Editorial: Brethren had a right to campaign

Right after the election the Prime Minister suggested the usual parliamentary review of the poll should this time look hard at "third party endorsements", especially those circulated by members of the Exclusive Brethren church. Hopefully that suggestion can be attributed to the aftermath of a nervous election night and the passage of a week has calmed her somewhat. The efforts of the Exclusive Brethren in the recent campaign are no reason to crack down on the rights of anybody to free speech.

Labour and the Greens have become quite obsessed with the efforts of the seven Brethren, suspecting them to be the cause of Labour's loss of so many provincial electorates. The Greens believe the pamphlets could have reduced their nationwide vote by enough to deprive them of an additional seat. There is no evidence for any of this. It is entirely a product of a tendency on the political left to jump at shadows when the shadow bears the shape of religious conservatism.

This is not the Bible belt of the United States, where the impact of the "religious right" can also be exaggerated. This is a country so indifferent to religious politics that the press had only to smoke out the authorship of the pamphlets for them to lose any credibility. And the secretive seven authors were not hard to expose. It took about two days of controversy for them to come clean, call a press conference and show their faces. In doing so they caused untold harm to the leader of the party they wanted to see lead the next government. Don Brash was pilloried for denying he knew who was behind the material when he had reason to suspect, though he could not be sure, it was the Exclusive Brethren group.

So what exactly would a parliamentary committee investigate? The right of any group to publish politically contentious material, or just religious groups? The accuracy of the material in this instance? The pamphlets were accused of misrepresenting certain positions of Labour and the Greens, but that is hardly unusual. The National Party might have said the same about material posted by the Post Primary Teachers' Association or other unions.

No opponent of a policy is likely to present it as its advocates would like. But the public is not as gullible as the leaders of Labour and the Greens seem to think. One glance at pointed material is usually enough to tell people whether it is published by friend or foe of the policy. If the tone is antagonistic its factual assertions will be read sceptically, if at all.

That is not to say enemy versions of a party's policy are always wrong. Labour would probably claim justification for its warnings to 7000 state house tenants that a National government would sell their homes. National was of course denying any such intention, but its previous record and its stated policy could justify the warning. Likewise Labour's tiresome suggestion that under National the nuclear ban would be gone by lunchtime. Strictly that was unfair but, in politics, fair enough.

So Helen Clark might cut the Brethren some slack. They were putting the worst construction on policies and attitudes of the Government and its closest ally. They met the legal requirements by putting one of their names to the material. They did not state their religious affiliation, and the law does not require it.

They were spending their own money, which is more than could be said for some of the Government's material, though private spending in election campaigns is another pet fear of the political left. Trade union money is one thing; individual or company money seems to be quite another. It is all grist to the mill of political freedom. Let it be.