Hopkins on Electoral Finance Bill

Jim Hopkins makes an excellent observation about the Electoral Finance Bill.

Because what our politicians are doing this week is not preventing people from buying an election. They’re actually determining who can buy it. And they’ve very sensibly decided it should be them. While deftly wrapping a gag of red tape around everyone else’s tongue, their bill specifically exempts parliamentarians from its provisions.

Indeed.  It is the hypocrisy which most grates.

In a strange way, the restrictions our glorious leaders are imposing on their surly populace are really quite flattering. They demonstrate that the gummint’s more scared of us than we are of them!

It’s true! They’re terrified. The big people are really just frightened little people, so haunted by the unthinkable thought that the great unwashed will be seduced by the tawdry blandishments of hucksters and ne’er do wells that they’ve built themselves a Maginot Line of regulations heedless of what happened to the last one.

Of course they are scared – scared bullies as we saw with Trevor Mallard attacking Erin Leigh.

So we’re heading for our first Eastern Bloc campaign, only made possible because it’s as easy to steal a national treasure from Parliament as it is from Waiouru’s museum. In different ways, the security in each is equally lax. And the consequences equally sad.

This is the point I made in my post on why I support republicanism.  We need a written constitution to protect our Electoral Act from such partisan hijacking.