Debate on Crown Entities, Public Organisations, and State Enterprises — Electoral Commission

This is an opportunity for Parliament to reflect today on the incredibly difficult job that the Electoral Commission has been given. The Electoral Commission is an entity that a lot of the public probably had not heard of until the 2005 election. It now finds itself thrust into the middle of political debate in election year. Whereas the Ministry for the Environment was discussed at great length last year, this year it is the Electoral Commission. Why is that? The Electoral Commission is so busy and has such a high profile because of the Draconian, anti-democratic, complex, and ridiculous Electoral Finance Act.

Labour has tried to make out in this House that the Electoral Finance Act is a product of much parliamentary consideration. It is not. It is a product of Labour’s deeply held instinct that to survive the 2008 election it needs to learn the lessons of 2005. The lesson of 2005 was that when any of Labour’s critics get much of a run, Labour’s political support suffers. So Labour passed the Electoral Finance Act to try to shut its critics down. It has succeeded.

I want to ask the Minister in the chair, Clayton Cosgrove, a question about what is probably the most difficult aspect of the Electoral Finance Act that the Electoral Commission has to deal with, and that is the length of the regulated period. Traditionally in New Zealand electoral finance has been regulated for 3 months, a period that reflects the common-sense understanding among the public that the run-up to an election is the time when all the activities of politicians are focused on electoral gain. Officials have given the Government advice about this over the last couple of years. The officials’ papers, as released under the Official Information Act, show that there was no advice given to the Government to extend the regulated period from 3 months to 12 months. In fact, the official advice made it pretty clear that there was no reason to change the period from 3 months. All the pressure that has come on the Electoral Commission now has arisen from the fact that the regulated period was extended to the whole of election year. This has the effect that for almost a third of the term of any Government the Electoral Commission has become the regulator of political speech—and is it not finding that difficult?

The Minister needs to tell us why the Labour Government ignored all the official advice and, out of the blue, decided to extend the regulated period. That is the single decision that has created the most problems for the political parties and for the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission has had to deal, of course, with a lot of complicated issues arising from that. The first one has been about authorisation. At least the Electoral Commission has done its job. It has found that the Labour Party breached the law. After Labour spent all of the 2005, 2006, and 2007 years lecturing everybody else about electoral rorts, it turns out that the Electoral Commission found that Labour breached the law. What excuse would Labour have for breaching the law? It would have no excuse; it wrote the law. The Minister can explain to us why, when the Labour Cabinet considered this legislation at great length and when there was much debate in Parliament through question time and parliamentary debate about the law, the Labour Party hierarchy did not know what was in it. That is a frightening aspect of this law. New Zealand First did not really know what was in it. The Greens did not know what was in it. Even now the smaller parties are asking us what is in it, and a number of them supported the legislation.

The breach of the requirements for authorisation was just the first problem with the legislation. Then, of course, we come to the total debacle, overseen by the incompetent Minister of Justice—represented in the chair today by Clayton Cosgrove—which is the debacle over the definition of “parliamentary business”. Here we have a core issue from the 2005 election. The Auditor-General did a report on it. There was an $800,000 overspend by Labour. It actually breached the electoral expense cap by some $600,000 or $700,000 in the 2005 election. Labour spent 2 years rewriting the law about how MPs spend public money, and 3½ months after the new law came into practice, no one knows what it means.

The National Party has had to take policy making into its own hands.

R Doug Woolerton: Oh, what?

Because the Minister does not know what the Act means, we have had to go off to court. New Zealand First does not know. It put up billboards in Tauranga that were illegal. It is just a question of whether the billboards were taken down before the Electoral Commission had enough evidence to see they were there. We know how bad it is, because the Labour Party has had to clean its electoral offices of all pamphlets in the last couple of weeks, like National did 2 months ago, because no one knows what the definition of “parliamentary business” is.

This is not a matter of partisan comment; this is a matter of total incompetence in putting together the law. Labour members were so enamoured of their own moral righteousness that they did not read the law they were passing, and National has had to go off to the courts to find out what parliamentary business is. If we do not do so, we will end up with a ridiculous situation such as Labour has had with material it has published already, where it is using public money for parliamentary purposes with the authorisation of some partisan political individual like the secretary of the Labour Party. How ridiculous is that?

Did the public know when the Electoral Finance Act was being passed that parliamentary money could be used for an election advertisement that was authorised by party officials? What have party officials got to do with parliamentary business? The answer should be nothing, but in this new world of the Electoral Finance Act those officials have everything to do with it, when we are talking about the Labour Party. Who sends out the emails telling Labour MPs what to do with electoral advertisement material? The ninth floor—the Prime Minister’s office—sends out the emails. That shows exactly the situation that was confirmed in 2005—that is, when it comes to spending public money on election advertising, there is no difference between the Labour Party and the Prime Minister’s office. They are one and the same—one strategy.

That fact has been confirmed in the last couple of days. What is the Electoral Commission to make of the opinion of the president of the Labour Party that it is fine for Labour MPs and activists to hand out pamphlets on KiwiSaver from the Inland Revenue Department, as part of electioneering? In our view, if a Labour activist hands out an Inland Revenue Department pamphlet, then that would be an election advertisement. What that shows, and this is something the Electoral Commission has to deal with, is a deep sense of entitlement amongst Labour members that every aspect of public life can be appropriated by the Labour Party, and that public resources produced for the information of the public can be appropriated by the Labour Party for its own electoral ends.

This, of course, raises the larger issue that Labour Ministers are directing Government departments to produce information for the public so that the Labour Party can use the information for political purposes. That was exemplified last year in the attempted political takeover of the Ministry for the Environment. The partisan Labour Party, in the form of Heather Simpson in the Prime Minister’s office, tried to take over that ministry because it was going to be the front end of Labour’s political push in election year.

So that is what the Electoral Commission has to deal with: a Labour Party that is insanely focused on using every dollar of public money it can to get itself re-elected. That is why the Electoral Commission is under pressure. It will find that its decisions are judicially reviewed and contested in public, not because the Electoral Commission lacks competence but because the legislation with which it has to work is complex, confusing, and chaotic. The Government has made the mistake of putting Annette King up to defend the legislation. Well, the Minister of Justice has shown consistent incompetence in understanding the law and in defending it.

Report noted.

Foundation for Research, Science and Technology