There was a bungled urgency motion followed by a fumbled adjournment motion and a reversal by the Speaker. The end result is that, after an objection by the Greens, the EFA’s second reading was delayed until today.

Where to start with unpacking the symbolism: how about the fact that the Nats’ EFA agenda was going backwards instead of forwards last week which says it all about the whole repeal plan; it’s a backwards step as Russel Norman articulated last Wednesday.

And it was the Greens who stood up in the House for what is right – a largely symbolic move in that it only delays National’s dismantling process. Much of the public has been brainwashed about the EFA’s shortcomings. Yes, the legislation is unwieldy in its current form, but yellow jackets are just not a threat to our democratic process. Enormous donations from the Exclusive Brethen are, and the EFA has addressed these serious problems.

So last week the Greens stood up for the serious, while National and Labour were busy buckling to the trivial. We’ll be criticised for resisting the Government’s urgency motion just as we’ve been criticised in the broader electoral finance reform debate. However, these issues are critical to the health of our political process. There’ll be more heat, but bring it on.

Clearly the kitchen has got too hot for Labour. They even tried to help National back into urgency last week. Apparently they want to eat all their humble pie at once…you know what happens when you eat too quickly, you get indigestion.

Lastly, the fact that the EFA’s second reading was delayed speaks to the whole question of urgency – what’s the hurry? The one thing everyone agrees on is that our election funding regime needs a lot more work. But we could easily continue under the current law until a better replacement is crafted. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit with the political posturing at the heart of National’s hundred day hurry up which is perhaps the ultimate in symbolism; a bunch of sound and fury signifying very little.

On Monday, the Greens called for even tougher funding rules as part of its open government policy. They want the source of any donation over $1000 named, and a cap of $35,000 on any one donor or entity.

They want a register of lobbyists and who their clients and lobbying methods are. They also want partial state funding as “insurance against … parties becoming captured by wealthy vested interests …”

It’s time we took these ideas seriously.

Earlier on Rudman draws attention to Peter Dunne’s previous links with tobacco donors:

Mr Dunne told Agenda the money was for a very pleasant lunch on an old country pub on a private trip and that “we’ve never been offered tobacco company money”. Asked if he would take it if offered, he replied “If people want to give us funding we accept funding on a no-strings-attached basis.”

It’s the same message delivered by every party – except, perhaps, the Greens, who are made of sterner stuff than the rest.

I’ve highlighted before that it seems likely most parties, not just New Zealand First, are hiding the source of their funding, even under the new Electoral Finance Act. (Labour, for instance, still has declared no major donors at all this year.) The public needs much greater transparency around political funding so that voters can assess for themselves whether it is an issue that will influence their vote.

The purpose of this part of the electoral finance legislation is to let voters know who is funding parties’ election campaigns.  It’s time the other parties, especially Labour and National, let the public know who is behind their campaigns, or explained how they are funding multi-million dollar campaigns without any large donations at all. Surely they are not embarrassed by who funds their campaigns?

An integral part of the Electoral Finance Act was to let the public know who was funding parties’ campaign before the election took place.   The public is now running out of time to find out who is financing Labour and National this election and decide whether it is going to effect their votes.

A new report, released today, says there will be a 75 percent increase in freight over the next 25 years but predicts little – if any – difference in the way freight is moved around: 70 percent on roads, 15 percent on rail, and 15 percent on coastal shipping.

“Without a substantial re-prioritisation in the way Government spends our transport budget, the number of trucks clogging our roads will nearly double,” Green Party Co-Leader Russel Norman warns.

Then their belief in a sensible public interest policy is probably not helped by learning the Road Transport Forum’s Trust is making donations to both the Labour Party ($20,000) and National Party ($30,000), laying as the Dominion Post noted, ‘each way bets’. For many people it’s fairly evident that we need to respond to peak oil and climate change with significant long term rather than piecemeal changes to our transport and freight systems. It doesn’t help our democratic trust to see big business donating to parties that consistently to do the opposite.

So far the Road Transport Trust is the only big business lobby group to openly declare, thanks to the Electoral Finance Act, that it is funding the major parties’ political campaigns.  As I noted recently we are six weeks out from an election and we still do not know where the majority National and Labour’s $2 million dollar election campaigns are coming from.  The public should be entitled to this information before they vote.

Incidentally No Right Turn notes that, in one instance at least, the Electoral Finance Act is doing exactly the job it is supposed to (although it took some good work by the Standard to bring it to the public’s attention).

Politicians should take note; there is a new answer to some of the toughest questions of our times. When presented with an issue with no obvious popular and sensible solution, or a situation where a legislature is unable to make progress on an important topic, 100 random citizens can be called on to solve the political puzzle, as they did in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario.

Read the whole article (it’s short) for an explanation of how and why citizens’ assemblies work.

The citizen assembly model is what deliberative democracy theorist Archon Fung calls a “minipublic,” that is “…an educative forum that aims to create nearly ideal conditions for citizens to form, articulate, and refine opinions about particular public issues through conversations with one another.” It is one of few processes where the shared values of the public are directly applied to policy recommendations, rather than guessed or assumed by privileged individuals—sometimes with their own agenda.

[T]he perfectly legal means by which, according to Audrey Young’s Herald story, $80,000, probably from the Vela family, was split into eight chunks and channelled through linked companies to avoid declaration, does demonstrate quite what could be got away with under the old electoral law. You can easily enough make the case that the Electoral Finance Act is a mess, but the old way of doing thing was indefensible.

And also this question.

And with the revelations of The Hollow Men, and now this, it seems reasonable to ask whether the racing industry has anything else it would like to tell us. Because the big money that swings around there seems like a malign influence on the body politic.

No matter what the findings of the three Peters’ inquiries, we’ve seen the negative influence that big private money can have on our democratic system.  The Electoral Finance Act tried to address this but it is struggling, not least because of repeated attacks from parties that are deliberately misinterpreting it to help it fail.  That’s fine, and it’s the job of some opposition parties. But I don’t get why those same parties are rejecting out of hand the Greens’ non partisan citizens’ assembly proposal to sort this all out. Clearly politicians all have too much perceived bias to make fair electoral funding law.  The decision needs to be made by an independent group like the citizens’ assembly.

Image Credit: Chris Slane

The authorisation statement looks like a clever, if somewhat grumpy little dig by Act.  But the reality was that Act had to authorise electoral advertisements even before the Electoral Finance Act passed this year. Not much change to free speech there that I can see.

(The other outrageous claim the ad makes is that Rodney and Roger are ‘two of New Zealand’s greatest speakers’. Bwah ha ha!)

The photos Mulholland submitted all had the promoter statement removed or covered over, and were not in the original state in which they were printed and published.

The posters were then quickly removed shortly thereafter, before any Green Party members could get to Morningside in Auckland where the posters in question were.

So, let’s track the sequence of events:

Either:

The Greens print a first series of A0 posters with authorisation statements and a series a few centimetres shorter than the standard A0 size without authorisation statements – thus more than doubling their printing cost.

Or:

The Greens print a single series of posters and then cut the authorisation statement off a few of the posters, like just for giggles.

Or:

After the Greens had printed the posters someone wanders by and tidily cuts off the bottom few centimetres of the posters.  This person isn’t just a Greenophobe. He or she is obviously well enough informed about electoral law to know that tidily cutting off a few centimetres is more damaging than the traditional ripping down of the entire poster.  Of course it is only damaging if someone should lodge a complaint with the Electoral Commission.  Then Blair Mulholland happens to wander around Morningside, with his camera and take a few snap shots. Then someone comes back later to take down the posters.

All this would have worked out conveniently for the secret vandal except that the Electoral Commission, which must now have plenty of practice at spotting a ruse, accepted that the posters displayed in Mulholland’s photographs did not appear in the form authorised by the Green Party Financial Agent. As a result, the Green Party financial agent did not wilfully publish, or cause or permit to be published, an election advertisement in contravention of section 63 or 65 of the Electoral Finance Act.

No surprise there.  What is a surprise is, that after that sequence of events, TV3 last night allowed Mulholland to accuse the Greens of being liars.

First it has Bill English demonstrating for logic students, with this statement, the exact opposite of a tautology:

“The worst of it is that is has had a freezing effect on the expression of political opinion in election year.”

It then has a short list of 12 electoral finance act issues that the police, courts or Electoral Commission have had to consider so far, seven of which are currently unresolved or decision pending.  So it’s hard to read much into that one way or the other except that people taking their time thinking about things.

Then John Armstrong highlights the many ways Labour has tangled itself upon its own law before making the astute point that:

Other more personally relevant issues – fuel prices and murders – are crowding out the act and stopping it getting the attention it was accorded last year. The debate is increasingly restricted to the Wellington “beltway”.

Well the Wellington beltway, on the whole, are also bored with the issue, by comparison with the Herald headline writers, but fair point.

The Herald editorial closes its pompous case by declaring against the evidence of widespread political hubbub in the public that the act is ‘silencing independent voices’:

Political participation should never have been restricted in this way. After six ludicrous months it is possible to look forward in reasonable confidence, whoever forms the government, that this discredited act will not stain our liberties forever.

The Herald continues to confuse restrictions on the right to make large financial contributions to a political parties or their campaigns, with the right to campaign on an issue, which has not been affected in any way.

The loss of political consensus around how to campaign has determinedly been blown out of the water not just by the Electoral Finance Act, but also the behaviour of parties during the 2005 campaign.  Rebuilding that consensus is certainly taking time.  The best way to do that is through a non-partisan forum like a citizens’ assembly.

Sue Kedgley in the Capital Times, in an article mostly about solving congestion and oil dependence by investing trains and trams, also takes time out to reveal her poor credentials as a groupie (the article is online but not the quoted inset).

“I went to the first ever Global Women’s Liberation Conference in Boston and who should be there but John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They played for us at the conference.�

Afterwards she went back to John and Yoko’s apartment where Lennon was later assassinated. John was sitting on the floor playing the guitar while we were having a meeting. New York was like that.

“Unfortunately it didn’t occur to me to take a photo at the time. I just listen to him and talked to Yoko.�

Further away from Lambton Quay but closer than New York the Rural News is calling the Green industrial dairy policies a ‘vote grabber’:

First the party challenged Fonterra over suspected ‘massaging’ of figures in its Clean Streams Accord progress report; then followed up the cooperative’s inevitable knee-jerk defence with video footage of cows roaming freely through waterways not far from the nation’s capital.
This well orchestrated ‘one-two’ punch sat any lingering speculation about the Green’s political naivety on the canvas… and made Fonterra come out of the scrap reeling.

Meanwhile, Infometrics Economist Adolf Stroombergen argued in an articcel printed in several weekend papers that there was a ‘sound case’ for the commercial water charges Russel outlined a few days ago and out in Mid Canterbury, the editor of Ashburton Today noted on Tuesday:

The Greens call for a sizeable increase on tariffs on the commercial use of water has predictably sparked an outcry from farmers’ representatives and opposition politicians.

The cost of the Greens proposal would certainly place a huge financial burden on primary industry which is a major element in our economy – in Mid-Canterbury in particular.  But the thrust of the Greens’ plan is one that deserves further investigation.  Water is the lifeblood of this planet.

New Zealand must come to the realisation that unless we play our part in a whole of country conservation in the use and protection of our water resources, we could face far more stringent restrictions.

And we made John Armstrong’s political diary two days out of seven:

“We take pride in our green identity as a nation and we are determined to take action to protect it”

In other news I understand John Key has been named a Champion of the Workers because of the uncompromising stance he is talking about taking to raise wages, Brian Waddle has been named Black Cap of the year for discussing cricket so expertly and New Zealand Herald editor, Tim Murphy, has been named Human Rights Defender of the Year for continuing to talk despite having his freedom of speech crushed by the Electoral Finance Act.

Another interesting question time today with Bill English asking the Minister of Justice about the authorisation requirements for election advertising and, in particular, giving the Green’s Proud to be Green billboards a bit of airtime on Parliamentary TV by waving round a photo of one of them.

While I support the Electoral Finance Act as an improvement on the old law, there were always going to be problems with it and one of the problems is that the financial agents of parties and third parties are required to put their residential addresses on material rather than a business address.

This is a bit silly because the purpose, to prevent people hiding behind false addresses, can be achieved using business addresses without exposing financial agents to threats from nutters.Initially there was confusion about this and the Electoral Commission told parties that they could use a business address, which the Greens did with the Proud to be Green billboards. Subsequently the Electoral Commission then issued a ruling that it should be a residential address. Uggh.

So in question time Bill English sought leave to introduce an amendment to the Act to change this provision back to the business address. This is a very sensible patch on the Act. Leave can only be allowed if not a single member objects and none did. So now theoretically Bill can introduce such an amendment. It would be good if it was fixed. MMP in action!

Bricks cost about 50c each on TradeMe, so the concerned citizens at People Power who have taken to hurling bricks at the offices of political parties that voted for the Electoral Finance Act are going to need to chuck over 24,000 bricks before they are affected by the Act’s requirement to register as an interested third party. I’m picking they’ll have very sore arms before the legislation comes anywhere close to applying to them. The Crimes Act on the other hand…