KEY POINTS:
Labour had a terrible finish to last year. Any hope for respite in 2008 was smashed within minutes of the New Year. Just after midnight, some wannabe drove up on a scooter to Helen Clark's electoral office and threw a brick at the window. The incident wasn't important
in itself and in some regards was farcical. After all, our erstwhile vandal couldn't even smash the window and was scared off by an old lady who was looking for a cat.
But the political relevance of this action was that the offender released a press statement afterwards saying it was motivated by the new Electoral Finance Act which came into force on January 1. It's clear the controversy over this legislation isn't going away as the Government hoped. Labour's party strategists would sense this is a warning of more headaches to come.
For example, in the past few days a website was set up opposing the re-election of the Labour Party. The website creator refuses to register himself as required by the new act.
The ensuing media attention has resulted in this website's domain name being extensively published and will make the website more successful than the creator could have hoped.
More dangerously for Labour, Invercargill Mayor and occasional revolutionary, Tim Shadbolt, is heading up a campaign to also tip the Government out of office because of education funding cuts to the Southland Institute of Technology.
Shadbolt is also required to register himself under the act, which he has no intention of doing. I'm sure he can't believe his good luck his campaign will get even more profile.
Stupidly Labour and its allies voted in Parliament to include rules allowing imprisonment for this breach. You'd think the last thing the Government would want is the courts imposing this. Shadbolt would relish the opportunity to become a political prisoner in election year.
I agree with former Labour leader Mike Moore, when he says the new laws are badly constructed and target the wrong problems. It is clear the print media is going to run a year-long campaign opposing this legislation and will highlight breaches. I can't think of another time the national media was so united in a political campaign. It's extraordinary that Labour has put itself in this position.
A political colleague of mine told me on the eve of the bill's passing that if Labour had any hope of retaining the Treasury benches, it must pull it.
I responded that the political price was too high to back down and they would believe their only option was to bluff it out and hope that the electorate would forget about it. But Labour has underestimated the fact that the opposition isn't just its traditional political opponents but, more importantly, the media is.
There's a certain irony that the new rules still allow the owners of the media unlimited ability to run high-profile political campaigns themselves.
It's hard to see how Labour can withstand it. The Government no doubt feels it has no option other than to battle on and hope for the best.
But if the campaign increases and more people refuse to comply with the new electoral law, what can it do? If the police refuse to charge perpetrators, the law will become a joke. On the other hand, if someone is charged, it will create a platform for political martyrs and the subsequent fallout will hurt Labour.
If the opposition campaign intensifies, Labour may well be forced to repeal the act. That would be humiliating but I suspect that, left unchecked, the electoral laws controversy fanned by the media will dominate all other politics this year, preventing Labour from getting any new policy initiatives or election messages up. Given its current polling this will hurt the party badly.
The electoral finance reform was well-intentioned and tried to address secret funding. But Labour's paranoia has created problems far worse than the solution. Ironically, political party spending isn't, in the scheme of things, that important. The big parties are limited to spending $2 million on their election campaigns and rarely raise that amount of money anyway.
Less well-known is the leaders of both main parties get more than $2m each in their parliamentary leader's budget to spend essentially on whatever they like. When you consider hidden subsidies, such as MP and political staff salaries and expenses during an election period, it amounts to more than $20m.
Even then, most voters are influenced more by media reporting on politics through the year than 30-second ads on television in the last few weeks of the campaign. Party election spending only matters significantly when the support for both parties is close leading up to the election.
This clearly isn't the case.
What is worrying for Labour is that it is already behind National a year out from the election. Unless it gets a clear run to set the agenda, the party knows it will remain where it is.
In the next few months, political survival may focus their minds. If face-saving and practicality does not involve a full repeal of this law, they should at least address the more draconian parts of it.
If they don't, the legislation designed to protect them from their political opponents could well be what tips them out of office on election day.
