Brash Don: Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Brash Don: Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:634;Page:5916] 
Dr DON BRASH (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 In the last 24 hours we have heard Government speaker after Government speaker trying to defend the indefensible. Professor Bill Hodge of Auckland University has just made it clear that this bill tries to backdate further than any other bill in New Zealand history. He describes it as legally bad politically bad and morally bad. That is what he describes this bill as. What we know is that if this bill is passed there will be no legal obligation on anybody to pay back anything. The Labour Party has said it will pay the money back. But we have seen other commitments by the Labour Party broken and broken again. Helen Clark says that Labour will try to pay it back this financial year. Well she said that she would try to get New Zealand into the top half of the OECD in a decade. New Zealand First is even worse. It has said it will pay back what is ultimately found to be unlawful. Well if this bill is passed this afternoon nothing will be found to be unlawful. 
We attempted to move an amendment making the effectiveness of this bill conditional upon political parties paying back what they owe. As members of this House know we were denied the opportunity of getting that amendment through. So there will be no legal obligation at all on anybody to pay back anything if this bill is passed. Furthermore when this bill is passed there will effectively be no limit at all on what taxpayer funds can be used for in electioneering. 
This bill makes it clear that one has to ask explicitly for a vote ask explicitly for money or seek explicitly a party membership for one to be electioneering. The pledge card would not qualify as electioneering under that definition. Yet even Pete Hodgson made it clear that of course the pledge card was electioneering. As he said if it had not been electioneering Labour would have put out the card the day after the election but it was put out before the election. The main Labour political strategist said that the pledge card was electioneering. 
This bill effectively overrides the Auditor-General’s report. The Labour Party has argued that the rules are unclear. We know from a press statement issued by Pete Hodgson himself on 14 February this year that “the Auditor-General had met extensively with Trevor Mallard and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff in the process of drafting a report on government and parliamentary party advertising.” in the first half of 2005. The rules were very clear and the Labour Party knew the rules. [ 
Interruption 
] 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. I say to members on my right that Speakers’ ruling 57/3 states that interjections should be rare and reasonable. If a member wants to make a speech then he or she can do so when the time arises. 
Dr DON BRASH 
: Pete Hodgson made it very clear in February this year that the Labour Party was properly briefed. Mr Hodgson was briefed Mr Mallard was briefed and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was briefed. Labour members knew the rules yet they flagrantly breached them. 
In fact the Labour Party has been trying to mislead the public for years. On TV last week Helen Clark said that Labour had never made any attempt to hide the fact that its pledge card was paid for by parliamentary funding. Well in 1999 the pledge card bore no parliamentary crest and it was associated with a brochure that said: “This card was paid for and delivered by Labour supporters.” In the vernacular that would be called a lie. I am not going to call anyone a liar because that would be unparliamentary. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: That would definitely be out of order. 
Dr DON BRASH 
: Absolutely! I am not going to do that. But that brochure clearly misled the public. Even the Opposition did not believe that Labour would stoop as low as that. It is clear that the Labour Party has been breaching the rules on parliamentary funding for years. Now that it has been found out it is simply passing a law to make legal what has heretofore been illegal. It is cynical and self-serving. Labour stole the election by misappropriating taxpayers’ money on a grand scale. 
Worse than that Labour also breached the law by breaching the legal campaign spending cap that section 214B of the Electoral Act provides for: $2.38 million. Going into the last election the National Party was polling ahead of the Labour Party and in the last week the Labour Party spent up big. We were puzzled by how it could spend up so big within the electoral cap. We now know that it simply ignored the electoral spending cap. Labour spent up big in total defiance of the law. It was allowed to spend $2.38 million; we know that it spent in excess of $2.8 million and almost certainly in excess of $3 million if the expenditure caught by the Auditor-General is correctly attributed to the Labour Party election campaign. The Labour Party stole the election by breaching not one law but two laws. It misappropriated public funds and broke the legal campaign spending limit—it simply ignored it. 
Last week in the 
 Independent 
 newspaper Chris Trotter made the point that the institutions of the democratic State are fragile. He took the National Party to task for holding the Labour Party to account for its breaching of the law. The Labour Party broke the law by misappropriating taxpayers’ money on a grand scale—by $800000—and it broke the spending cap by exceeding it by at least $418000 and almost certainly by much more. This quite frankly is an outrage. The assertions about GST made in this House by members of the Labour Party were outrageously dishonest— 
Hon David Benson-Pope 
: Looks like a pretty black kettle to me! 
Dr DON BRASH 
: —blatantly dishonest Mr Benson-Pope because they bore no resemblance to the facts of the matter at all. 
I conclude by pointing out once again that the Labour Party stole the election. This is a fraudulent illegitimate Government and I believe that Helen Clark should go to the Governor-General offer her resignation and invite the Governor-General to call a new election.