KEY POINTS:
The natural advantage that sitting MPs and incumbent Governments have always had over outside candidates and other parties will increase when the Electoral Finance Bill is passed.
The disadvantage for candidates will come mainly from the tighter restrictions being placed on opponents and interest groups outside Parliament.
Their spending is already capped at $20,000 a candidate but this will now have to be spread more thinly almost over an entire election year, rather than the three months' regulated period now.
The proposed regulated period begins in just eight weeks.
National's chief opponent of the bill, deputy leader Bill English, says that will provide a greater disadvantage to non-MPs.
"The experience in our electorates is that a candidate would need to spend $40,000 to $50,000 from a cold start to get their name recognition high enough to have a chance at winning the seat. And they will be restricted to less than half of that."
On the other hand it was "quite plausible" that an MP candidate would have access to $70,000 or $80,000 of public money.
"The candidate has to raise their own $20,000 and that's the limit."
MPs and and leaders of parliamentary parties have access to cumulatively millions of taxpayer funds that enable them to produce "soft advertising".
And it is rising.
Parties are bulk-funded in Parliament to run their parliamentary and electorate offices including their own publicity budgets.
In the last finance year they were given just over $14 million.
Speaker Margaret Wilson has just approved a $1.8 million increase in the present financial year to $15.8 million a year.
Within the increase, leaders' office base-funding has doubled from $50,000 to $100,000.
That may not mean much to the National and Labour Parties. But for Act leader Rodney Hide or for United Future leader Peter Dunne - both with just two MPs - that bit extra could go a long way in telling the voters in their respective electorates what Act or United Future is doing for them. It can tell them every week of an election year, if they choose to spend their funds that way.
And Parliament has made that easier after the Auditor-General's report on unlawful expenditure by most parties last election.
It decided that the rules and the Auditor-General rather than their own behaviour had been at fault and that the quick-fix was to impose a test that favours MPs.
So it passed a law allowing public funding of political advertising by an MP as long as votes or money are not solicited.
The advantage of incumbency for Governments comes from the large amounts spent in mass media to publicise important policies such as extending cheaper doctors' visits to Public Health Organisations.
AC Nielsen Media Research data on Government advertising shows that for June, July and August, state departments and agencies spent $24 million on advertising. That suggests that $100 million a year on Government advertising would not be out of the question.
Some of it wouldn't be considered in the slightest bit political, such as anti-drink-driving campaigns, recruitment ads for the Army, or civil defence emergency announcements.
Others, even though they may have legitimacy, could have greater political value to the Government, such as ads to promote new entitlements in flagship party policies.
THE HIDDEN DANGERS
"It may suit a Government department's communications objective to establish an easily recognisable brand for a set of entitlements.
"An example is the Working for Families brand [Kiwisaver and Supergold card could be others]. A brand may be free of any explicit party political references.
"However, if the advertising campaign is part of a wider, more politically driven publicity strategy, there is a greater risk that the brand will have value to the Government as a political tool ... "
- Auditor-General Kevin Brady 2005.
