Sheer hypocrisy

I said on Tuesday that the failure of the Government clamp down on anonymous and trust donations must be due to one of two possible reasons – either that they were short of money themselves and dropped it voluntarily, or that they couldn’t get the numbers for it.

I commented at the time that I thought it was the latter option and gave Labour the benefit of the doubt that it was not the former, as that would be sheer hypocrisy.

But Helen has confirmed it is the former.  NZPA reports:

But Miss Clark today said banning anonymous donations in their current form without providing additional state funding would have led to parties “across the spectrum” struggling for funding.

Every member of the Labour Party should hang their head in shame.  For over a year Labour have spent almost every day whining about these secret donations.  It has been the centrepiece of their entire electoral reform campaign.  National had agreed they should end. But Helen Clark and Labour decided unilaterally to leave it out because Labour would have struggled for funding without such money.

Can one get any more hypocritical?

Labour have about as much moral right to draw up election financing laws as Paris Hilton has to promote abstinence.
Let us look at previous quotes from Helen Clark:

“I think the public wants to know who is funding political parties. They want to know who is pulling strings, if they are pulling strings through funding.” – 6 Dec 2006

 “I look forward to the National Party’s support for clamping down on anonymous donations. I understand that in Australia everything over $250 has to be declared. That sounds like a good idea to me.” – 6 Sep 2006

 Week in, wek out, Labour MPs have bleated about these donations.  They have vowed to get rid of them.  They have held them up as the epitome of all that is wrong with the political system.  They have all but called them corrupt.

And now we have a price for Labour’s principles.  They unilaterally move to remove any clamp down on anonymous donations, because gee whiz we get quite a few of them ourselves, and we’ll be too stretched if we ban them.

 Come on, this goes even beyond hypocrisy. How can anyone take anything Labour says or does on electoral finance seriously.

Their Electoral Financing Bill is an abortion.  The penalties are still a joke.  The restrictions on election year speech are beyond draconian, and they left out the most important part of the whole bill – because Labour needed the secret donations too much.