Matt McCarten: Red card for Labour but no party's perfect

Many taxpayers will be appalled to see that Helen Clark approved nearly half a million taxpayer dollars in sending out the Labour Party's pledge card.

Clark claims with a straight face that the parliamentary rules allow her to do it. The chief electoral officer disagrees and says the Labour Party broke the law. The Electoral Commission has referred the matter to the police.

The worst that can happen legally is that the Labour Party secretary could go to prison for a few weeks and be fined up to $20,000. But that's not going to happen. Even if someone had to go down, it's a small price to pay if it helped the Labour Government survive by a whisker. It's not like the election can be overturned. If the case is proved then the most that will happen is that Labour may have to pay the money back.

Yes grasshopper, it's true, there are different rules for the powerful.

National MPs, of course, are pissed because they're wondering if they were robbed of the Treasury benches. They had a week of acting injured and working up their indignant rage. Then Clark burst their moral bubble by tabling in Parliament a National Party brochure also printed and paid for by parliamentary funds. The Nats claimed it was a leaflet to "explain the party's general identity".

However, I think the words on the front saying "What National stands for" gives the game away.

And now the police have also decided to investigate the Nats over a $100,000 GST omission.

Now it seems the perk-busting and moral guardians of the public purse, Act, were possibly in on it as well. Winston Peters produced Act's advertisements that were printed in newspapers two days before the election titled "What Act brings to Parliament" with a group shot of the party's smiling MPs. We may not have voted for them but we certainly paid for their ads.

Then Act retaliated saying we paid for Winston's "poo on the shoe" billboards. It seems we paid for just about everyone's billboards.

So whoever we vote for, we also unwittingly contribute several million dollars of our taxes to helping other parties also get elected. Labour, it transpires, only got caught because it was just too blatant and the amount too big.

It's an outrage that they all seem to manipulate their parliamentary budgets for electoral gain. But the real scandal is how the rules are set up in the first place to allow them to funnel money from the taxpayer to their election campaigns.

These rules are set by a powerful committee in Parliament that meets in secret to dosh out taxpayers' money to MPs and their parties. This committee, headed by Speaker Margaret Wilson, has the bosses from all parties and no votes taken. If a deal can't be made Wilson makes the decision.

It's a bit like mafia series The Sopranos where big boss Tony Soprano has a "sit down" with his capos to decide how to split their ill-gotten gains. His capos all compete with each other but they all have vested interests in sorting out disputes about money. They argue their case and if they can't agree Tony decides.

The parliamentary services committee works like that too. All the parties know that they have a vested interest in keeping their business in private. They all turn up - not to stop anyone from getting anything but to make sure they get a cut too. They also have the unique power to decide how big the pie is. The rules they have created on spending are deliberately set so loose that they can virtually get away with anything.

For example, they all can print and mail out anything as long as it doesn't have a "vote for us" or a party membership form on it. Provided they can justify to themselves that it is imparting information about their party, it's OK. They can even put their party names and logos on it.

Now they have gone to a new level with huge commercial billboards with photos of their leaders. How they can pretend that these boards are parliamentary business is beyond me.

The truth is, the whole system is rotten and needs overhauling. The political parties should just be honest and say there needs to be public funding for political parties. The current practice of misusing money that is supposed to be used for parliamentary reasons is dishonest.

The only way to run a democracy is to set up a one-stop electoral agency that is independent of parliament. This agency - and not the MPs - should set the rules and enforce them.

The pigs in the trough need to be put back into their pens.