Roy Eric: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee 
Roy Eric: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee 
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ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 I am compelled to take a call in what will be the final debate in the Committee stage on the Electoral Finance Bill on its title and commencement. I wish to make some comments on both. In regard to whether the title is appropriate my suggestion to the Committee would be that the title of the bill would more appropriately be the “We Will Find Another Way Bill”. 
The Labour members of this House—and to some extent the New Zealand First members—have been standing up and saying this is a principled argument and that they do not believe in having for example anonymous donations. But as one of my colleagues—I think it was Chester Borrows—pointed out significant amounts of anonymous donations were going into the Labour coffers going back over the various elections as far as we can see. Government members think the issue is not that we have anonymous donations; it is that National got more than they got. So therefore they said we needed to move to a State-funding model. Having not been able to get agreement to a State-funding model they then changed the rules so that Government expenditure kind of counts in an indirect way. 
A example from a little story may illustrate the point. You see George Bernard Shaw the playwright of Irish descent was dining with a notable lady of his time. During the course of the meal he said to her: “Will you sleep with me for £10000?”. The lady thought for some time and then said: “Yes.” Later on during the course of the evening he said to her: “Will you sleep with me for £5?”. Her response was: “Goodness me! What do you think I am?”. He said: “We’ve already established what you are and we are now bargaining.” 
I say there is a parallel exactly with what Labour has done here. It does not believe in anonymous donations but it has found another way and it will use the Parliamentary Service money to endorse its members as candidates. I say there is no principle in that for which those members can hold up their hands. Labour at the last election—and we have had plenty of examples of this—broke the rules and it continued to break the rules even after the Auditor-General warned it that what was happening was indeed outside the spectrum of what was allowed. What did we get after that? We got some kind of retrospective fix-it-up. So again we have the “We Will Find Another Way Bill”. If Labour could not change the rules retrospectively it is to change them right now so that Government members can find another way to use resources in order to endorse themselves. 
I now make a comment about the commencement date. A number of submitters have said that this bill is not easily understood and that they do not know what its implications are. If we move on from the Committee stage without changing that commencement date and pass this bill we are locking ourselves into a starting date after the bill gets the Royal assent and that will be pretty close to immediately in the new year—maybe on 1 January. If we do that we will be starting with a set of rules at a time when Parliament is not sitting and when it is impossible to discern exactly what some of the provisions actually mean. We have given examples of those provisions asking what this clause or that clause means and we still do not know what those clauses mean. Yet we will be starting to work with legislation that is seriously flawed in interpretation and flawed in clarifying exactly what the rules are. 
So there needs to be a shift in terms of the commencement date. If we do nothing else we need to set the date back so that we have time to get some discernment and clarification. It is all very fine for the Minister to say we will come up with an explanation later determine matters later or do whatever else he may say. But we are actually entering an election year and we need to know whether our behaviour our expenditure and the way that we conduct ourselves are captured—we need to know what is inside or outside the rules. To start the commencement of this bill immediately on 1 January 2008 because that is an election year would bring a great deal of litigation I suggest throughout the whole process of the election. It can have no other outcome because there is such a lack of understanding of this legislation. Parts of it are completely incomprehensible.