English Bill: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
English Bill: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:644;Page:13532] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 What a shambles we are getting from Annette King. Labour is not getting on with the people’s business at all. Part 2 shows that it is getting on with Labour’s business and Labour’s business is anything it can do to stay in Government. 
When the House rose last night I was looking at the provision that exempts MPs from the coverage of the Electoral Finance Bill. National takes issue with that. Why are MPs exempt from the rules that apply to everybody else? There is a simple reason. Labour knows that MPs can spend money on things that average citizens cannot so it has changed the rules to make sure that MPs can go ahead and spend public money on things that any other New Zealander cannot. 
This is the provision that legalises the pledge card. Therefore one would have thought that the Government knew what it was talking about when it made this provision. But the Minister of Justice has demonstrated to the House each day for the last couple of weeks that she has no idea what the Government was talking about when it exempted MPs from the coverage of the Electoral Finance Bill. Well she ought to know because every other New Zealander wants to know why something that is published by the Labour Party a community organisation or an individual citizen could be illegal but if published by an MP would be legal. That is not one law for everybody; that is giving MPs a privileged position. So what does that mean? 
The chief executive of the Electoral Commission said that she did not know. The Minister of Justice then grossly overstepped her capacity by coming to Parliament and saying that she would read into the record what it means to have an MP’s exemption and tell us what MPs can do. But with the deep paranoia and arrogance of Labour it turned out that her interpretation went like this: the Opposition cannot say anything about what it will do. If people are Opposition MPs then they cannot say “We will cut taxes.” because that will count as an election advertisement. That leaves the Government of course free to spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising what it is doing. 
So the Government would be allowed to say what it is doing but Opposition MPs would not be allowed to say what they will do. Clearly that was stupid. I do not know what officials told the Minister but if that is what they told her then she should have told them they were stupid. 
The bill is stupid. It is unenforceable it is unfair and it is ridiculous. It is so ridiculous that the Minister who is full of bluster and certainty came to the House and said that yes it was probably wrong. Where does that leave MPs who want to avoid committing a corrupt act? The Minister does not know what the legislation means and she botched her one attempt to tell us what it means. So that means that the Electoral Commission does not know what it means. 
The Minister now says that the statements she made were personal statements despite the fact that she is a Government Minister with a Government bill. Apparently they were personal views which is not what she said at the time so now the courts cannot take those statements as any kind of guidance. This Minister could not have made a worse hash of the technical aspects of this bill. This one provision and it is only one—it is actually the one we thought might not be too complicated but it has turned out to be endlessly complicated—must change.