Editorial: Outrageous bills to fund election

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Yesterday a bill setting out how political parties can spend taxpayers' money during next year's election campaign was given its first airing in Parliament, The Dominion Post writes.

The Appropriation (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill extends till June 2009 temporary legislation put in place last year to retrospectively validate parties' election spending since mid-1989.

Treasury advised that the earlier legislation was necessary after electoral and public-spending watchdogs deemed most political parties had illegally misspent public money on electioneering during the 2005 campaign. Several, especially Labour, disagreed.

The new bill will, therefore, again allow Labour, if it wants to, to splurge $440,000-plus on a pledge-card - spending the auditor-general found last year to have been unlawful.

The source of the cash was a $14.6 million honey pot set up to give all parties sufficient resources to develop and explain their policies to the public. But it has become a slush fund MPs dip into at will, believing - at least in the past - that as long as they did not explicitly solicit votes, their soft-focus billboards fell within the rules. They had even browbeaten the Parliamentary Service, which must approve the spending, into agreeing with their interpretation.

But last year, Auditor-General Kevin Brady found such spending illegal and public opinion forced most of the transgressors to repay what they had illicitly appropriated. NZ First and United Future, however, have still to make good debts of $158,000 and $72,000 respectively.

The bill now before the House will become law because the Government has amassed enough votes for it to do so.

But the public will have no formal opportunity to comment. The bill is not being sent to a select committee, meaning voters will have no forum in which to tell MPs they would rather the money went on hip replacements and new classrooms than on airbrushed photos of Prime Minister Helen Clark.

The legislation is as outrageous as the spending that provoked it. It is every bit as outrageous as its companion measure, the Electoral Finance Bill, also before the House.

The former will allow political parties to spend their cut of the $14.6 million as they see fit; the latter will effectively deny all but Government MPs the opportunity to spend more than a pittance publicly advocating, backing or opposing policy.

Though Miss Clark intimated recently that the Electoral Finance Bill would be redrafted, its provisions on third-party funding seem likely to remain. That means that trade unions, the Exclusive Brethren and charities seeking, for example, higher payments to the disabled will find their freedom of speech stifled from January 1 till the morning after election day.

It is incredible that any social democrat party would countenance such a move but when a party faces possible defeat, it can elevate ambition over ethics. Miss Clark seems to be calculating that the public interest in election spending is over - that, while voters got seriously angry in 2006, this latest row will be an overnight wonder.

National needs to ensure she is wrong.

- © Fairfax NZ News