Kiwiblog

Bill Ralston writes in the HoS:

John Key’s memorable line about Labour’s “hug a polar bear” programmes, ineffective campaigns that sound good but don’t deliver results, wryly summed up this Government’s contempt for many of the touchy-feely, state-funded marketing campaigns the last Labour administration spawned.

Much of the many millions spent on these things proved to be a cynical exercise to try to convince New Zealanders difficult problems were being effectively tackled when, in reality, they were not.

We face a childhood obesity epidemic, so run a series of ads on television telling kids to eat their vegetables. Not a single kid will be inspired by it to munch on more broccoli, but the public will be reassured that something is being done.

Can anyone honestly tell me that they have been provoked into leaping from their couch and start running around outdoors by Sparc’s inane Push Play campaign?

The total advertising spend by the last Government was massive. There is always a need for certain Government services or policy changes to be communicated, but one has to especially wonder about so called social isses campaigns. Some are effective, but some miss it.

Sure, some public education campaigns are necessary and do achieve results.

For example, the mental health campaign fronted by John Kirwan demonstrably achieved results in changing New Zealanders’ attitudes towards people with psychological issues.

Kirwan and others involved in that programme have taken the stigma out of mental illness.

Yep that is an example of a really good campaign.

Are we having fewer injuries around the home since ACC started mounting campaigns advising us not to accidentally have an accident?

The answer I am pretty sure is no.

Matthew Hooton quotes Andrew Geddis on the info kits, with Andrew saying that they are not election advertisements as they are orange not red and don’t mention Labour.

Hooton points out though that Phil Goff, unlike his colleagues, has described himself as the “Labour MP for Mt Roskill” on the cover of his info kit.

This raises the possibility that for Phil Goff (but not other MPs) they will be counted as an election advertisement and hence an election expense. And if he has already spent more than $16,000 then he may have broken his spending limit. If that is the case he could lose his seat.

So if Phil Goff wins Mt Roskill, I am sure lawyers will be looking very closely at his election return.

And I wonder why Goff stuck Labour on his cover, when it seems most of his colleagues did not?

The Rudd Government has changed the rules around Government advertising campaigns:

But the Government will have to tread carefully to ensure it does not breach its own advertising guidelines, unveiled earlier this week by Cabinet Secretary John Faulkner.

Under the rules, the Auditor-General has to sign off on any advertising campaign with a value of $250,000 or more.

This could be a good policy for NZ. At the moment it is up to Ministers and Departments to decide if their advertising complies with the AG’s guidelines, unless there is a specific complaint or referral.

Requiring the AG to approve any significant campaign in advance seems to me to be a win-win. The Government then has the confidence that any campaign will not be criticised by the AG at a later date, and the public have the confidence that the AG has approved it.

What has just happened in Western Australia should send a chill up the backsides of NZ media as they look to expose Government funded advertising campaigns this year:

Sixteen police raided the newsroom of News Ltd’s The Sunday Times Wednesday, acting on a complaint from the office of Premier Alan Carpenter, himself a former journalist.

The fraud squad was trying to find who leaked information about a government decision to spend $A16 million in taxpayers’ money on an advertising campaign, allegedly intended to help Labour’s bid for re-election. …

The newspaper article, written by staff reporter Paul Lampathakis and published in February, quoted “government sources” as saying the $A16 million was to be spent on strategic advertising campaigns ahead of an upcoming election.

It said Mr Ripper, as chairman of the cabinet subcommittee on communication, had “urgently” asked the expenditure review committee, which he chaired, for $A5.25 million for the first half of the year and a further $A10.75 million until July next year. …

Incredible.

We have heard a lot from Labour about how the suggestion to use taxpayer funded Government information pamphlets while out campaigning just came from a delegate at the conference, and Mike Williams just agreed with him that it was a damn good idea (before WIlliams then denied everything).

Now as someone who has attended a lot of party conferences, I can sympathise that sometimes you get very naive and inexperienced members at these conferences who say stupid things.

So when the proposal to use the taxpayer funded advertising for campaigning is dismissed as just being from a delegate, you do wonder what sort of delegate?

Was it someone just active at branch level? Was it someone active at electorate level? Or was it someone who held office at regional level? Or was it someone even more senior than that.

Well thanks to a Kiwiblog reader, we have an answer.  A female Mainlander e-mailed in to identify the voice as Martin Ward. Mr Ward is (or at least was until recently) a member of the Labour Party’s ruling NZ Council.  So this delegate the President was responding to, was one of his colleagues on the Party’s top board.

And according to reports Mr Ward suggested the use of both KiwiSaver and Working for Families brochures. WFF is one of the Government’s key welfare benefits (by way of family tax credits). And who is the Minister of Social Welfare, sorry Social Development and Employment. Well by coincidence Mr Ward’s wife – Ruth Dyson.

So this suggestion to use taxpayer funded material for campaigning did not come from some junior lackey. It came from a member of the Labour Party’s Council and the spouse of a senior Cabinet Minister.

The scandal over Williams lies re the Labour Party Congress have been the main focus of the last 24 hours. But there are plenty of other statements which are worth looking at. From the transcript:

GUYON  Your own poll Mike Williams UMR, I saw it this week, 51-36, 15 points behind, how do you pull that back?

MIKE  Well again I think UMR is the subject of this problem that – let me tell you virtually all polls are conducted by landlines I don’t know one that isn’t.  Now I was the first person in New Zealand ever to put the electronic white pages together with the electoral roll.  Okay that was in 1986 I think, and I got an 82% match in the general seats.  Right, what we got in January of this year was a 50% match.  What this means Guyon is that half the population is statistically invisible.  Now what I trust is our canvassing data and our canvassing data shows the Labour vote about where it was last time, about 40%.  Now at that point it’s winnable.

I find it amusing that Williams works so hard to discredit polls, when his party spends so much money on them! And I have never known someone to claim canvassing data on behalf of a party is more representative than a random scientific poll.

Now look I am the last person to deny there are some challenges for the polling industry, but people over state the problem of landlines. Labour’s Coromandel candidate Hugh Kininmonth for example claimed yesterday:

I’ve never been a fan of the polls. They’re incredibly irrelevant and unrepresentative. For one they seldom report the number of respondents who are ‘undecided’. Around 37% of electors don’t have a landline – they are therefore exempt from participating in the polls.

The 2006 census found only 8% of households said they had no landline, with only 2% having no telecommunication services at all.  I have no idea where 37% comes from.

Williams stuff on matching the electoral roll to the white pages is also somewhat of a red herring. That affects the party’s abilities to match voters to phone numbers, but does not affect polling for media organisations as they do not use the electoral roll, but just call random numbers from the ranges Telecom have advised are available for allocation.

GUYON  Alright, some people say that Andrew Little is lining himself up for the job of Labour Party President.

MIKE  I’d welcome that in the fullness of time yes I would.

GUYON  Is that going to happen?

MIKE  I wouldn’t be surprised, I think he’d have good support

Now Andrew would be a very capable Labour Party President, and on present form he may get a promotion sooner than he wants!

I note on that issue the Herald states:

Mr Little said he would be able to keep his role with the EPMU if he gained the Labour Party presidency.

Now imagine if Little ascends to the presidency before the election. He would be running the Labour Party campaign, and at the same time also running the independent third party EPMU campaign, which will in no way of course be aligned to help Labour’s campaign. That will be a serious case of hat shuffling.

MIKE  There was general agreement I mean it passed with a majority in the parliament and I do think it needs to shake down.  What I’d say to you Fran is that this is what it’s about, it’s about the influence of big money in election campaigns and I think in New Zealand we do not want the kind of American politics transplanted here.  I mean this book (The Hollow Men) really shows an outrage, it’s a conspiracy to overspend and that’s what the Electoral Finance Act’s all about.

Mike’s idea of general agreement is a fascinating one. He means Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

But the prize for hypocrisy is for the line “it’s a conspiracy to overspend”. Mike Williams’ own party overspent by $400,000 to $800,000. They lied to the Chief Electoral Officer about it. They stated they woudl include the pledge card as an expense at a time when they knew that was impossible to do and stay within the limit. They lied merely to keep the issue out of the media until after the election. So for Williams to go on about conspiracies to overspend is just laughable.

MIKE  Well that’s like we had in the past I mean if you’ve got a long memory you’ll realise Muldoon called an election under a National passed law that said you couldn’t enrol after the writs were down, in other words enrolments in that election that Muldoon actually lost cut off in 48 hours and we had to run round, parties change laws, that’s the prerogative of government is it not?

Williams is citing Muldoon as constitutional precedent! God help us.

MIKE  The sort of feedback we get is that yes people are definitely and something has to be done about that, and I think that will be at least partly addressed in the budget, but I do think there’s an understanding that the government cannot legislate for food prices, cannot legislate for petrol prices, there are some things that governments cannot do.

Well if you are going to cite Muldoon as a precedent for constitutional law, why not also follow him as a model for the economy and do a price freeze like he did.  After all his economic management was on a par with his constitutional law probity.

BERNARD  And we don’t have a government list if you like of what are other strategic assets, so we have to wait and hope or guess at what the government’s view on this is, this is the danger of politically driven decisions on foreign investment isn’t it?

MIKE  I’d agree with you, I think we probably do need a list and I think that’s an oversight, but Helen said you know we’re not perfect and these things don’t arise very often, I mean we haven’t had major strategic assets that I’m aware of the people trying to take them over before.

Here I agree with Mr Williams. We do need a list of what assets the Government now deems strategic. Even the Labour Party President says we need a list. So hopefully someone will ask Dr Cullen when he will be producing one.

MIKE  Well I think this government has been very constrained in its use of government advertising I mean if you go to New South Wales in advance of an election you’ll see wall to wall government advertising you know we’ve got advertised for nurses doctors and that sort of thing, I can’t anticipate that but obviously you’ve gotta tell people about what’s going on.

Cough, splutter. Constrained? Well constrained when the Auditor-General knocks some of the more outraegous plans back, but $100 million of government advertising spend is not constrained.

The NZ Herald has obtained confidential strategy notes from the Labour Party Congress, detailing how Labour plans to get around the spending limits they have foisted on everyone else.

It involves taxpayer money again of course – this time Government Departments:

In a private session on the election strategy, run by president Mike Williams, delegates were advised to distribute pamphlets on KiwiSaver produced by the Inland Revenue Department and on Working for Families produced by Work and Income.

They were also advised to tell voters when handing out the pamphlets that National voted against both measures.

Normally in an election a party in Government would pay a hundred thousand dollars or so to produce a party pamphlet which tells people about the good things they have done. But to both save Labour money, and keep them under the limit everyone else has, they plan to get hundreds of thousands of extra Government funded information pamphlets and then scare people into thinking they WFF and KiwiSaver will eb abolished if you dare not to vote Labour.

Now let us remember here that this is not a low level campaign worker thinking “Hey why don’t we grab a hundred KiwiSaver pamphlets in case we run into people interested in them. This is the Labour Party’s most senior campaign official telling every MP, candidate and campaign activist to use taxpayer funded material as part of their election campaign.

The Auditor-General actually saw this possibility back in 2005:

Auditor-General Kevin Brady raised concerns about the use of Government publicity as a political tool in a report he wrote in June 2005, three months before the election.

He said a non-political departmental publicity campaign for a policy such as Working for Families could still have value to the Government as a political tool if it were used in a wider, more politically driven campaign.

And that is exactly what they are doing.

Oh there are going to be so many lawsuits and electoral petitions after the election.