Editorial: Paying up for party puffery

The Labour Party is said to be coming to terms with the fact that 81 per cent of the electorate we have polled say it should pay back the public money it used to produce election material last year. That much is progress. But the party is also said to be looking at some unusual ways of raising the money, one of them being to underspend its next parliamentary budget by whatever amount the Auditor-General deems to be owed. The Finance Minister has denied that suggestion, and just as well.

Labour would be paying the bill with public money that has been allocated to it for a legitimate purpose. If that money was now to be used to reimburse the public account for illegitimate spending, the public would be penalised twice. Taxpayers would be paying for the misappropriation and also missing legitimate material for which their taxes are intended.

That such a solution could even be contemplated suggests that some in the party have not begun to understand the reason that so many people are disappointed in their attitude to funds entrusted to them for public information.

Fundamentally, Helen Clark and her cohorts believe any publicity they want to pump out is worthy of public funding. In fact, they believe party election campaigns should be financed entirely from public funds, and have tried to turn their difficulties with the Auditor-General into a case for complete public funding. They have succeeded only in revealing the depth of their error.

Only a party that believes all of its publicity should be state-financed could have made the decision to pay for something as blatant as its pledge card from the public information account of the Prime Minister's Department. The pledge card was so clearly a campaign publication that even Parliament's closest observers had assumed it was produced from party funds.

Yet the mindset of Labour leaders was such that they went ahead to produce the card from a public account even after the Auditor-General had raised issues over the rules before the election last year. When the misappropriation was revealed in the Auditor-General's subsequent report, Labour decided it would legitimise the election spending retrospectively. Now that a Herald DigiPoll Survey has shown the extent of public disapproval of that cynical use of legislative power, the party appears to be dreaming up new ways to avoid paying its bill.

If it were to offset the bill against its next annual parliamentary allocation its actions would call into question the necessity for those allocations. If, as implied in Labour's attitude throughout, there is really no distinction between campaign spending and ordinary state-financed party postings, it is not necessarily an argument for public funding of election campaigns. It argues even more forcefully against any public funding of party publicity at all. Why would any of the multi-million-dollars-a-year fund be needed if government departments and ministries were to be made responsible for public information on new programmes?

If the parties cannot distinguish between bona fide information and blatant electioneering, they should not be entrusted with funds for the former. The distinction may not be easy to define but most people recognise propaganda when they see it. And any mail-outs made within a month or so of an election cannot but have a campaigning purpose.

Labour has its back to the wall on this issue and is flailing about to find comparable spending by its opponents. It cites contributions to National by a religious group, as if that had anything to do with a misuse of public funds, and for which that party was rightly, separately, castigated for its economy with the truth. That argument is over. Voters had their say on National's lack of judgment about its links to the Exclusive Brethren. Now Labour has dredged up National material from the election before the rules were clarified. It is all a bit desperate.

There is no way around Labour's liability for its errors at the last election. It must pay the bill and call it a salutary lesson in the limits to which the public will pay for political puff.