Parker David: Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 03 August 2010. Volume:665;Page:12942. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I am very happy to respond to that speech by John Boscawen because the member who has just spoken confuses the principle of freedom of expression with the right to buy an election outcome. I say to Mr Boscawen that the ACT Party is on 2 percent and the allocation that the party receives of the public moneys that go into broadcasting is already disproportionately high. The member’s party already receives money at a level that is disproportionately high. 
The underlying issue that John Boscawen complains about is that there is any limit on broadcasting expenditure and I am quite happy to stand in this House and defend the status quo. It is a stark choice between the style of our elections and of those that take place in the United States where money talks money works and money buys an election outcome. ACT Party members can spend 24 hours a day putting their total effort into an election outcome. They are completely free to express themselves to try to convince every other person. What ACT cannot do is disproportionately use its wealthier status to buy an election outcome in a way that exercises influence disproportionate to the pathetic 2 percent that it is at in the polls. 
I revert to the Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill. The bill maintains the brightline test. It effectively says that except for the 3-month election period where no public moneys can go into an advertisement the things that we do as politicians to promote ourselves as politicians are allowed. It acknowledges that we are effectively trying to encourage people to support us. That is what politicians do: we try to advocate for causes just as John Boscawen was doing in advocating for a cause that he believes in—and he is perfectly entitled to do that. We are all entitled to try to influence people as to how they will vote at the next election. That is what we do every day in this House and that is why in the end the Government has been forced to come back and say it might have been strident in its criticisms previously when this legislation was passed but when one looks at it one cannot have anything other than a brightline test because nothing else works. 
So this legislation says one cannot have taxpayers’ funds going into advertisements and things that encourage people during the 3 months prior to an election but outside of that we can use the money that we have to run this Parliament and to pay for telephones and the publications that we put out in a way that promotes the things that we stand for. That is absolutely intrinsic to the process of politics and one cannot have a functioning democracy if politicians cannot do that. That is why despite the rhetoric that we had from the National Party when it was in Opposition which described this legislation in very extreme terms—and we have heard other members describe how they used the descriptions “Mugabe-style legislation” “utterly disgraceful” and “a rort”—the reality is that this legislation is good legislation. It stops parliamentary parties in the 3 months prior to an election using any parliamentary funds for advertising purposes and it also stops us at any time directly asking people to vote for us. But it does enable us to go about the business that politicians have to go about which is to try to show why the policies that our party stands for are better than the policies that the parties that we oppose stand for. That is why the Labour Party has been consistent in its support of the brightline test and it is pleased to see that other parties in Parliament have now reached the same position. 
Bill read a first time.