Helena Catt on Nine to Noon

Electoral Commission CEO Helena Catt was on Nine to Noon. Some extracts that should make everyone but the total zealots realise the Electoral Finance Bill should not proceed in its current form:

PRESENTER: It is your problem because you’re the one in the hot seat, or one of two senior officials in the hot seat, making just those decisions and you’re saying, as this bill stands, you can’t make them.

CATT: Yes we can’t make them. What we, what we said to the Select Committee was as it stands at the moment, the advice we would have to give to parties is seek your own legal advice.

This is a pretty serious statement.  Parties rely on the Electoral Commission for advice, and they say the Bill is so flawed that they will not be able to advise in key areas as to what is or is not illegal.  So parties will get their own legal advice (which will differ of course, as they like the EC won’t know what the law is) and it will inevitably lead to big court battles.

PRESENTER: Is this a case of poorly drafted legislation.

CATT: Ah, in some of these terms ah, yes. I think it is a case of not thinking through the ramifications for how you administer some of the components.

PRESENTER: What are then, your biggest concerns.

CATT: Our biggest concern as you said is how we define when an MP is acting in their capacity as an MP. The laws, the new bill says that if they’re acting in their capacity as a MP, then that activity is not to count towards election expenses. Our problem is we don’t know where that line is between acting in their capacity as an MP on the one hand and inducements to vote on the other hand.

As I keep saying, there is an easy answer for this.  Nothing is so blatantly seeking to persuade or encourage votes as an election pledge card.  So the Government needs to clearly state if it is their intention that an election pledge card is exempted from being a cost against a party’s limit if done via the Leader’s Budget.

They will not want to answer this question though, because the answer is yes, but they do not want to say yes because the public won’t like it.  So instead we have bad unclear law.

PRESENTER: And yet we know from history that, that was precisely the debate in 2005, and MPs saw it one way and the Auditor-General saw it another way. You’re saying that there has been nothing to clarify or prevent that exact same debate going on again.

CATT: Exactly. There could be that debate again and that’s what, where the problem is. I mean the, the regulated period for this election starts on the first of January assuming the bill is passed. Everyone involved really needs to know where they are in terms of the law on the first of January. On any situation where we’ve got one, two, maybe three, four different interpretations then we run the risk of um, problems during the time between the first of January and election day.

CATT: Our fear is that um, that litigation will become part of the election campaign, you know, it will go the American route where each party lawyers-up and firing the lawyers at each other becomes as much part of the campaign as the traditional advertising, I mean, that’s the worst-case scenario, that’s our fear, that everywhere where we’ve got areas where interpretation isn’t clear that the parties will start using that as part of their attack on each other and that’s not going to do anything to encourage public interest in politics, trust in the election campaign.

Oh the way this Bill was developed has almost guaranteed this.  If the Bill proceeds, I can almost guarantee we will end up like the US with litigation.  It’s almost inevitable when the Commission themselves say hey we can not interpret this law.

And I think it is a safe prediction to make that every single publication that appears after 1 January with a parliamentary crest on it will be complained about by members of the public, and rulings sought on whether it should count to a party cap.  MPs electorate newsletters will be targeted, brochures, everything.

Third party groups will sue over whether their campaign is an advertisement or not.

Press releases which do not comply with the law will be targeted. If a candidate makes a speech to a public meeting and does not give his address, they will be complained about.

Labour has destroyed the decades old convention of bipartisanship on these issues.

National had agreed to reasonable third party restrictions and a clamp down on anonymous donations.

All Labour had to do was convene multi-party talks in late 2006 or early 2007 and seek agreement on some key issues.  They would have been able to get them.  They didn’t even try.  Then they should have produced a Bill which just added on a few clauses to the Electoral Act, and it would have sailed through.