Kerre Woodham: Well done, our very civil servant

How could they have all got it so wrong? From Labour's whopping $800,000-plus to New Zealand First's $157,000, all the parties, bar the Maori Party, have been caned in the Auditor-General's long-awaited report. Peter Dunne, who sent out a grovelling press release earlier in the week, apologising profusely for criticising the Auditor-General last month, will be wishing he had maintained the status quo after being told that United Future is in the gun for more than $70,000, and the Greens will be basket weaving like billy-o to raise funds to pay back the $87,000 that Kevin Brady says they owe.

Only the Maori Party is in the clear - its total overspend came to just $54. Tariana Turia for Minister of Finance, I reckon - she's the only one who seems to understand accounting practices.

The rest of the parties are in a bind, but it seems to be a problem of their own making. The rules say that taxpayers' money cannot be spent on electioneering, and although politicians say that precisely what constitutes electioneering is unclear, Kevin Brady sees no such ambiguity.

He warned the parties that they should be careful to watch their spending in the last election. They ignored him, he conducted an audit and now it appears to be Auditor-General 1, politicians 0.

Kevin Brady seems to be your archetypal civil servant - he lives in Tawa, he's a keen bowler and he takes his job very seriously indeed. As Auditor-General, a job he was appointed to in 2002, he's responsible for keeping tabs on the spending of public bodies, and since his appointment, he's slapped a few of them round the chops.

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise was roundly criticised for its management of almost $50 million in grants, and the advertising budget for Labour's Working for Families programme last year had to be reduced, after Brady found that the costing process for the ad campaign had lacked rigour.

I've met civil servants like him before. "Civil servant" is often used as a pejorative term, especially by people in Auckland, but a good civil servant is a fine thing indeed. They take enormous pride in their jobs which they do with meticulous and scrupulous honesty. Sloppiness, evasiveness, ambiguity, relativism - all of these things are anathema to the good civil servant, who is genuinely appalled when processes aren't followed and mistakes are made.

The political parties are scrambling to find opinions that support their interpretation of what does, and what does not, constitute electioneering, but the die has been cast, and the damage is done. Anything other than a complete repayment of the monies Brady says have been overspent will be seen as dishonest, and any attempt to get off the hook through legal means will be seen as the actions of invertebrate shysters.

In the pollies' defence, they were just the ones who got caught. It appears that plenty of parties have been getting away with using taxpayer money to fund their political aspirations in the last few elections, and because everybody did it, the party strategists thought nothing of it. And, in fact, that's what a couple of the parties argued. They were able to spend the money, they said, because of the "conventions of the day" - that is, everybody else did it, so why couldn't they?

But Kevin Brady, that good civil servant, was having no truck with that sort of craven excuse. Accepted conventions, he thundered, had no standing when considering whether public money had been spent lawfully, and, besides, he says, everyone should have known better.

Whether they knew or not before, they sure know now. As to what happens from here, well, the parties have to pay back the money. As the Speaker of the House says, paying the money back must be taken seriously if public confidence in Parliament is to be maintained. Labour is already at work drafting changes to party funding and election spending rules; validating legislation is being prepared to remove the unlawful aspect of the parties' spending; and party faithfuls of every hue (bar, once again, the Maori Party) will be asked to dig deep to help pay back the debts.

And given that Kevin Brady still has a few more years in the top job, government departments would be wise to tighten up their accounting procedures in case he trains his sights on them.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY