Hooton on Electoral Act
In the SST today, Matthew Hooton sums up far better than I could, why it is so important that Labour’s attempts to secretly negotiate changes to the Electoral Act to favour themselves, does not proceed:
If Chris Trotter and Helen Clark don’t like the government being called corrupt, they should discourage ministers from behaving in ways which give rise to the accusation.
The integrity of our electoral law is ultimately the sole legal protection we as New Zealanders have against tyranny. We do not have a written constitution that defines and limits our government’s powers. Our Supreme Court has not yet assumed the authority to strike down legislation, even if it overrides our most fundamental rights. Most probably, our governor-general would never refuse the Royal Assent. We don’t even have an Upper House that could prevent or delay outrageous legislation.
In fact, perhaps uniquely in the developed world, our House of Representatives claims for itself total supremacy. Attorney-General Michael Cullen has argued it can do literally anything it likes. Unlike Americans, Australians, Canadians, and even the British with their House of Lords, the sole check on our House of Representatives is our decision every three years on which mob will control it.
Matthew nails it 100% here. The Electoral Act is our sole safeguard. Changes to it should be made in a public and open fashion, not a result of dirty backdoor deals.
Any government of integrity needed to act after the law had so obviously failed to be obeyed or enforced, but the government had a duty to proceed with full transparency, the greatest care and with the utmost good faith. Labour has failed these tests.
Instead of appointing an independent commission with impeccable reputations, Justice Minister Mark Burton has acted unilaterally and secretly, under the “guidance” of none other than Labour’s own party strategist, Health Minister Pete Hodgson.
Burton tells us there is nothing in his proposals – which are still secret – to stop abuses like the pledge card rort. We do know state-funding of political parties has been dropped. Sorting out the various enforcement agencies will be left until 2009, the justice minister tells us with a straight face. There is nothing, as far as we know, to amend parliament’s standing orders to prevent a future government retrospectively legalising its own breaches of electoral law.
Again Matthew nails it. Nothing in these proposals will stop the pledge card rort happening again. There is a desperate need to have dramatically stronger penalties for serious breaches of the election law.
Plunket, Greenpeace, churches, Federated Farmers and so forth will be restricted to spending $60,000 in election year on public policy campaigns, but unions will be able to spend as much as they like lecturing their members on how to vote. Labour’s rising star, Shane Jones, admitted on radio this week that the union exemption is because “they’re valuable and long-term supporters of ours”.
Indeed. And the unions already are developing plans to spend lots of cash to exploit their exemption.
This is not the way to reform our electoral law and associated enforcement procedures, but our justice minister is almost certainly not corrupt. He only looks it, because he is politically incompetent, unsuited to high office and lacks proper guidance on how an honourable government would go about reforming this special part of our law.
Incompetent but not corrupt. Matthew is in a generous mood 🙂
Matt McCarten seems to agree with the incompetent tag, finishing his column with:
Now Labour gets the worst of both worlds. They won’t get State funding through and they get bad press for appearing self-serving.
How dumb is that?
McCarten also makes an interesting observation regarding the last election:
Labour owes a whopping $824,000. Getting the grassroots party members to raise this on top of campaign funds is very difficult. In my view the party should have made Cabinet Ministers chip in $30,000 each to pay the bill. After all, the decision to raid the parliamentary piggy bank wasn’t a decision of the party organisation. MPs will be well aware that if this money hadn’t been spent it is quite likely the Nats would be sitting in the Beehive. Given that the difference in salary between an opposition MP and a Minister is over $300,000 over a parliamentary term, it’s not a big hit given the returns.
McCarten has just admitted that the $800,000 overspend by Labour was “quite likely” to have been what won the election for them. I have always taken the line one can’t no either way what impact it had,, but the fact McCarten thinks it “quite likely” is a revelation.