KEY POINTS:
The Labour Party's new leader, Phil Goff, says a controversial electoral law pushed through last year needs to be reviewed and admits his party was wrong to push through the changes without greater consensus.
Mr Goff said yesterday that it was a mistake to pass the Electoral Finance Act without wider political consensus.
Speaking on Radio New Zealand, he said the law should be reviewed and National should seek consensus support for the changes.
"I don't think the way the Electoral Finance Act was passed or necessarily its specific detail was as good as it could have been ... Any matter that's constitutional or electoral, we should be seeking consensus for. We didn't have that consensus."
The National Party wants to repeal the law and replace it with one based on wider consensus with other parties.
Yesterday, National leader John Key said Mr Goff's comments were difficult to reconcile with his defence of the law when Labour was passing it last year. However, he said National would not make the same mistake.
"When we do undertake that work, we'll be consulting fully with other parties in the way we believed Labour should have consulted with us."
The act faced strong opposition when the Labour Government pushed it through Parliament with Green Party and NZ First support.
Mr Goff said Labour would like to contribute to the review of the act and while Labour had made mistakes, he said the reasons for changing the old law remained valid.
"What I would like to see is a system where democracy works but does not rely simply on the power of the dollar and that you don't have massive clandestine funding which was the real concern that lay behind the Electoral Finance Act."
Labour passed the act partly in response to the $1.3 million campaign by Exclusive Brethren in support of National at the 2005 election.
The Electoral Finance Act made major changes to electoral laws and prompted the Human Rights Commission to warn its provisions impinged on freedom of speech.
The NZ Herald also campaigned against the law change and the Electoral Commission criticised it, saying parts were almost impossible to interpret and it was so confusing it had a "chilling effect" on public participation in the election campaign.
Among the changes made by the Electoral Finance Act was a limit on what non-political parties could spend to promote their points of view.
It extended the official election period so restrictions applied from January 1 in an election year and it broadened the definition of election advertising in a way the Electoral Commission said was almost impossible to interpret.
- NZPA
