Parker David: Parliamentary Service (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill — First Reading 
Parker David: Parliamentary Service (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:654;Page:3077] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 The Parliamentary Service (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill deals with a very difficult public policy issue. In order for democracies to work people who vote for political parties have to know what the different parties or members of Parliament stand for. It is very important that members of Parliament be able to express what they stand for and stand against so that when people come to exercise their vote they do so in the knowledge of what the people and parties stand for. Virtually everything that we do in this Parliament or at least a great proportion of it is highly politicised. It is the very nature of this place that it is political. It is nonsense to suggest that when we communicate with people about where we stand on a particular issue we are not influencing their view of us as a politician or of a particular political party. 
Therein lies the difficulty because some people say we as politicians ought never to use the taxpayers’ money that is used to fund this Parliament to influence how people vote in the future. Yet everything we do is intended to have that effect. In the contest that we have in this Parliament every day we have National putting a proposition in support of a piece of legislation—or not necessarily a piece of legislation but a policy setting—and on the other side of the House we have another political party Labour or other members of the Opposition putting forward an alternative viewpoint. We are funded to do that. It is very important that it is a transparent process. It is important that people understand what we stand for. 
This bill tries to draw a line between that sort of conduct and conduct that goes a step too far and uses public money to explicitly seek support for the election of a particular person. Some people would say that test is not the right test and there should be some other test. The test that is in this legislation and has been in the legislation for the past couple of years has been termed the “brightline test”. This is where we try to draw a difficult line by saying any other line is so grey as to be impossible to properly police because so much of what we do is so intrinsically political and so implicitly seeks the support of people at a future election that it would be caught by a grey line. 
This legislation resolves that problem by imposing a brightline test. It says that in order for someone to infringe the rule that is set out in this legislation that person has to explicitly ask for someone’s vote explicitly ask someone to join a political party explicitly encourage someone to become a member of a political party or explicitly solicit financial support. And if one does any of those things this legislation says it cannot be done out of money that is voted through Parliament. But if one does other things that are political like the National Party does on any issue—be it Auckland governance tax policy or accident compensation policy; whatever the issue is—then it is perfectly proper for members of Parliament to advocate either in support of or against that proposition and in doing so to highlight the role of the different political parties in support of or in opposition to the proposition that is being discussed. 
I think that this legislation is appropriate and that is why the Labour Party supports this bill. I go into the background of the difficult policy issue that lies behind this bill because it is very difficult to do better than the brightline test that we have currently. That is why I am quite pleased to hear the National Party members today use moderate language surrounding this bill. It does represent even as a stop-gap measure a considerable reversal of National’s prior stance. National opposed this bill—or the Acts that already had these provisions in them—using very strong language. It described the bill as Mugabe-like legislation and as utterly disgraceful legislation. It was described as a rort by some people who are now Ministers and it was described as a disgrace by yet other National members who are now Ministers. But the reality is that the difficult public policy issue behind this bill is as I have described it. 
This legislation allows politicians to do what people elect politicians to do which is to take and to promote different points of view but it does not allow them to go so far as to take that extra step of using the money that funds this place and that funds politicians to go about their business to ask people to vote for or fund politicians. For those reasons the Labour Party will be supporting this bill. 
I say one further thing in respect of the underlying discussion that is taking place on appropriate rules around campaign expenditure. These are very difficult issues. I think the difficulty is shown by the rules that we had at the last election which have since been repealed. The financial returns of the political parties following that election purported to show that less was spent by the National Party on that election than was spent by the Labour Party. We all know that in reality the amount spent in pursuit of election at the last election by the National Party was a lot more than was spent by the Labour Party in pursuit of election. 
Paul Quinn 
: How do you know that? 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: We know that the National Party is better funded than the Labour Party and the historical record of that goes back many many decades. The suggestion was made before the last election that the rules were so Draconian that the National Party would not be able to spend money in pursuit of its election aspirations. The reality is that it was so able to spend but it was not caught by the rules. So far from being Draconian those rules particularly around the transparency of donations were if anything too lax. 
It encourages me that the current Minister Simon Power has said that the transparency issues are at the heart of the current work that is going on regarding the election spending rules and he will look very seriously at them. There should be transparency around donations. People ought to know how much parties are being paid and by whom they are being paid so that they can make informed decisions on whether policy is being bought or sold. That is a very easy accusation to make; it is hard to disprove. It is very undermining of people’s public confidence in democracy. We in this Parliament should try to maintain the confidence of people in our democratic processes so we need to do better than we have been doing in respect of the transparency of donations. The Labour Party supports this bill.