A bad bill made law

The Labour Party and its allies in Parliament have pushed on in the face of fierce opposition to pass the Electoral Finance Bill, writes The Press in an editorial.

The Government is no doubt gambling on the issue being one that that is of interest only to the politically committed and that with the holiday break and new issues emerging in the new year, it will just fade away. It may have misjudged that.

Opposition to the bill may not be widespread but it is deeply felt. The sudden change of direction by Peter Dunne, who is as astute as any in Parliament at sniffing which way the political wind is blowing and who changed tack because of the strength and volume of the messages he was getting, is just one indicator that this may not, as the Prime Minister has dismissively suggested, be simply a "beltway issue" and that it could resonate well into election year. Dunne is right when he says that people have gone past caring what the bill says, "they simply mistrust it".

In any event, whatever happens next year, the legislation is thoroughly bad law and the process by which it was shoved through Parliament indefensible.

The Government has only itself to blame for the mess it has made of the matter. The bill was introduced with next to no consultation with anyone other than the cronies Labour needed to get it through the House. This was unforgivable for legislation of this kind. Consensus may be an unreachable goal on something as inherently as contentious as electoral finance, but some measure of consultation was called for. Labour did not make the slightest effort at it. The result was a bill that was a disaster that few but the party's most uncritical followers could swallow. It was all too plainly designed not to deal honestly and fairly with an important problem but rather to shield an embattled government from any critical comment during an election year. The Government has since made multiple amendments in an attempt to remove some of the more offensive elements of the legislation, but the effort has not been sufficient. The Government was clearly prepared from the outset to ride roughshod over long-established principles. Trying to patch the matter up with all sorts of adjustments and fixes was never going to work. It should have gone back and started the process over.

The country is now left with a highly inadequate piece of legislation governing a central element of the democratic process. Parties and pressure groups will enter the election year with no clear idea of what sort of advertising is permissible. There is a clear risk that parties will engage in tit-for-tat complaints to try to shut down rivals by tying them up with expensive and time-consuming legal battles. Worse than that, from January 1, 11 months before any likely election, a firm engaged by the Electoral Commission will be conducting surveillance of political advertising to see that it complies with the law, something that will strike most fair-minded people as having the smack of Big Brother about it.

Already, challenges to the law are being prepared, including one by the Mayor of Southland, Tim Shadbolt, a man for whom confrontation with the authorities holds no particular terrors. If it does come down to a fight with that adroit self-publicist, Labour may have even more reason to regret that it did not pause for a rethink before it blundered stubbornly ahead.

- © Fairfax NZ News