Editorial: Changes far better than poll status quo

A separate bill will finally be introduced to tighten the use by parties and MPs of parliamentary funds to campaign to voters. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The Government's long-awaited bill reforming electoral finance law solves many of the problems created by its contentious, discredited and repealed 2007 predecessor and the dated 1993 Electoral Act.

It is before the House and a special electoral legislation select committee in good time, just half way through the parliamentary term. The Government hopes it will be enacted before the end of the year.

Several new measures have been raised since details of the reforms were announced in February.

The most welcome is news that a separate bill will finally be introduced to tighten the use by parties and MPs of parliamentary funds to campaign to voters.

This is needed because the definition the Parliamentary Service Act uses for electioneering differs from existing Electoral Act, and newly proposed, definitions of election advertising. It matters.

On the one hand the electoral law regulates parties on how much they can spend and parties and the public on what type of advertising is allowed during a campaign period. On the other, incumbent parties have been infamously able to rely on a lesser standard to campaign with taxpayers' money unavailable to non-parliamentarians.

A bill later this year will align the parliamentary and electoral law definitions in the "regulated period" or three months before an election. Parties will no longer be able to spend parliamentary money for communications other than those that "explicitly" seek people's support or party vote or donations or membership of their party.

Now they will be barred from spending parliamentary money on a much wider basis - any attempt to "encourage or persuade or appear to encourage or persuade" voters to vote for them or against the other guy. It is tighter for just the critical three months before polling day, but that is far, far better than the status quo, where doubt created opportunity for unscrupulous incumbents.

Better still would have been a commitment from the Government to tighten permanently the political slush funds that are available to parties through the Parliamentary Service. The state ought not to splash out on party political communications at any point in the electoral cycle.

If parties choose to adopt a stance of permanent campaigning, let them raise the funds themselves and spend their private cash on their message. Plainly MPs and party leaders should be adequately funded for their parliamentary, representative functions. Just not subsidised for advancing their private parties' interests.

Alas, this argument is forlorn given the self-interest of decision-makers and is in any case tangential to electoral finance reform.

The Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill sets a three-month regulated period, down from the entire calendar year of an election in the 2007 law, and limits it still further if an election is called fewer than three months from polling day.

The latter change avoids advertising and finance restrictions applying retrospectively to parties.

Justice Minister Simon Power has steered the reforms through cross-party consultations and has left untouched areas still subject to broad dispute, such as changes to taxpayer-funded broadcasting time for parties.

It seems clear that we will go into the 2011 election with the removal of dollar limits on public, or third-party, advocacy and participation, which is a certain improvement. A requirement for such "promoters" to register with the Electoral Commission if they spend $12,000 in the campaign continues one restraint of the former government's law.

This reform package leaves aside substantive changes to the way donations can be made to parties and how the real identities of all donors could be made known to the public.

It may seem to the politicians to be a frontier too far, and Cabinet papers suggest at least one more election is needed to reassess donor rules, but unalloyed openness should be the goal.