Nats, Act spend up large with your cash

John Key. Photo / Getty Images

National and Act, the parties that kicked up a stink in Opposition about Labour's taxpayer-funded election advertising, are engaging in their own taxpayer-funded binge this month.

The aim is to spend all the money they are entitled to before the financial year ends on Thursday.

But while Act is being up-front about its estimated $50,000 spending on a one-week campaign to reinstate youth rates, National is keeping the details of its publicity burst secret.

Under Parliament's rules, party leaders are entitled to funding according to their number of MPs, but if they don't use all their money, they cannot carry the balance over to the next financial year.

So National is spending up big time around the country, producing leaflets, in the names of MPs, on last month's Budget, with a survey attached.

The survey is clearly intended as an election tool. Its questions include asking voters which party they support and it tries to ascertain if they are swing voters.

National is refusing to say how many leaflets have gone out or how much they cost.

The ads are heavily branded with party logos and look no different from electioneering ads. The spending is not unlawful because Parliament's rules allow anything as long as it doesn't solicit votes or money.

The formula under which parties are funded to run their parliamentary and electorate offices (including promotional material) gave National, with 58 MPs, $7.1 million to spend in the past year and Act, with five MPs, $631,000.

The post-Budget binge won't count against the 2011 election spending limits, however, because the regulated spending period has been changed from the whole of election year to three months before an election.

The last Labour Government undertook a similar advertising binge about its last Budget at the same time in the electoral cycle but its spending had to count as official election advertising because the whole year to the election was then counted as regulated.

Act's parliamentary leader, John Boscawen, last night defended the spending as within the rules and merely promoting the party's policies.

Act has taken out newspaper ads and is also planning a mail-out to 100,000 households this week.

The ads draw attention to the 27.5 per cent youth unemployment rate and the party's view that abolishing youth rates had cost 12,350 young people jobs.

It calls for youth pay rates to be reinstated.