Labour’s plan to avoid the EFA

The NZ Herald has obtained confidential strategy notes from the Labour Party Congress, detailing how Labour plans to get around the spending limits they have foisted on everyone else.

It involves taxpayer money again of course – this time Government Departments:

In a private session on the election strategy, run by president Mike Williams, delegates were advised to distribute pamphlets on KiwiSaver produced by the Inland Revenue Department and on Working for Families produced by Work and Income.

They were also advised to tell voters when handing out the pamphlets that National voted against both measures.

Normally in an election a party in Government would pay a hundred thousand dollars or so to produce a party pamphlet which tells people about the good things they have done. But to both save Labour money, and keep them under the limit everyone else has, they plan to get hundreds of thousands of extra Government funded information pamphlets and then scare people into thinking they WFF and KiwiSaver will eb abolished if you dare not to vote Labour.

Now let us remember here that this is not a low level campaign worker thinking “Hey why don’t we grab a hundred KiwiSaver pamphlets in case we run into people interested in them. This is the Labour Party’s most senior campaign official telling every MP, candidate and campaign activist to use taxpayer funded material as part of their election campaign.

The Auditor-General actually saw this possibility back in 2005:

Auditor-General Kevin Brady raised concerns about the use of Government publicity as a political tool in a report he wrote in June 2005, three months before the election.

He said a non-political departmental publicity campaign for a policy such as Working for Families could still have value to the Government as a political tool if it were used in a wider, more politically driven campaign.

And that is exactly what they are doing.

Oh there are going to be so many lawsuits and electoral petitions after the election.