Labour’s minutes

David Fisher at the Herald on Sunday reports:

Slater supplied the Herald on Sunday with a sample of the information he has obtained.

The proof was a copy of the minutes of a “Labour North” meeting held on May 25 this year, serving the party’s candidates for the five electorates north of the Auckland Harbour Bridge.

The minute stated the “Labour North” collective should “use Parliamentary Services for best outcome of LP (Labour Party)”.

Parliamentary Services rules strictly forbid the use of services for campaigning purposes.

You can see the minutes for yourself at Scribd.

They go on to say:

It was clarified that an officer or MP is required to be on site for campaigning use as the rules and use of parliamentary services resources is under increasing scrutiny.

Now using an office for campaigning is forbidden regardless of whether an MP is there or not. What this means, is that Labour wants an MP to be in attendance so they can claim it is not campaigning, but parliamentary work.

The minutes also listed the presence of Australian Labor Party activist Sandy Rippingale. She was a senior figure of 30 years with the party.

Slater said the visit by Rippingale to the “Labour North” meeting showed the party was subject to foreign influence.

Rippingale told the Herald on Sunday she was in New Zealand to attend the Labour Party congress.

Asked if she was working on the election campaign, Rippingale said: “I can’t make comment on the relationship between the two Labour (Labor) parties.”

Which pretty much confirms it. Now in my view nothing wrong with ALP helping out NZLP, except that Labour is the party that has railed against foreign interests being involved with election campaigns.

UPDATE: Labour have sent out a damage control e-mail to all their donors, informing them their details have not been securely stored and their names, e-mails, addresses and amounts of donations may all now be public. Every person who has donated money online to Labour is likely to have their donation made public.

Again I should stress that while I have no first hand knowledge of how the information was obtained, I am told that there was no hacking, cracking or illegal access. It was simply available to the world.