2008 Party Spending

The Herald reports on the 2008 spending returns. I’ll come to that, but first an error they made:

No parties exceeded their caps, unlike 2005 when Labour got into trouble for its parliamentary-funded election year “pledge card” – a cost which was later deemed an illegal election expense and put it over its spending cap.

It was not “later” deemed an illegal election expense. The Chief Electoral Office warned Labour three times before the election that their pledge card was an election advertisement.

Anyway the 2008 returns are on the Elections website. Be warned some of them are huge as every ad has to be listed.

NZ First is listed as havign filed an incomplete return. What this probably means if there is no statutory declaration and/or an Auditor’s Certificate. In other words no-one will swear it is actually correct!

Considering their 2005, 2006 and 2007 returns were all found to be false, it might be no surprise they are finding it difficult to find someone to sign them off.