Parliamentary Party Funding
People will (or should) be aware that Labour, NZ First, Greens, Progressive, United Future and ACT are about to vote to change the law so that they can spend their parliamentary budgets on election pledge cards and the like. Even worse, the law changes works in tandem with the Electoral Finance Bill, so that all the money they spend – even if done in the week before the election – is exempt from the spending limits in the Electoral Act.
So how much money are we talking about? Well from the 1st of December the parliamentary budgets available for pledge cards and the like increases to $16.2 million.
Here’s the breakdown of MPs for each party:
The new funding formulas for each party are as follows:
- Leadership – $100,000 plus $64,320 per non Minister
- Party – $22,000 per MP
- MPs – $64,260 per Electorate MP and 40,932 per List MP
This means funding per party as follows:
Labour has less than National because they have 25 Ministers with Ministerial Offices out of which press secretaries and the like are funded. National has to fund all its non secretarial staff from its budget. Field and Copeland may not get their leadership funding until such time as they declare a party affiliation.
Now I am the last person to advocate parliamentary parties shouldn’t have enough money to fund their staff and activities. But that money should not be used on promoting parties during the 90 days before an election. Under this new law, Labour and NZ First could spend their budgets on full page newspaper ads promoting themselves even after Parliament has been dissolved.
And as if that isn’t bad enough, all these millions of dollars can be spent, without even counting as expenditure under the Electoral Finance Bill. Labour can now legally spend twice the $2.4 million limit. They overspent by $800,000 last time. This time they can overspend by millions and this little funding gerrymander makes it totally legal.
One could have two identical brochures. One for say Labour and one for Party X which is not in Parliament. They could have the exact same text – talking about how people will be better off under their economic policies. Every word could be identical except substituting party names. But Labour’s pamphlet will be exempt from the spending limit if they spend their parliamentary budget on it (and stick a crest on), while Party X will have to count the cost of that pamphlet as part of their spending cap.
Regardless of your political orientation, one should be principled enough to say this is unjust. It unfairly protects all incumbent parties and especially all incumbent Electorate MPs from competition.