Brash Don: General Debate 
Brash Don: General Debate 
[Volume:633;Page:4778] 
Dr DON BRASH (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. A few weeks ago I accused Helen Clark of leading the most corrupt Government in New Zealand history. In the last few years we have seen “paintergate”—do members remember that—when Helen Clark forged her name on a painting she did not paint. We have seen “Doone-gate”—do members remember that—where Helen Clark bad-mouthed the Commissioner of Police to the media and then claimed she had not done so. We have seen Helen Clark allow the driver of a Crown car and five police officers take the rap for driving her through South Canterbury at 160 kilometres an hour—do members remember that? We have seen Helen Clark deny that she knew the Treasury estimate of the cost of the interest-free student loan bribe—and indeed deny that she knew that Treasury had even done such an estimate—only to have the denial categorically refuted after the election. 
In the last few months we have seen Helen Clark set up an inquiry into very serious allegations of corruption against a member of her caucus but set it up in such a way as to guarantee that it could not deal with the most serious allegations. Then we have seen her refuse to set up a proper inquiry and to allow the serious allegations to hang over the House and taint the reputation both of the member concerned and of Parliament more generally. 
Now we have the grandaddy of them all: it is now clear that Helen Clark has been told by no fewer than four different official agencies that spending on her infamous pledge card was election spending. First the Auditor-General told the Labour Party in June last year—3 months before the election—what was and what was not election spending and that advice made it clear that anything as explicitly electioneering as the pledge card would be election spending and should not be financed from taxpayers’ money. There can be no doubt that the Auditor-General’s report to Helen Clark in the last few weeks confirmed that. 
More than 2 weeks before the election as my colleague Tony Ryall pointed out the then Chief Electoral Officer David Henry advised Mike Smith the Labour Party secretary—in writing—that the pledge card was election spending and should be included in Labour’s electoral spending limit. The Electoral Commission then referred the pledge card to the police and argued that prima facie expenditure on the card took total Labour expenditure above the legal amount the party was allowed to spend. Finally the recent letter from the Solicitor-General to the Auditor-General makes it clear that funding the pledge card was election spending. Four official agencies made the position clear. The police investigating the matter also found a prima facie case that the law had been breached. 
In reality two laws were broken. First the Labour Party exceeded the legal limit it was allowed to spend on its campaign by almost half a million dollars—roughly the cost of the pledge card. Had my colleague Bob Clarkson been shown to have deliberately overspent his modest $20000 limit he would have forfeited the Tauranga seat in the election. Labour exceeded the limit by almost half a million dollars and Helen Clark wants us to ignore it. Secondly the Auditor-General has made it clear that the Labour Party used large amounts of taxpayers’ money in clear breach of the rules. 
And what does Helen Clark want us to do? She wants us to believe that the rules are unclear or that all political parties have been doing it since 1989 or that we should talk about raiding more money from the taxpayer’s pocket for the next election or that we should hold an inquiry or that this is just a “beltway” issue of no interest to the country outside Wellington. 
This is an outrage; Helen Clark stole the election. Not content with enormous bribes to voters with other people’s money she had to misappropriate half a million dollars of taxpayers’ money to fund her campaign. She should pay the money back. She should then resign go to the country and have a fair election.