Editorial: How Labour might fudge the issue

No crystal ball is required to imagine the Government's likely response to the Auditor General's report to be tabled in Parliament today on parties' election spending. Labour probably will try to present its misspending of public money on a campaign pledge card as a symptom of a much wider "problem" - a supposedly blurred boundary between what constitutes public information and what is political promotion. The Government may even have a panel ready to be announced to try to define the boundary more clearly.

Such an exercise would serve to muddy the waters and move the issue on to a wider front, but it would achieve little else. For the blurry boundary between public information and political puff is a problem that exists more in theory than in practice. In theory it is almost impossible to define where information stops and propaganda begins but in practice the ordinary person has no difficulty distinguishing one from the other.

Almost nobody outside the Labour Party imagined for a moment that the pledge card the party has issued for successive elections was being financed from public funds allocated to the Prime Minister's Department. Even its closest friends, from Jim Anderton's Progressive Party, have said they were surprised to hear what Labour had done. The Auditor General's draft report found that all other parties, except Progressive, overstepped the boundary in some way at the last election, but none to the same degree as the Government which overspent by $446,000 on the pledge card alone.

The least Labour can do when Kevin Brady's final report is tabled today is offer to pay the money back. It would be heartening to hear also a public admission of guilt and regret but that seems unlikely. The Prime Minister and her colleagues will probably continue to maintain they used her departmental funds in good faith and that Mr Brady should have given them a clearer warning that they could not. The offer to repay the money will be a grudging concession to public opinion rather than a genuine realisation that what they did was wrong.

It was not "corruption", as the National Party has been calling it, but it was something almost as bad. It was a complete disregard for the spirit of the rules. Labour read the rules literally to permit anything that did not expressly ask for votes or campaign contributions. It regarded any other campaign publicity as a fair call on the taxpayer. It is the attitude that public funds are to be exploited to the maximum rather than kept strictly for their intended purpose.

The Prime Minister and her chief of staff Heather Simpson can have been in no doubt that the publicity allocation for her department was not intended for election material, much as they might believe campaigns should be entirely state-funded. They have tried to turn the Auditor General's criticism into a case of public financing of political parties but quickly recognised the time is not ripe. An exercise in boundary drawing could be a step to the same end.

Once a panel of officials had failed to define a distinction between government and political information the way would be more open to permit public funding of it all. The public, though, should not fall for it. Fair-minded people could easily agree on the distinction. It is easy to recognise advertising that is intended to promote a public service rather than the political interest of its sponsors. We do not need to sacrifice information services, or pay for political parties' election pitches, for the sake of Labour's deserved embarrassment today.