KEY POINTS:
The Electoral Finance Bill emerges from its select committee scrutiny slightly better, but still a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation.
It is better for having jettisoned the overly bureaucratic and arbitrary limits on so-called "third parties" - essentially pressure groups - going about their normal business of lobbying politicians and representing their members.
It is better for introducing a new regime requiring anonymous donations of more than $1000 to be channelled through the Electoral Commission which will pass the money on to the relevant political party without revealing the identity of the donor.
This will make it harder for donors to try to buy influence and easier for parties to sound convincing when they say they cannot be bought.
As the Prime Minister said yesterday, it is a huge step forward in increasing the transparency of party funding. But it would not have happened without the Greens pushing for reform.
The bill remains flawed for being a partisan rewrite of electoral law. It purports to create a level playing field, but its intention is to reduce drastically the amount National would otherwise spend on political advertising during election year.
This is most obvious in Labour's refusal to budge on the starting date of the "regulated period" when parties will be limited as to how much money they spend on such advertising.
This has always been the three months before polling day. The bill brings the starting date forward to the beginning of election year, thereby forcing parties to spread the maximum spend of $2.4 million over 11 months, rather than just three.
Justice Minister Annette King told the Herald the longer period would allow parties to "better plan" how they would spend their money in election year because previously they did not know when the regulated period would begin.
No one will buy that rationale. As the select committee's report reveals, under questioning, Ministry of Justice officials could not offer committee members any rationale for the extended regulated period. To have done so would have meant embarrassing the Government.
Mrs King also argues there is now "consensus" on the bill - another stretch of the imagination. There is consensus among the Government and its allies - Labour, Jim Anderton's Progressives, NZ First, United Future and the Greens. But even reaching that consensus was hard fought.
Such statements can be expected from the new minister handed this hospital pass in last month's Cabinet reshuffle. It is her job get Labour off the back foot.
Labour believes a more vigorous selling of the revised bill, the appeasement of noisy pressure groups and the partial reform covering anonymous donations will be enough to neutralise National's criticisms.
Labour is also punting on the bill being submerged by the end-of-year rush of announcements. And that its pre-Christmas passage into law will see the fuss die down before politics resumes in earnest in late January.
However, Labour might have been better to have been upfront about the bill's motives by arguing the bill is directed at National because National has an unfair advantage from being the party of the well-off.
Alternatively, Labour could have offered to reduce the regulated period to six months. Or it could have increased the maximum size of the party spend which has not been adjusted for inflation for more than a decade.
That would have demonstrated Labour was willing to make genuine concessions and compromises in the interests of getting cross-party consensus. And National would have risked looking churlish if it had rejected them out of hand.
