Funding reform is draconian

BETTER ways to fund political parties have hogged the headlines for more than a year, The Dominion Post says in an editorial. The way several parties plundered the public purse to finance the 2005 and earlier election campaigns forced some, but not all, to grumpily repay the money and the Government to promise election-funding reform.

Given recent revelations, however, it seems that rorting the taxpayer is a Labour Party habit. Last Friday it was revealed that a former longstanding Labour treasurer claims she was dumped from her role because she refused her local MP's request to evade tax.

Election fundraising is an issue in Britain, too. New Labour has been embroiled in what became known as the cash-for-honours scandal; police investigated claims that wealthy businessmen were put forward for peerages in return for secretly lending the Labour Party millions of pounds to electioneer. The Crown Prosecution Service has decided not to prosecute and the sighs of relief have been audible.

Here, Justice Minister Mark Burton last week tabled in Parliament a gutted version of a measure that Labour MPs had earlier vowed would circumscribe non-party election-year advertising and end anonymous and trust donations. Labour was apoplectic that, in the 2005 campaign, the Exclusive Brethren spent more than $1 million - at the outset, anonymously - in a bid to denigrate it, and the Greens, in the eyes of voters.

Trying to wrest something from the party's own election-funding mess - it has repaid the taxpayer more than $800,000 - a furious Prime Minister Helen Clark swore she would put an end to anonymous trust funds and donations, which have financed both major parties, and that allowed National to outspend Labour in 2005. The public, she said, wanted to know who funded political parties and thereby pulled their strings. But the bill before the House does no such thing.

It continues to allow anonymous donations, because Labour knows that, without them, it cannot mount a campaign in 2008. Its having said one thing and done another is its pragmatic and hypocritical response to having failed to win cross-party support for its preferred option - state funding of political parties and campaigns.

Vanquished in that battle, the Government has tried to make good on at least its intention to limit what groups backing, or criticising, a party seeking office can spend in an election year. The Electoral Finance Bill thus caps third-party expenditure at $60,000, preposterously small given the cost of newspaper or television advertising.

This will affect trade unions - traditionally Labour backers - as well as the Brethren, if they are daft enough to try again.

But the greater concern is the bill's attack on freedom of expression, the right to which is enshrined in the Bill of Rights Act. Choosing how to spend one's own money is a freedom Kiwis individually and jointly have long enjoyed - now they are being told that, in election year, they can go this far and no further. It's draconian.

Labour's agenda is clear. It is determined to do all it can legislatively to make it very difficult for opponents to wage a political campaign in 2008 but, at the same time, will almost certainly add to the millions it is already spending on telling the community how to behave via a veritable wave of public education campaigns. This bill, when it reaches its select committee stage, needs serious, not just partisan, thought.

- © Fairfax NZ News