A new website

People are stubborn creatures. If you tell us you can’t do something, then someone will go and do it, even though they never would have done it before it became prohibited.

The irony of the Electoral Finance Act is it may lead to many more people going out of their way to campaign against a party or parties, then would have been the case when there were no significant restrictions on doing so.

So with that I note some people have set up a website called Don’t Vote Labour. It is clearly an illegal election advertisement under the Electoral Finance Act as it advocates against a party, and does not have a name and address of its promoter on the site.

They even have this badge people can put on their own sites:

Of course if Labour, United Future, NZ First and the Greens had not voted down the amendment which would have expanded the exemption for non-commercial blogs to all non-commercial Internet speech, then the site wouldn’t be illegal.

Incidentally I’ve had nothing to do with the site (as in first I knew about it was an e-mail), but one of the creators has asked me to do a short summary of the EFA for the site, which I have provided to them.