KEY POINTS:
One disappointment from the parliamentary standoff over the Electoral Finance Bill is that the National Party, which in most respects is on the right side of the argument, has failed to see the wood for the trees. It has made some of the right noises but allowed itself
to focus on side issues, details, and to spend time on the impact of measures on MPs rather than the public. It seeks to delay the Bill's start date and promises to repeal it but has made no bold gesture over what it would do to improve accountability in election spending.
The debate can boil down to two basic interpretations. One, which is the view of this paper, is that the Bill makes democracy in New Zealand less free. The other is that, yes, it does do that, but it is a necessary evil to rid the country of covert manipulation from the likes of the Exclusive Brethren. National should be seizing its chances to hammer home that first point and ensure that the public realises that from January 1 political discourse will be restricted. A simple message needs simple communication.
Labour and its support parties are open in their denunciation of the Exclusive Brethren but will not acknowledge that their Bill will make the country less free. That is probably to be expected, given their obsession with the hamfisted attempt at the last election by seven church members to attack the Greens and Labour. National's limitations in this debate are harder to understand.
Its support parties in the fight, Act and the Maori Party, have captured some high ground. Rodney Hide and Te Ururoa Flavell have spoken of broad freedoms and the unacceptability of what the Bill proposes. National deputy leader Bill English has been a powerful analyst of the Bill for much of its life but in these final stanzas has become fixated with the new Justice Minister, Annette King, and her ongoing muddle over exactly what constitutes an MP's ordinary duties. His leader John Key has been starved of a Prime Minister to question or assail. Helen Clark has managed to be elsewhere for much of the past fortnight when this Bill has been hitting the fan in the House. Instead, Mr Key has tried to land shots via Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen. His attempts have been too low-brow, too detailed and too open to argument.
The debate has been going through the committee stage of the Bill, where parts and clauses are argued, so National can say that it has been obliged to focus on the detail. Yet in losing almost every vote by 65 to 56 and filibustering in vain, it has been all tactical control and little strategic vision. Where were the amendments that might have appealed to the Greens, or United Future or both, and would have tempted the support parties into even a partial re-think?
Surely, when the issues at stake are as profound as who is allowed to spend money and how much they can spend on public issues advocacy in the best part of an election year, National needed to put its own money where its mouth is. To offer the public a concession that, while potentially hampering itself, would also get to the heart of the most basic concern: the secrecy of some donors and advertisers. Where was National's grand amendment to this ill-conceived and anti-democratic law? It could have proposed a ban on all secret donations, eliminating trust payments like those from its clandestine Waitemata Trust million-dollar donor and making funding upfront and transparent to the public. Once that was done, any justification for restrictions on the actions of lobby groups and individuals is removed. The amendment would no doubt have failed; Labour and its allies are paranoid about phantom threats and intent on utu for the Brethren's interventions. But is it too much to ask that even one party put the public ahead of its own interests? Probably.
