The Herald launched a campaign against the Electoral Finance Bill last week, saying it is repressive, curtails democracy and breaches human rights. Despite changes to the bill this week, the criticisms have continued.
But they seem strangely one-eyed. The Herald position seems to be ignoring why electoral finance reform was needed.
This is seen in a Herald editorial that argued the bill “is prompted almost entirely by the silliness of seven Exclusive Brethren in 2005″ and that National was the main casualty of the “clumsy” Brethren campaign, which tarnished its leader’s credibility and lost it votes. It concluded that Brethren-style campaigns don’t matter as the Brethren were loners “with more money than sense” who failed to help their preferred party anyway.
Faulty assumptions lead to faulty conclusions. The full facts of the Brethren story show there are very good reasons for the Electoral Finance Bill.
Far from being about clumsy loners, the Brethren story is as much about the National Party, which was secretly collaborating with various wealthy lobby groups to boost its election chances. Internal party papers in my book The Hollow Men show National arranging the collaboration.
Groups like the horse racing lobby and Brethren would provide “independent” pro-National advertising. Some rich Business Roundtable supporters would quietly fund a biography of leader Don Brash. The Maxim Institute would spend large sums on pro-National publicity and so on – all on top of “anonymous” Business Roundtable donors giving National probably the biggest campaign budget in our history. Since National already planned to spend all its legal campaign budget, it wanted covert or “independent” spending to provide more campaign power. National campaign manager Steven Joyce met secretly with the Exclusive Brethren in May 2005, where he proposed the “Change the Government” slogan used in the Brethren pamphlets.
He explained that National would then say “the only way to change the Government is to vote National”, which National did. Later, I believe, he helped design the pamphlets.
The Brethren also met Don Brash and John Key about their election plans. Four months before the election, they told Brash and Key they would spend $1 million on seven pamphlets with the “sole goal” of party votes for National. But like the other secret allies, National knew that Brethren links wouldn’t look good and preferred to keep them secret. Both Brash and Key later denied foreknowledge of the Brethren campaign.
So what does the Electoral Finance Bill do? Mainly, it tries to close two large loopholes in New Zealand’s election finance rules. The first loophole is parties arranging extra advertising beyond the allowed $2.4 million through Brethren-style campaigns. What’s the point of the $2.4 million cap if parties can exceed the limit.
(National had almost no print advertising in the campaign’s last two weeks when it knew the Brethren would be helping.)
The new bill’s “third party” rules close this loophole by extending the current spending controls on parties to cover other groups like the Brethren as well. Freedom of speech is protected by allowing anyone to spend up to $120,000 on election advertising, but they can’t spend more than that, reducing the potential for parties to bypass the rules as National did with the Brethren.
The second loophole is that currently the $2.4 million cap only applies to the last three months before an election, meaning that parties with wealthy backers can spend up on advertising before this regulated period.
The bill closes this loophole by extending the regulated period to the whole election year. It’s a sensible way to stop some parties having an unfair advantage. This is about strengthening, not curtailing, democracy.
There were, however, some sections of the Electoral Finance Bill, as originally drafted, that were blatantly undemocratic. Nearly every submitter criticised these parts (especially the drafting of third-party rules that seemed to restrict normal political speech).
The bill returned to Parliament is substantially rewritten and, leaving aside nitpicking, the flaws have been fixed. But political attacks on the bill have, if anything, increased in pitch. It is important to recognise when people are playing politics.
The Act Party says it is “the most serious assault on free speech and political expression ever seen in the developed world”. The National Party-linked Free Speech Coalition “slammed” the revised bill, saying it’s “even worse than the original”. Silly, politically-motivated rhetoric. The Herald shouldn’t be joining in this sort of game playing and electioneering.
Critics of the revised bill can no longer claim to be defending democracy and human rights. They are simply defending the dubious “right” of very wealthy interests to try to influence our elections.