Fran O'Sullivan: Ruling comes after the party horse has bolted

Are the New Zealand authorities so cowed that they have to wait until four months after the election to throw the book at Labour for what looks like a clear raid on the Government purse to help finance its campaign?

On the surface Labour had been caught cold, well ahead of the September 17 election, by using Parliamentary Services as the channel for the production of a raft of pamphlets issued by Prime Minister Helen Clark's leader's office - including Labour's pledge card - rather than the party's own coffers.

Sure this obvious election collateral did not carry Clark's exhortation to get out and vote for Labour. It hardly needed to.

After Labour's successful use of the Clark pledge card at the two previous elections, that particular device had already acquired iconic status. It would not have taken a brain of Einstein magnitude to make the obvious leap of logic that finally led the Electoral Commission this week to decide that the expenditure was politically rather than government oriented.

It has found Labour has exceeded its allowable election expenditure limit by $418,000, just shy of the $446,815 Parliamentary Services forked out for what is now deemed to be a Labour-related spend.

Commission chief executive Helena Catt has shown some courage in referring the issue to the police. It is, after all, the first time any party has been referred to the plods for election overspending since the lamentable introduction of proportional voting.

But it is too late to have any impact on the only tally that really counts.

Just like David Henry, the Chief Electoral Officer before Catt, who referred the same material to the police in October after deeming the election advertising did not carry the required Labour Party authorisation, Catt is acting after the horse has bolted.

The only person who is even remotely in the frame at this stage is Labour Party secretary Mike Smith. Smith has already being fingered in some news reports as the poor sucker who could face up to a year in the boob, fines of up to $4000 or both, if he is found to have committed a corrupt practice. (A lesser $3000 fine is in the offing if an illegal practice is found.)

But, frankly, this is chicken-feed compared to the impact Henry in particular could have had if he had taken strong action before the election.

Across the Tasman, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks is facing claims that his Government is abusing advertising rules to position Victorian Labor for upcoming state elections.

State auditor-general Wayne Cameron, who was previously at the NZ Auditor-General's Office, has agreed to conduct an audit into the Government's advertising spend and, importantly, release the result well before the November 25 election.

Thus Victorian voters will know, well in advance of judgment day, their auditor's verdict on whether the Bracks Government is, basically, using their money to promote votes.

Inevitably, NZ Labour will argue that woolly election advertising rules, on this side of the Tasman, created confusion in its ranks over what was acceptable election spend and what was not.

It has some justification. There has been no concerted attempt to clarify the rules since the Auditor-General's report in June last year noted a big growth in publicly funded parliamentary party advertising.

The report makes it clear that there are a number of anomalies which concern the auditors.

But in my view, Labour will be on weak grounds indeed if it uses that report to justify any resultant defence if and when the matter gets to court.

The reality is that by pointing up the explosion of parliamentary spending, the Auditor-General has served notice over where the boundary of acceptable practice lay.

Unfortunately for National its failure to include $100,000 GST within its broadcast spend at the election means it is also facing police investigations this time for breaching the Broadcasting Act .

So it is not in a position to spray too much vitriol over its opponents.

The big losers are once again the New Zealand voters.

If an election candidate exceeds his/her campaign allowance limits, he can be automatically thrown out.

A new election will be called to fill the seat at which the fallen candidate is banned from standing.

This neat solution does not work at national level.

Even if a political party's election transgressions were proved to be so blatant - for instance, involving clear vote-rigging or voter fraud - the resultant court cases would take so long to wind their way through the legal system that they would probably still be going on well after the next election was due.

Labour's alleged transgressions are not of that ilk.

They are probably symptomatic of an environment which sets an absurdly low limit on the amounts political parties can spend at any election.

Unfortunately for voters no one really polices the worst electoral frauds.

Such as the fictitious costs political parties attached to their policies when they sought to buy our votes with our own money at the last election.

If the authorities' attention was turned in that direction, it would not be the party apparatchiks facing the jump but the politicians who benefited from the overspending in the first place.