KEY POINTS:
The nation is halfway through a legislated farce. The Electoral Finance Act passed six months ago today has imposed restrictions on political spending that will remain until election day but surely will be repealed before another election year arrives. A review seems likely even if Labour leads the Government that emerges from this year's ballot. Labour's vindictive legislation has given it more headaches than it ever imagined when it set out to curb campaigns such as that which seven Exclusive Brethren ran last time.
The Act has applied campaign finance limits to the entire period from January 1 to the election whenever it might be. Consequently, quite normal political activity is being questioned or curtailed for possible breaches of spending caps and inevitably most of the confusion concerns government publicity.
The Minister of Finance had to excise all mention of his party from his recent Budget press statements for fear of upsetting the rules. The Labour Party president found himself in trouble for endorsing a suggestion that party workers distribute the purely factual published guides to welfare entitlements and the like. If that is not ridiculous enough, one minister has been told his party logo on his electorate vehicle is an election advertisement and has had to put a promoter statement on it, and the Greens have issued iron-on transfers for T-shirts bearing their logo so that all will carry the required authorisation for political advertisements.
All parties are feeling their way in the dark, as is the poor Electoral Commission that has been charged with interpreting and enforcing a law that was conceived in spite, drafted in haste and passed in disgrace. It was blatantly partisan, which electoral arrangements should never be, enacted without reference to the Law Commission or any independent constitutional authority.
If its primary purposes were to prevent the kind of billboard campaign that National launched early in the last election year, and to silence independent voices, it seems to be succeeding. Non-parties have to register as "third parties" if they want to spend more than specified amounts of their own money. The mere fact that political expression is no longer a simple matter of buying time or space for public messages and including a named authorisation is probably enough to deter any group that is not practised in the art of compliance with state regulations and procedures.
Public service interests and labour unions will study the rules, business interests and ordinary citizens will not be bothered. The Labour Party might be prepared to submit every intended publication of an MP or candidate to a committee headed by the Prime Minister's chief of staff no less, and its supporting unions might be prepared to run the gauntlet of legal action for the sake of promoting their political interests, but most people have better things to do.
When Act MP Heather Roy sought a ruling from the Chief Electoral Officer on whether her routine email newsletters were election advertising under the widened definition of the new law she was advised they might be. All MPs are in the habit of communicating with interested constituents in that way and United Future's Peter Dunne has called for a cross-party conference to try to bring some common sense to the law. All, including Labour, were willing to participate.
But even a multi-party resolution of the debacle would exclude the interests of non-parliamentary organisations of people who sometimes come together just to put a subject of their concern in front of the public in election year. Unless they can attract free coverage they face forbidding restrictions on their right to promote a cause, and fearsome penalties for exceeding the terms Labour has set down.
Political participation should never have been restricted in this way. After six ludicrous months it is possible to look forward in reasonable confidence, whoever forms the government, that this discredited act will not stain our liberties forever.
