Ralston this week

Bill Ralston traverses both the Setchell Affair and the Electoral Finance Bill:

To quickly summarise the cock-up: Madeleine Setchell was sacked as communications manager at the Ministry for the Environment because the minister did not like the fact her partner was an adviser to Opposition Leader John Key.

The Hunn report, which investigated the affair, found top public servants and ministers were colluding over who could and could not be hired as spin doctors.

Her [Clark] own staff co-ordinate not only all the press secretaries in the Beehive but manage the strategy for virtually every word that comes out of every department and agency of state.

Also, it coordinates multi-million-dollar departmental publicity campaigns to portray the Government as taking action on virtually any issue worrying voters. Curiously, every election year, these advertising campaigns seem to increase.

If the public is concerned about health issues, the relevant department runs a “public education” campaign about the wonderful advances being made in the health sector.

Worried about your retirement? If the Government’s constant polling picks up your concern you bet there will be a campaign to explain to you the glories of the KiwiSaver scheme and how you can benefit from it.

Under pressure from increased mortgage rates, married couples are worrying about how one partner can take time out of work to raise children. So the Government has a nifty early childhood education publicity campaign up its sleeve so it can demonstrate to struggling parents that not only can they offload the kids for several more hours a week but the little ankle-biters might even learn something while the parents are generating desperately needed cash for the household.

That does tend to make a mockery of the Electoral Finance Bill, which will severely restrict spending by Government critics in an election year while allowing Government departments a virtual free hand.

As long as a “public eduction” campaign doesn’t blatantly say “Vote Labour” the chances are the Auditor-General will okay the department’s publicity spending as non-political.

Isn’t it nice how we give the Government hundreds of millions of tax dollars so it can hire publicists to tell us how well it is doing?

Ralston, like many others, sees the obvious links between the Setchell affair and the Electoral Finance Bill – it’s all about spending as much taxpayer money as possible on re-election while preventing critics from spending their own money against you.