Brian Rudman: Return to natural order is settling

North Shore National Party MP Wayne Mapp's latest newsletter popped up on my screen this week to breathlessly reveal "Unions Funding Labour's Political Campaign." My God, what will he uncover next? That the Pope's a Catholic?

Or that his friends at the Auckland Employers and Manufacturers Association are funding a $500,000 pre-election advertising campaign attacking the Labour Government's road building record?

Call me old fashioned, but I find this return to the natural order of things, where the bosses support National and the workers, Labour, rather settling.

Luckily for the over-excitable Dr Mapp, he wasn't politically active back in 1987 when the world did nearly turn upside down and Judith Tizard, the present Labour MP for Auckland Central, came within a few hundred votes of capturing deepest blue Remuera.

That was the year that merchant banker Michael Fay - later to be knighted - was so grateful for the economic reforms of the first three years of the Rogernomics revolution that he poured a rumoured $2 million into Labour's coffers.

Now that really would have been something for Dr Mapp to have squawked about.

Dr Mapp, who is National's industrial relations spokesman, claims "union bosses are using union funds to run the Labour Party campaign" and threatens that if they refuse "to discuss employment policy produced by National and others with a rational, open mind ... they will be doing their members a great disservice in the future when they try and negotiate with a National-led government."

No doubt the union movement still dreams of dominating the Labour Party as it once did, but the party's latest annual report suggests rather a different story. That's if money equals power. In a non-election year, union contributions make up just $40,000 of a $1 million budget. In election year, union contributions are listed as a hopeful $100,000 in a total budget of $2 million.

With recent revelations that old Mt Roskill Grammar boy turned international logistics king Owen Glenn has donated $500,000 to Labour's coffers in the run-up to this year's election, it rather puts the union movement's combined contribution in the shadows.

If Dr Mapp worries about the effect union backing for Labour might have on industrial relations, I worry about the effect the rumoured donation American hedge fund billionaire Julian Robertson has made to the National Party might have on the party's plans to reform the Resource Management Act.

Last month, Mr Robertson, who owns luxury golf courses at Kauri Cliffs and Cape Kidnappers, refused to confirm or deny to my colleague Gareth Vaughan that he had given to National. "I like Helen Clark and I like Don [Brash]. I don't see why it's anyone else's business."

Mr Robertson's plans for a luxury lodge on Cape Kidnappers was rejected by the Environment Court last December.

Coincidentally, I am sure, Dr Mapp's newsletter also contains a trenchant attack on the Resource Management Act, declaring "National will reform the RMA in the first 12 months of taking office and put an end to the madness once and for all."

The madness he refers to is the latest twist on the ongoing saga of the planned Wairau Park Pak 'N Save supermarket.

Earlier this year, the North Shore City Council gave a non-notified resource consent for the supermarket to begin. This was appealed in the High Court by a rival supermarket operator and the judge ruled that all work should stop on the site because the city had not waited for advice from Transit New Zealand on the effect supermarket traffic might have on the nearby motorway.

In Dr Mapp's opinion: "It is quite unreasonable for a developer in an urban and commercial area to have to worry about how they might impact the motorway system." He says the RMA "needs major reform".

For a party that is obsessed with the cost of motorway congestion, this seems a very cavalier approach to what seems to be a very reasonable worry.

Another very reasonable worry is what Dr Mapp's "major reform" of the RMA might involve.

The RMA may need fine tuning, but as the community's only defence against the aggressive developer, I quake at the talk of "major reforms" and putting "an end to the madness" in the same breath.

Particularly when you hear who's rumoured to be funding the political party promising the reforms.