KEY POINTS:
It comes as no surprise that New Zealand First will be the last political party to settle its debts with the public from the 2005 general election. As always, its leader Winston Peters has been hard to pin down on whether his party will pay back the $157,934 that the Auditor-General found last year had been unlawfully spent from parliamentary funds. Entering the new political year, he claims to be waiting on legal advice to determine if his party will make a court challenge to the Auditor-General's findings.
His party ought to think hard once it gets that advice. This is the same Winston Peters who failed in a challenge against his defeat by National's Bob Clarkson in the Tauranga electorate, despite much braggadocio about his knowledge of electoral law and the robustness of his legal advice. The result of that case was a rewriting upwards of Mr Clarkson's spending, but to nowhere near the figures Mr Peters had alleged and not enough to unseat the National MP. Mr Peters' camp had to pay costs, and his long tenure in Tauranga and as the champion of electoral spending cases ended in ignominy.
While the Labour Party seemed to waver briefly on Sunday about its commitment to repaying the $824,525 it overspent should a NZ First challenge succeed, that disappeared rapidly yesterday with the intervention of the Prime Minister. Helen Clark was as personally and politically affronted by the Auditor-General's findings as Mr Peters or any of those who used parliamentary funding for party political purposes. But she had accepted, once his final report was issued and the public had spoken resolutely through opinion polls, that the game was up and the money had to be raised and repaid. She has taken her own advice and "moved on". Not so the recalcitrants in NZ First. What sounder heads in that party must understand is that any challenge to the Auditor-General's report will be a lose-lose proposition.
Even should its legal argument win - which in light of the Tauranga debacle should be doubtful - the public reaction will be more than unforgiving. Politicians using taxpayers' money to advance their own MMP-list interests cannot hope to escape sanction. It is no coincidence that NZ First has almost disappeared within the margins of error in polls over the past year. All other parties have said they will pay, even if they have yet to do so. United Future, which like NZ First took the "bauble" of a ministership outside the Cabinet in return for supporting the Labour/Progressive Government, is not interested in relitigating in 2007 the political quicksand of 2006. Its leader, Peter Dunne, whose judgment deserted him on this issue last year, now says: "I think most people want to see that particular episode put behind us and that is certainly our thinking."
The debilitating health conditions which have kept Mr Peters out of the spotlight for the past six months have left a gap in the landscape for his colleagues. Deputy leader Peter Brown and MP Ron Mark have found more of their voice and have tried to find issues with which to push the NZ First agenda. Any announcement that the party is now going backwards, to court, to argue with the people of New Zealand about their right to have their money back will surely condemn it to remain on the fringes through this year and its MPs to new careers some time in 2008. The Tauranga lifeline is gone. Labour is going to pay, regardless; National is champing at the bit for the "pay it back" row to go another round. Will NZ First take a bet on its very existence? Don't rule it out.
