $70,000 for its Gaza awareness campaign from the government’s (disbanded) Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism Fund. https://t.co/cjuYRw7e9z pic.twitter.com/K3jPdAd4A6

— Juliet Moses (@JulietMosesNZ) March 25, 2026

So this political lobbying campaign got $110,000 from taxpayers from two different government entities.

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