The culture of entitlement

In Canada the Liberal Party was widely seen and branded as having a “culture of entitlement”. This is something not unique to Canada, but we are also see it in NZ Labour, albeit not to the same extent as Canada.

In Canada a commission of inquiry (one with actual powers headed by a Judge, not a Clark Claytons Inquiry) found that the Liberal Party handed out government advertising contracts to agencies, in return for those agencies donating a portion back to the Liberal Party as money or services.

Now this has never happened in NZ, but it was reported some years ago that in the 1980s the Labour Party chief executive did raise the possibility of Labour’s debts to its advertising agencies being setlled by way of giving them government advertising contracts. Luckily Geoffrey Palmer was Leader and of too high integrity to take this suggestion up.

But we still see the culture at work with the demands for “democracy funding” and also the outrageous proposed $15 million advertising campaign for Working For Families. This campaign is in fact what first led the Auditor-General to start trying to clean up the system.

Now a culture of entitlement does not mean by itself, a party has acted illegally. It does help understand why the party keeps pushing the boundaries and is then outraged when told they have gone too far.

For the sake of clarity, let us look at what Labour has done, and which are illegal, and which are not.

1) The $15 Working for Families campaign

Now I regarded this as outrageous, but have never labelled it illegal or corrupt. That is because the Auditor-General reviewed the programme, and pared it back. I might not like the fact they still spent $12 million on a campaign which could have been done via targetted idrect mail for $500,000, but that was within the rules. Greedy, but not corrupt.

2) The over-spending by $418,000

Lasbour clearly broke the law here. The incompetence or timidty of the Police is the only thing which saved them from an inevitable court ruling against them. My series into the Police investigation demonstrated to any reasonable person that the Police fucked this up majorly. And the fact that Labour were warned three weeks before the election they had to include their pledge cards, and they ignored that advice gives them no defence. An aggravating factor is that they lied to the Chief Electoral Officer.

A good comparison has been made to Bob Clarkson. Clarkson was warned his spending was being challenged. So he stopped some spending, and this allowed him to remain under the limit. Labour were warnned with three weeks to go, and not only did they not decrease their spending to stay under the limit, they increased it (while telling the Chief Eleectoral Office the opposite)

3) The $800,000 of expenditure provisionally ruled illegal by the Auditor-General

Now I don’t actually label the Government corrupt for the illegal expenditure. A number of parties were found to have used taxpayer money illegally.

4) Refusing to pay the money back

*If* the Auditor-General affirms his draft opinion that the expenditure was illegal, then a refusal to pay it back is corrupt. It is not the expenditure which was corrupt – it is the refusal to obey the law.

5) Retrospective legislation to personally MPs

If MPs vote for a law which will personally relieve them of their debts to Parliamentary Service, then that is corrupt.