KEY POINTS:
Wake up to what Labour is doing with its shabby, self-serving Electoral Finance Bill. Or let it be on your conscience that you stood back and watched your right to free speech being flushed down the drain.
While not being quite that direct, National's Bill English has effectively
thrown down that challenge to trade unions, left-of-centre lobby groups, and politicians and individuals of the same ideological ilk.
It is clever politics.
By giving itself another huge helping hand in next year's election despite being punished for how it paid for its pledge card in previous ones, Labour is courting another self-inflicted backlash from voters when it can least afford it.
So far, however, public disgust with the iniquitous Election Finance Bill is relatively isolated and unco-ordinated.
Seeing the massive potential for the issue to flare up in the Government's face, English is seeking to supply the spark.
He has taken charge of running National's strategy which basically involves ensuring Labour is left both highly embarrassed and severely damaged by the bill.
National's deputy-leader and two other front-benchers, lawyer and justice spokesman Simon Power and electoral law specialist Tony Ryall, will replace more junior National MPs on Parliament's justice and electoral select committee when it hears submissions.
English has sent written material to many organisations, alerting them to the bill's squeeze on "third party" election-related advertising by groups which are not political parties, but which interact with the political system.
Their spending on such advertising will be limited to $60,000 for the whole of election year. The sum is barely enough for two full-page ads. And like other definitions in the bill, the meaning of "advertisement" is so broad, it could conceivably encompass press statements.
English points out that it would be no skin off National's nose to let the bill go through largely unaltered. After all, National has a very good chance of winning next year's election.
The bill bestows huge advantage on the incumbent governing party. National would stand to gain in 2011 - and without copping the criticism Labour will get for initiating the blatant feathering of its own nest in 2008.
English says standing back is not an option. The legislation is so draconian, so pernicious, so unsatisfactory and so unworkable, National is morally obliged to fight it, even though the bill's failure to ban anonymous donations is very much to National's advantage.
However, by even hinting National stands to gain from the bill's passage, English is placing those on the left in a quandary. They either fight Labour's legislation, or they accept the bill's limit on election-related advertising will still be law when National is in power - the very time they might need to pull out the stops.
English's gambit is win-win for National.
It will be rubbing its hands at the prospect of Labour getting a pasting from its trade union affiliates and other Labour allies.
If those organisations remain silent, they will have only themselves to blame if the law is not amended substantially and National ultimately benefits.
Such a scenario has not been lost on grassroots Greens. A National-led Government, for example, might sanction widespread uptake of genetically engineered products. Anti-GE groups would find election law circumscribing their ability to fight back.
At senior levels, however, the Greens seem blinkered by the Exclusive Brethren's covert attempt to nobble them at the last election through an anonymous advertising blitz. Labour's solution is worse than the problem it seeks to solve, however.
While the bill's worst features are likely to be amended or even ditched by the select committee, it can only go so far without compromising the bill and creating loopholes.
The Greens are vociferous opponents of such legislation. Yet, they are happily signing up to the electoral equivalent so the likes of the Brethren cannot again indulge in what might be termed "electoral terrorism".
That aside, those minor parties currently backing the Electoral Finance Bill may have a rethink once lobby groups have read the material English is distributing.
As one critic of the bill observed, the phone lines into NZ First's offices will be in permanent overload once Grey Power fully realises what Labour is doing.
That goes beyond limits on third-party advertising. There are new rules which mean the sum of money that political parties are allowed to spend in the three months before polling day will now also have to cover the preceding eight months as well.
The capped sums have not been adjusted upwards to allow for them having to be spread far more thinly. Neither have they been inflation-adjusted. This has little to do with creating level playing fields and a lot to do with frustrating any plans by National to repeat the mightily effective billboard-based campaign it ran throughout the year in 2005.
Meanwhile, Labour will be pumping millions into taxpayer-funded promotions of Government policies like KiwiSaver, although the bill is so poorly drafted, it may have accidentally made such advertising illegal in election year. The difficulty in working out exactly what some of the bill's clauses allow or disallow will inevitably see the courts dragged in to provide clarity.
The resulting judgments may well not be in tune with what the Government intended. Rushed remedial legislation may be required to patch things up.
It is also inevitable that some organisations will flout the new law either intentionally, but more probably unintentionally, such is the bureaucratic rigmarole they will have to follow to communicate with voters.
The Government is already saying that defects can be fixed by the select committee - an admission that the bill is badly drafted.
However, the wording may equally be very calculated.
Given it is in the minority, Labour knew it would have to compromise on the bill's detail as a minimum. It may consequently have made the bill deliberately extreme. It can then strike compromises over clauses which other parties find hard to stomach.
That way Labour will still largely get what it originally wanted. It will claim there is a broad consensus on the new rules on third-party advertising, disclosure of donations and party's election spending. It will say National, along with Act and the Maori Party, are the ones on the extremes.
But it will not be able to say that until the select committee reports back to Parliament early next year.
In the interim, National should have a field day, flaying Labour for putting self-interest first for the second year in succession. So much for lightning never striking in the same place twice.
