May 17, 2008 11:40am by David Farrar

Dom Post on Electoral Finance Act

The Dominion Post opines on the law of “common sense” known as the Electoral Finance Act:

In environs more typically frequented by murderers and rapists, election officials, National Party grandees and trade unionists gathered at the High Court in Wellington this week to determine whether the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union is able to campaign during the upcoming election, The Dominion Post writes.

Elsewhere, signwriters were busy adding the name of a Labour Party official to the gaily painted Volkswagen that serves as Cabinet Minister Trevor Mallard’s mobile billboard to make it comply with new election rules.

The law of commonsense is in full swing. It is a law few realised held legislative sway till Justice Minister Annette King airily dismissed Opposition concerns about how new electoral laws would work by telling Parliament last November “the law of commonsense applies”.

This law of common sense which has been repeatedly broken by oh the Labour, NZ First and Green parties which voted for it. Such common sense they Ministers are breaking it.

Instead, the pedants responsible for overseeing election campaigns are insisting that politicians adhere to the arcane rules in an obscure piece of legislation entitled the Electoral Finance Act. We say obscure because Mr Mallard, the Labour Party and assorted other politicians who have been found to have breached it, are clearly unfamiliar with its contents. ACT’s Heather Roy, who breached the act by failing to include an authorisation statement in her weekly newsletter, can at least argue that she voted against it.

And this is the problem for its supporters. If National or ACT break it (which is almost inevitable at some stage) they can just say hey we said this was a bad, confusing law and despite our best efforts we got pinged. But those who voted for the law and foisted it on New Zealand will always face questions of why they are breaking a law they insisted was common sense and voted for.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t seem entirely logical,” Mr Mallard said after being told his vehicle breached the act. Funnily enough that’s pretty much what the Electoral Commission, the Human Rights Commission and the Law Society said last year before Mr Mallard and 62 other MPs ignored widespread concern that the new rules were undemocratic and unclear.

They can hardly say they were not warned.

In retrospect, the teething problems caused by the new act appear to have been caused by a breakdown in communication.

Government irritation at being forced to jump through the ridiculous hoops created reveals it was never meant to hobble Government MPs, or even probably MPs of any persuasion, but rather to entangle other critics of the Government in a dense thicket of legalese and to limit to a pittance the amount they could spend advertising their views during election years.

Indeed the intention was to protect incumbents.

Sadly, for the Government, election officials have either misread or wilfully ignored the signals that have emanated from the Beehive and for some strange reason are applying the law to everybody. For that, the rest of us have reason to be grateful.

Indeed.

An example of how stupid the law is, can be seen by this very blurry photo below of a candidate’s name badge.