Electoral Act fiddling

Bryce Edwards blogs on how Labour is doing secret deals over changes to the Electoral Act.

The Electoral Act is part of our constitution. It sets out the basic rules parties and candidates must operate under. Any attempt to ream through partisan change secretly agreed to by a few select parties should be met with massive resistance.

The suspicion is that having been caught illegally spending taxpayer money last election, they will seek to legalise it for this election by bringing in direct party funding, despite having no public mandate for it.

There are a lot of necessary changes to the Electoral Act. The fact only individuals not parties can be prosecuted needs to be remedied. The maximum fine has to increase from $4,000 to probably $1 million or so. These are issues hopefully all parties can agree on.

But we should be very very wary of these secret negotiations whose prime motivation is to change the electoral laws to benefit themselves. Any major partisan change should be an election commitment, so a mandate is gained for it.