KEY POINTS:
Labour's attempts to gloss over changes to contentious bill are less than convincing
To listen to Cabinet ministers talk about the hugely contentious Electoral Finance Bill, you might think select committees exist merely as Parliament's resident panelbeaters tasked with knocking the defects out of poorly written legislation that governments routinely throw at them.
Prime Minister Helen Clark and Justice Minister Mark Burton have sought to stifle the growing public disquiet over the Electoral Finance Bill by suggesting any proposed new law covering the running of general elections is inevitably subject to extensive amendment.
According to the pair, it's all perfectly normal and nothing to get excited about.
However, it was no less an authority than Sir Geoffrey Palmer - Helen Clark's de facto chief policy adviser on justice portfolio matters - who once observed that select committee scrutiny of legislation was not an invitation for governments to introduce poorly considered or badly drafted bills.
The question National wanted answered in Parliament yesterday was whether the unforeseen and unintended consequences already glaringly apparent in the confusing, catch-all wording of the barely three-week-old Electoral Finance Bill was a case of the Cabinet deciding to issue such an invitation to itself.
Or, more likely, whether those consequences had been deliberately intended all along - and that Labour had its fingers crossed that no one would notice, but now it had been found out.
Labour was hardly going to own up to the latter explanation. Instead, the public alarm surrounding the bill's restrictions on election-related advertising by "third party" lobby groups and other non-government organisations has seen Labour put up the smokescreen that the bill was always going to be subject to change.
The question now is where. Labour - intent on avoiding a repeat of the Exclusive Brethren's covert campaign in the 2005 election - is unlikely to budge on the bill's principles. It will have to shift on the details, for example, by raising the $60,000 cap on third-party advertising.
However, both Helen Clark and Mr Burton are keeping mum on which areas of the extensive bill, which also establishes new rules affecting disclosure of political donations and parties' election expenses, are open to alteration.
Speaking on Monday, the Prime Minister parried questions by declaring that "obviously" there were going to have to be some changes, prompting National's John Key yesterday to ask her where exactly those would be made.
Told that was for the select committee to decide, Mr Key took a leaf out of Sir Geoffrey's textbook and asked why, if the changes were so obvious, had the bill been introduced to Parliament in its current form.
He got another non-answer. He pressed on, again asking for the specific changes. Again he was told that "at this point" they were not yet determined.
"Why are they not determined if yesterday they were obvious?" Mr Key flashed back.
For once, the Prime Minister could not come up with a reply to match.
National's Bill English had less success tackling Mr Burton, whose line of defence was to try to embarrass National over its ill-advised dalliance with the Brethren by repeating that the limits on third-party advertising were in the bill so that "no one could again use huge amounts of money to buy an election".
However, Mr Burton's answers were also laced with references to the bill likely being "refined", and in some cases "improved", by the select committee.
He insisted that was something he had "always indicated" would happen. Strange, then, that Mr Burton's three-week-old press release unveiling the long-awaited legislation made no mention of such compromise.
