Kiwiblog

No Right Turn says:

Back in 2006, the (then-Labour) government passed the Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill, which retrospectively validated Parliamentary Services expenditure in the wake of a nonsensical, retrospective reinterpretation by the Auditor-General. The rabids in the sewer (and some supposedly outside it) preached revolution.

Today, the (now-National) government introduced the Appropriation (2007/08 Financial Review) Bill, which among other things retrospectively validates various items of unapproved, unappropriated expenditure.

Will we see the same outpouring of outrage from the sewer, or will they finally admit that such retrospective validations are standard procedure and happen almost every year? Hmmm, I wonder…

This is one of the more desperate rewritings of history.  Yes validations are common place, but Idiot/Savant deliberately overlooks the vast differences with this one.

Also he continues to smear and lie about the Auditor-General. The Auditor-General warned parties before the 2005 election about their spending. They ignored him. The opinion of the Auditor-General was backed up by the Solictor-General. And what was truly despeciable is that the Government and certain scyophantic supporters attacked the Auditor-General time and time again claiming he was wrong – and then they went and passed a law which killed off a law suit that would have resulted in a Court deciding if he was right or not.

It is bad enough to attack an Independent Officer if Parliament for doing their job, but to attack them and to support a law change that would stop a court case over whether they are correct is disgusting.

As for the other issue of validation, here are what made this case different:

1. The MPs voting for validation had personally gained (in a political sense) from the illegal expenditure. They were not disinterested participants. This is totally different to a minor breach by some junior official in a department.
2. Not all parties had agreed to pay the money back, and in the case of NZ First never paid it back.
3. The MPs voted down an amendment that would have allowed the Darnton vs Clark lawsuit to continue, so that a court ruling could have been obtained on whether or not the pledge card was illegal.
4. The MPs who voted to validate kept claiming the expenditure was legal and like Idiot/Savant attacked the Auditor-General, rather than accept the ruling.
5. The Auditor-General had explicitly warned MPs before the election about their expenditure, and they ignored his advice

Toad from the Greens has an insightful piece as to why the centre-left lost power:

1. The Taito Phillip Field Affair Allegations of misconduct against Field had been simmering since just before the 2005 election. Instead of implementing a proper investigation with the teeth to interview witnesses under oath, Clark implemented an Claytons inquiry that was widely perceived as a whitewash designed to clear Field. Then despite further very serious allegations, Field was retained in the Labour Caucus right through to February 2007, creating a perception of tolerance of impropriety and possible corruption.
   
   Dead right. It was a disgrace, and even after the Ingram report they defended Field with Cullen saying he was just working harder for his constituents than National MPs did. Richard Prebble showed the correct way to respond to allegations of corruption around an MP – Helen Clark did the opposite.
2. The pledge card Labour’s handling of the pledge card and the Auditor-General’s report was appalling. The should have simply admitted “we got it wrong, and we’ll pay the money back” (as the Greens did). Instead, they allowed the pledge card affair to drag on interminably, and were subjected to daily allegations in Parliament of corruption. They hadn’t actually done anthing that most other political parties had done, but their reluctance to own up to their mistake and put it right undermined public confidence in them as a Government.

   They only conceded to pay the money back after they had taken all the flak for resisting. And the attacks on the Auditor-General were disgraceful.

3. David Benson-Pope Much like Taito Phillip Field actually, although the allegations were not so serious. The perception was created, through Clark’s continued tolerance of Benson-Pope through the “tennis balls affair” in which he had quite clearly been economical with the truth. He was finally dispatched in July 2007 after allegations of him lying to Parliament over matters relating to the appointment of a Communications Manager in the Ministry for the Environment. Clark said at the time, “The way in which certain issues have been handled this week has led to a loss of credibility and on that basis I have accepted Mr Benson-Pope’s offer to stand aside”. Pity for her that she didn’t realise he had lost credibility much earlier.

   Benson-Pope clearly lied about the tennis ball incident, with 11 or so pupils recalling it. And the issue was not whether or not he was a perfect teacher – it was that he called his former pupils liars and denied an incidents. He created all the problems for himself by the way he went on the attack.
   
   

4. The Electoral Finance Act This was handled by Labour in the most appalling way. The original Bill was so poorly drafted that Justice Minister Mark Burton deserved the sack for allowing a Bill that was such a shambles to come before Parliament. He was later quietly stood down, but by that time the damage had been done. Labour railroaded the Bill through Parliament, refusing to consider very pertinent submissions from organisations such as the Human Rights Commission or suggestions from the Green Party who were left with a “take it or leave it” option. This allowed the right to create the perception of the Electoral Finance Bill, and consequently of Labour, being undemocratic – a task which the NZ Herald took up with great gusto.

   Here I will have a go at Toad. The bloody Greens voted for the EFA, and they voted against many good amendments that would have made it a lot better. They sacrificed any moral high ground on electoral issues with their shameful kowtowing to Labour. If the Greens had the backbone at the beginning to say we won’t vote for this at first reading unless you consult with all parties, then the EFA would never have happened. I’m actually getting sick of how many people on the left are now decrying the EFA, when they never spoke up at the time.

   And while the final EFA was bad enough, I agree Mark Burton should have been shot for letting the original EFB through – that was the most draconian law I have ever seen with statutory declaraions needed to send an e-mail to a mate on a topical issue.
   

5. Winston Peters Need I say more. Clark stood by Peters as allegation after allegation of impropriety and, in the last few weeks, even corruption emerged against Peters. In her first and second terms he would have been promptly dispatched, at least temporarily, for allegations of far less substance, but her continued tolerance of him as a Minister allowed her and her government to be tarred with the same brush as Peters.

   Here at least the Greens can take a bow, and did put some heat on Clark. Clark’s legacy will always be tained by her disgraceful defence of Peters, and her total lack of concern with the evidence from the Serious Fraud Office and the Muerant papers about possible policies for cash.

There has finally been some attention paid by the media to Labour’s “information kit for the over 60s” which their MPs are posting and handing out in the tens of thousands.

Matthew Hooton has blogged on this several times in recent days.

This is a continuation of Labour’s 2005 pledge card strategy where Labour tries to get the taxpayer to pay for material it can use during the election campaign – and also tries to not have it count towards as part of their $2.4 million spending limit.

There are two questions involved:

1. Is it appropriate and legal for the info kit to be paid for by The Parliamentary Service (taxpayers) for distribution during the election campaign?
2. Does the info kit constitute an election advertisement under the Electoral Finance Act?

The answer to (1) is that it is legal – but, and this is important, only because Labour, NZ First and Greens rammed through a law change to over-turn the Auditor General’s interpretation of the previous law.

The Auditor-General could well have found, if the law had not changed, that this info kit was electioneering – especially as it was produced and distributed so close to an election. If it was a genuine info kit it would have been produced and distributed last year or even earlier this year.

But Labour First and the Greens changed the law (without even giving the public a chance to submit on the law change) so that only material which explicitly sought support for a party (as oppossed to implicitly) is covered. Under this law change Labour’s 2005 pledge card could be legally taxpayer funded again.

My solution to this rorting of the system is simple – ban taxpayer funding of such advertising in the last 90 days. If it was a genuine info kit then they can produce and distribute it when there is not an election a few days away.

This is all part of Labour’s strategy to hold its most marginal seats. Part One was the Electoral Finance Act to silence new candidates by extending the $20,000 limit in the regulated period from 90 days to all of election year. This is a limit of around 5c/voter/month. Part Two was changing the law so incumbent MPs could use taxpayer funded advertising during the election campaign. It is all designed to keep incumbent MPs in their jobs.

Considering the huge amount of interest in the pledge card last time, it is surprising it has taken so long for the media to cover this issue. Has TVNZ or Radio NZ told their viewers and listeners that Labour and “friends” changed the law to make these info kits legal?

The second issue is whether or not the info kits are advertisements under the Electoral Finance Act. I tend to think they are not. The issue for me is whether MPs should be allowed to use their taxpayer funded budgets so close to an election to be writing and sending stuff to tens of thousands of voters.

No Minister has a copy of the 2008 Labour Pledge Card, taken from Hitting Metal With A Hammer.

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.

I love it when I am proved right.

When I saw the new exemption (from party spending caps) for parliamentary purposes clause in the Electoral Finance Bill last year, I concluded and blogged that Labour were trying to change the law so that their private rules over parliamentary spending would over-ride the Electoral Act. Labour blatantly broke the law in 2005 with its $800,000 of over-spending and they argued to the Police that anything approved by The Parliamentary Service under Speaker’s Guidelines over-rode the Electoral Act.

Never mind that this was against the explicit advice of the electoral agencies, the Parliamentary Service itself and the clearly stated case law from the 1988 Wairarapa Electoral Petition.

But Labour did not want people to know what they were doing. If they didn’t mind, then the Electoral Finance Bill would simply have said:

Any material approved by The Parliamentary Service as an appropriate Party or MP’s parliamentary expense, will not be an election expense.

But what the EFA says in s94(2)(g):

does not include the cost of … any publications that relate to a member of Parliament in his or her capacity as a member of Parliament.

Now the Herald reports that Labour thinks the law is as it wanted it:

The view in Labour that all material with a parliamentary crest should not be attributed as an expense under a spending cap imposed on all parties is not shared by the Electoral Commission.

Acting Prime Minister Michael Cullen yesterday showed his frustration with the Electoral Commission when asked if its view was the same as his towards parliamentary-approved material and election expenses.

“I would advise them perhaps to take clear legal advice because the law is quite clear that where an MP is acting in accordance with their normal duties as a member of Parliament then, in fact, that [material] is not attributable.”

And at this point, I should remind people that they also changed the Public Finance Appropriations Act so all but the most explicit campaign advertisements could be funded by the taxpayer, and as an even better bonus exempt from spending limits. But they knew they could not state it as blatantly as this:

Labour dares not amend the act with a more explicit exemption for parliamentary material because of the potential voter backlash.

Now the Electoral Commission CEO warned publicly before the EFA was passed that the exemption was confusing and unclear. So Labour has no one to blame but itself for the fact that there is great confusion over what the exemption does or does not cover.

Colin Espiner also writes in The Press on the issue:

The law says publications and advertisements are not attributable to party campaign spending limits if they are produced by MPs in “his or her own capacity” as an MP.

The commission is understood to be worried that this could represent a loophole through which parties could use their multi-million-dollar Parliamentary Service budgets to run election advertisements and claim they were the work of individual MPs going about their parliamentary business.

The Commission should be worried, except that this is not a loophole, as in some sort of accidential consequence. It is in fact a very deliberate attempt by the parties who supported the EFA to have the taxpayer funded their campaign, and even better not have it count towards their expenditure limit.

Espiner also reports a useful reminder from Bill English:

English said that any assurances from Labour that it would attribute the money to its spending limit were worth little, as Labour assured the Electoral Commission just before the 2005 election that the $800,000 pledge card would be counted against its expenses and then, two days after the election, reneged.

“Why should we believe any undertaking the Labour Party makes about this?” English said.

Actually the pledge card was only $400,000 – the other $400,000 was other taxpayer funded expenditure. But sadly English is right – the Labour Party General Secretary wrote to the Chief Electoral Office a few days before the 2005 election and agreed the cost of the pledge card would be included as an election expense. Then after the election he wrote again to say he had changed his mind. In my eyes that was enough to move the over spending from an illegal practice to a corrupt practice. But thanks to the Police, we never got to find out if a Judge would have agreed.

Hodgson said the misunderstanding arose because the pledge card was similar to the 1999 and 2002 pledge cards, which had been determined to be within the rules.

Not totally. Yes the Parliamentary Service approved the earlier pledge cards as able to be paid for from their budget. They were wrong to do so, but they did approve them.

But they were never approved or cleared by the electoral authorities as not being a campaign expense. The simple reality is that the electoral authorities never knew that Labour had not been including them in their expense returns previously. The old return forms never asked for individual items to be listed, so there was no way they knew the previous pledge cards had illegally not been included.

Likewise the Auditor-General never was aware that the earlier pledge cards had been paid for out of parliamentary funds. If he had been aware, there is little doubt they too would have been ruled a breach of the Public Finance Act.

So in fact it is highly probable that Labour has broken both the law in every election since 1999. Hence their conclusion that the law had to be changed, rather than they simply start obeying it.

In his IFR column yesterday hard core leftie Chris Trotter said:

New Zealand should probably hope for a National victory, too.

So does this mean Chris has seen the light and repented? Well, not quite. Chris goes on to explain:

A defeat for the Right in November would be all too likely to encourage conservatism’s most dim-witted and violent adherents to take Von Clausewitz at his word and “continue politics by other means”.

So Chris is just saying people should vote National, because if you don’t we’re all going to start rioting in the streets.

This is one of the reasons why People Power do harm beyond the odd smashed window. They allow Chris to paint a picture of thousands of violent rightists just waiting to go on the rampage if National should lose the election. It’s about as likely as Tame Iti voting ACT.

Earlier in the column, Chris covers the events of 2005 election reasonably fairly:

However, the Right’s conviction that they were robbed of victory in 2005 is not entirely fanciful. The money the Labour Party used to pay for Helen Clark’s infamous “pledge card” came from a public fund which at least two responsible state officials had warned it not to use. That arguably illegal decision freed-up the half-million dollars the party needed to bank-roll its South Auckland strategy. That Labour was able to edge past National in the final hours of election night was due, in no small measure, to campaign over-spending.

The Right’s rage was not abated when the final election returns showed a narrow majority of votes had been cast for the Centre-Right. The combined total of votes for the parties of the Centre-Left (Labour, Progressive, Green) was 1,082,281 (48.1%) while the Centre-Right (National, Act, NZ First, United Future) secured 1,115,257 (49.6%).

Chris hasn’t classified the Maori Party as Centre-Right or Centre-Left. Also I get slightly different percentages as there were a total of 2,275,629 valid votes.  Maybe Chris is going off total votes for parties which made it into Parliament which is 2,245,801.  Let’s see – that might be it as that gives the CR 49.7% and CL 48.2%.

Incidentially while I have heard many people rage about the illegal overspending of some $400K to $800K by Labour, I’ve not heard many claim that the CR got more votes than the CL. I certainly tend to regard the Maori Party as more CL than CR, which puts the CL marginally ahead of the CR.  Even if you add Destiny into the CR vote that gives you 1,129,467 for the CR and 1,130,544 for the CL – almost a tie – only 1,077 votes in it.