Kiwiblog

This advertisement appeared in a Grey Power magazine. In scanning it the e-mail address phil.goff@parliament.govt.nz got obscured, after the phone number.

Now we know from the minutes Whale published, that Labur have been instructed to use parliamentary service resources to benefit Labour, and this ad is funded by Parliament.

Now up until the regulated period starts on 26 August, this ad can be funded form Labour’s parliamentary budget as it does not explicitly call for votes, money or members. However my recollection is the rules are the party logo must be the same size as the parliamentary crest, and clearly in this ad it is way way larger, and appears twice.

So Labour may have broken PS rules (unless they have amended the rule about logo size) in this advertisement. However it could be worse. They may have broken the Electoral Act because there is no authorised by promoter statement.

The Electoral Commission has just this month published a booklet with guidance for MPs. They stress that even taxpayer funded advertisements need an authorisation statement if they can be “reasonably regarded as encouraging or persuading voters to vote or not vote for a party”.

In their official guide, the Commission notes a factor that may indicate if an advertisement is an election advertisement is “references to a party’s election policy or what they will do if re-elected”.

Look at the ad and the part that says “Under Labour there will be no asset sales”. Bingo.

The ad is very clearly designed to encourage people to vote Labour. That means it should have an authorisation statement with a name and address.

Over at NBR (subscriber section) I blog:

Documents released under the Official Information Act this week reveal that both the Cabinet and the Parliamentary Service Commission have approved a law change to amend the Parliamentary Service Act 2000, to prevent a repeat of electioneering materials such as Labour’s 2005 pledge card being funded by the taxpayer.

This will be welcome by many, especially when you realise the current law.

The current law still allows Parliament to fund blatant electioneering material so long as it does not explicitly solicit votes. A parliamentary party could spend half a million dollars on billboards and newspaper ads promoting their election promises in the week before the election, and send the taxpayer the bill – even though Parliament had been dissolved a month earlier.

I expect we will see a bill implementing the change in the next few weeks.

Full details of the proposed change are at NBR.

John Armstrong writes:

Axe the tax? Labour would if it could. But it can’t. So maybe the tax will stay. Maybe it won’t. Who knows.

Labour isn’t saying. And it won’t be saying for quite a while yet. …

National’s overall tax package will leave Labour nursing a big political headache – how to make up the $2 billion shortfall in revenue if Labour pledges to restore the rate of GST back to 12.5 per cent.

Labour won’t say how. But it can hardly talk of raising income tax rates which National will have just lowered.

No party – not least one coming from such a long way behind its rival – can afford to saddle itself with that kind of platform.

I would welcome Labour giving New Zealanders a clear choice, and campaigning on increasing personal income tax rates.

But that is one thing Labour will definitely not be doing. It is not going to be trapped into declaring a position which it might later regret.

Goff has been around long enough to remember National’s very own GST-induced political disaster.

When Labour introduced GST in 1986, National felt obliged to come up with an alternative – the long-forgotten “Extax”.

With Labour determining no items would be exempted from GST, National saw a gap in the political market. Extax allowed exemptions for basic foods, doctors’ fees, local authority rates and some charities. The tax was universally panned as an administrative nightmare.

The ridicule prompted senior National MPs to lose faith in the policy, resulting in mixed messages as to where National really stood on a broad-based consumption tax.

Not just National MPs. I was an office holder in National in 1987 and I actually voted for the Labour Party, partly because of National’s ridicolous Extax policy.

Meanwhile Bryce Edwards looks at the Axe the Tax campaign. He looks at whether or not is is electioneering regardless of the rules devised by MPs on what is legal:

The Labour Party obviously hasn’t learned much from the severe public ignomany suffered when it was revealed that the party had been paying for its electioneering Pledge Card with public funds while in government. Their latest rort – running a heavily branded bus campaign around the country – is no less electioneering, yet Labour has once again used taxpayer funds to pay for this political advertising. This blog post looks at whether such electioneering can really be called ‘legitimate’, even if the exercise is made to fit into the dodgy Parliamentary Service rules. Regardless of the expenditure’s legal status, few voters will appreciate having to pay for such overt political advertising.

Bryce goes on to distinguish between whether something is “legal” and “legitimate”

The Herald reports:

Labour’s “Axe the Tax” bus trip protesting GST increases is costing the taxpayer about $30,000 – but Labour leader Phil Goff has defended it as the cheapest way to get around the country on an issue that affects everybody. …

The bus features a red “skin” with Axe the Tax signage and Labour logos.

A spokesman for Mr Goff said the costs were expected to be about $30,000, including for the bus charter, the signage and other material such as signs and balloons.

It was funded out of Mr Goff’s parliamentary leader’s office fund.

He said it was a fraction of the $200,000 bill to the taxpayer for brochures Prime Minister John Key sent out to households last month to defend his party’s new national standards policy for schools.

Now Goff is quite correct that the bus is within the rules for spending from the leader’s fund. Just as the $200,000 on national standards brochures was within the rules.

But there is a danger that the public don’t care much about whether or not it is within the rules, and will judge the spending on the basis of whether it is providing information, or a series of photo ops.

I suspect most voters don’t mind parliamentary budgets being spent on a pamphlet which is sent to individual households, setting out a policy area, and why they are doing it. They may see that as useful communications.

With a bus tour, it is open to a very different perception. Voters know that it is not about communicating with voters – because if it was, it is hugely inefficient. It is about a series of photo ops, and desire to get media coverage.

Now again, this is all within the rules. But as I said, don’t be surprised if the public take a different view of parliamentary funds being spent on a bus tour, compared to direct mailing of pamphlets.

It would cost significantly more for him to use Crown cars to travel around in and for other MPs to use individual forms of transport. The signage was attention-grabbing and ensured people knew exactly what the MPs were there to talk about.

In my experience with bus tours, they cost massively more than the cost fo the bus. You see what they do not tell you is the fact that MPs normally fly in and off the bus to meet up with it.

As for the signage ensuring people know exactly what the MPs were there o talk about, this is not quite the case. Labour are not promising to axe the tax, and in fact they are not even promising to axe any increase in GST. As far as I know their policy is simply we will promise to do something different to whatever National announces, even though we do not know what National will announce.

It would be hilarious, if not rather tragic.

The NZ Herald thinks the Government is timid:

We need to build opportunities for people to invest and to invest safely, said Justice Minister Simon Power in his response to the Capital Market Development Taskforce report. That was a statement of the obvious, given the shortage of high-quality investment opportunities, which, among other things, has promoted an unhealthy zeal for the housing market. The Government should, therefore, be seizing every chance to ensure such investments are available. Regrettably, it has chosen, instead, to replicate the timidity evident in its recent tax reform proposals.

A core taskforce recommendation was that the Government should sell off minority stakes in state-owned enterprises. This would provide mum-and-dad investors with the sort of investment that proved hugely popular when the likes of Vector, Contact Energy and Auckland International Airport were fully or partly floated. It would also provide a major boost to the New Zealand stock exchange, which has suffered from a large number of delistings over the past few years.

I am a big fan of selling off minority stakes. National’s 2008 election policy prohibits this for their first term, but I will be disappointed if they do not have a more flexible policy for their second term.

The Dominion Post wants an end to taxpayer funded electioneering:

Mr Power, or the select committee considering his proposals, should insert in the new law a clause banning the use of public funds for implicit as well as explicit political purposes. Politicians are entitled to research policy and to communicate with constituents, but they should not be allowed to use public money for electioneering.

I think the Dominion Post is being impractical here. I am all for banning taxpayer funded publications during an election campaign, but the Dominion Post’s proposal would make almost all parliamentary communications illegal. If the Opposition proposes an alternative budget to the Government, that has an implicit political purpose. 99% of what Parliament does has an implicit political purpose. Minority reports of Select Committees for example.

The Press considers the safety of attending the Commonwealth Games:

Our Government is considering what security it would provide in New Delhi in October but ultimately this is India’s responsibility and therein lies a problem. Despite reassurances about athlete safety, there remain major doubts about security services there.

They could not prevent the Mumbai attacks, even though the two opulent hotels targeted should have had tight security, given previous attacks in the city.

And the delays in gaining accreditation to our New Delhi high commission of a police liaison officer, as revealed by government papers which showed top-level concerns over safety, do not inspire confidence that security is an absolute priority.

Besides, even if security has been tightened it is difficult to provide protection against determined suicide bombers.

Indian authorities do not like to be embarrassed by foreign criticism of their security services. But it would be far more embarrassing if nations or individual athletes refused to compete there or, even more humiliating, if a prestigious event such as the Commonwealth Games were shifted elsewhere.

I have visions of athletes running the 1500m in bullet proof vests!

The ODT talks wildlife smuggling:

Hopefully, the incident where Manfred Bachmann was caught in Christchurch this week with 16 rare jewelled geckos inside plastic pipes in his backpack is itself a rare case of wildlife smuggling.

Hopefully, the New Zealand leg of the several-billion-dollars-a-year trade in protected and endangered species is minuscule.

And hopefully New Zealand authorities can stamp out any incipient trafficking.

It will be interesting to see what sentence he gets.

The Ministry of Justice has just released to me (thanks to the officials) under the OIA the background papers on electoral finance proposals to date. Still working my way through them, but one stands out as interesting.

It is a paper from the Parliamentary Service dated 2 September 2009 on aligning the definitions of what is election advertising for both parliamentary and Electoral Act purposes.

It reveals that the Parliamentary Service proposes that the standard definition of explicit electioneering (for purpose of being able to use parliamentary funding) will continue to be narrowly defined (the status quo is no explicit solicitation of votes, money or members) but that during the regulated period this will change to a broader persuasive definition.

This is a very good move, as it would not allow pledge cards and the like to be funded during the regulated period. In fact it would prevent parliamentary funding (during the regulated period) any publications that might be seen to persuade someone to support a party.

This is in the fact the position I have long advocated. It would be too restrictive to have the broader definition through the entire three year electoral cycle (it would be unworkable and probably ban MPs newsletters) but once you get close to an election, then any material which is persuasive would not be allowed.

Now this is only the proposal of the Parliamentary Service, and has yet to be adopted by the Parliamentary Service Commission itself. Hopefully they will do so.

If the regulated period is set to start 1 August in election year, it would mean the status quo applies up until 1 August 2011, but after 1 August 2011 the Parliamentary Service could refuse to approve funding for any material that is seen to be persuading people to support a party. This will limit a party’s ability to use taxpayer money to find their election campaigns.

The Herald has the story of how Labour is flooding the country with taxpayer funded “information kits” on what the Government has done for over 60s.

It has escaped being an election advertisement, because they have been careful not to mention a party’s name. But it is obviously designed to influence voters as it is being circulated after Parliament has been dissolved.

My solution to this is simple. In the 90 days before an election, MPs and parliamentary parties should be unable to spend any of their parliamentary budgets on advertising – except for the most basic stuff such as hours an electorate office is open.

It is important MPs can communicate to their constitutents. But in the final weeks before the election, MPs should not have an unfair advantage over new candidates and be able to bury the electorate in material which doesn’t even count towards their limit.

This is of course what Labour did last time with their illegal pledge card. They have just adopted a more subtle approach this time.