KEY POINTS:
All things considered, the arrogance of Labour's tax-funded booklet for distribution to its electorates is remarkable. This election, everyone has noticed, is unusually quiet. The babble of interest groups is largely absent, the junk mail that normally cascades from candidates and parties by this stage of a campaign is not appearing. The reason lies partly in the Electoral Finance Act's restrictions and partly in the backwash from parties' unauthorised use of public funds at the last election.
At least other parties are wary of misusing public funds this time; Labour, the prime offender with its "credit card", appears unconcerned. The booklet circulating with the faces of Labour MPs on the front purports to be an "information kit for the over-60s" and it has cost more than $58,000, paid from Parliament's funds, as is the printing of a covering letter and postage.
If it were a bona fide information kit, of course, it would be going to all electorates without the smiling visage of any MP on its cover. It is plainly a piece of electioneering that will not be caught by the cap on candidates' permitted spending.
It has escaped the Electoral Finance Act's definition of advertising because the Chief Electoral Officer, Robert Peden, finds the document "does not contain words or graphics that could be reasonably regarded as encouraging voters to vote, or not, for the candidate. Mr Peden has not explained what other purpose the MPs' photos could serve. Innocent decoration, perhaps.
The MPs offer the defence that they do not cease serving their electorates with information such as this at election time. Well, they should.
In ordinary times, a 50-page booklet on the benefits available to pensioners could be a legitimate use of the parliamentary budget provided for public communications, though at the best of times information such as this comes with more credibility from the relevant ministry than it does from the governing party. At a time such as this, in the middle of an election campaign, it comes with no credibility for those in its target age-group who are not committed Labour supporters.
The latest irony in this reprehensible law is that it is "chilling" departments much more effectively than it is doing to the governing party. Last month, the Ministry of Health shelved much of its advertising for a cervical cancer vaccination programme until after the election.
"Chilling" was the well-chosen word of the Electoral Commission's chief executive, Helena Catt, for the uncertainties created by the bad law the commission has been asked to enforce. More recently, the commission's annual report has detailed vagaries of the law it is unable to clarify before the election.
The list includes: whether a wide range of submitted items come under the act's definition of "election advertisement", whether communicating with the news media amounts to publication, in what circumstances a report by a third party on the policy stances of a range of parties may be considered to be an election ad, and in what circumstances and when is a person deemed to be involved in the administration of the affairs of a political party.
In all the circumstances the architects of this law should be the last party to be playing fast and loose with campaign spending limits. The legislation will need to be revised by whatever party leads a government after this election. If it is Labour, it will not want to spend the best part of another term accused of electioneering with parliamentary funds. To run that risk again it must be desperate.
Its booklet has served only to remind the voters how rare such material has become this year and how much life this campaign lacks because Labour could not resist regulating politics to death.
