Fitzsimons Jeanette: Appropriation (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill — Second Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Appropriation (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:643;Page:13027] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Parliament the media and the public are caught up in a phoney debate about democracy and fairness. The media and some MPs have exploited the public’s general hatred of MPs to argue that any money we spend at all doing our jobs as MPs is electioneering and should not be allowed. I know I have been told that I should not fly to Wellington and that I should catch the train—never mind that it would take 24 hours to get here and 24 hours to get home again. There are members of the public who think that every penny that an MP spends is money ill spent and therefore they are hostile whenever the subject comes up. At the same time we have an argument that is raging publicly about so-called freedom of speech under the electoral finance legislation. Certainly when we look at the Appropriation (Continuation of Interim Meaning of Funding for Parliamentary Purposes) Bill as introduced we see that there is some reason for concern around that. 
But what is really behind this phoney debate is the old and important issue of whether democracy is about one person one vote or one dollar one vote. We know that unlimited money to spend on election campaigns tends to win those campaigns. It is not that people are too stupid to see through saturation advertising; it is more that saturation crowds out those messages that are infrequent because they are not so well funded. In particular attack campaigns can sow doubt in voters’ minds which those who are being attacked have no money or time to counter. This is why we have laws putting a cap on election expenditure. These were circumvented last election by wealthy third parties campaigning on behalf of political parties but that expenditure was not caught in the spending cap rules. That is why we now have the Electoral Finance Bill which this debate is not about but which is part of the overall picture that I am describing. 
That is the context in which we now have a debate about how parliamentary parties should spend their parliamentary funding which is voted to them to enable them to do their parliamentary work but is not supposed to be used for electioneering. This bill rolls over the current legal definitions of what is parliamentary work and what is electioneering. The nub of the issue is what it is that MPs are elected to Parliament to do and what is legitimate use of publicity and advertising to do that job. 
In my view we are elected to represent a policy programme on behalf of our constituents—a set of ideas that the public has voted for. We are elected to communicate with the public—with those who put us here to represent them. We are elected to have the policy debate in here and to explain and argue those policies both in here and out amongst the public. The Auditor-General agreed when he reviewed our spending after the last election that it was part of our parliamentary purpose to communicate policies to the public yet he knocked out virtually every action we had taken to do that during the campaign period. It left us with massive uncertainty. 
The Auditor-General’s rulings were hugely inconsistent. He would say on the one hand that the principle of doing something was fine. Then on the other hand he would look at what we had done which came within those rules and say no it was not fine. I spent hours and days studying what he did and I could not follow it. I gather that just about everybody else was in the same situation. It was a Kafkaesque kind of situation where we were being prosecuted under rules that had been determined arbitrarily that were internally inconsistent and where we did not even know the rules under which we were being prosecuted. So when the Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Act was passed last year there was a sigh of relief that it provided some clarity and certainty. It was not so much whether the rules it came up with were right but rather that they gave us some certainty. 
I find as the person responsible for the leader’s budget for the Greens that it is a huge burden to determine what I can and cannot legitimately spend money on if there are no rules or if the rules keep changing on me. So that legislation was a relief. It gave us the certainty to do our jobs. It defines electioneering and it defines parliamentary purposes. In our view the definitions of parliamentary purposes are a bit too wide. Electioneering is defined only as a person or party asking people for their votes or their money. There are lots of ways of electioneering that do not actually use those words. In my view we needed to sit down with all parties to draw up some slightly tighter rules that we could have now been legislating into force. But the National Party would not play. 
Short of having agreement across this House by all parties as to how to clarify the rules further Parliament is now left with no option but to continue the current rules. They are not in my view entirely satisfactory but we cannot go back to the situation we had last time where there was huge inconsistency between what we could use our staff our telephones and our travel for and what we could use our advertising budget for and where only part of the leader’s budget was ever looked at by the Auditor-General—where the rules were completely and totally unclear. I believe we have no option but to extend the existing legislation through the next election period so we know where we stand. 
The one thing that can clarify the situation further for us is the use of Speakers’ rulings. In fact the legislation makes it clear that Speakers’ rulings have effectively the force of law as a result of this legislation. We have asked the Speaker for clarification about websites for example that are shared between the party and the parliamentary office. We look forward to her bringing down some rulings on that. There are other issues too. We do take some comfort in the fact that it is possible now to submit advertising to the Speaker’s office and get a ruling before we publish it as to whether it is deemed to be within the rules. I would very much encourage the Speaker to bring down further rulings at the request of any party that wants greater clarification so that we know where we stand and any loopholes remaining in the law as it is written now are closed. 
This legislation will get us through the next election despite the clamour from some members of the House who nevertheless are quite happy to spend their parliamentary appropriations fully when they get them. But I do not think this will get us through in the long term. What we need is a thorough scrutiny of both the Electoral Finance Act as it will be and the Parliamentary Service rules by the people of New Zealand. It is not good enough to send this off to some specially chosen commission that will come up with the answers it is asked to come up with. We need a process that is trusted by the people of New Zealand because it is representative of the people of New Zealand. 
The Greens are strongly promoting and recommending the process that I have seen used in Canada recently called a Citizens Assembly where a person is chosen at random off the electoral roll from each electorate to form the assembly. That would give us some 69 people. We screen it for people who are not of sound mind or a few things like that. We bring members of the assembly together regularly over a period of several months and have staff to do investigations and they study the questions that are put in front of them. They come up in the end with recommendations to Parliament. The Ontario Citizens Assembly did a brilliant job of looking at the electoral system. It was led by a judge who chaired the process. It was fair and democratic. The assembly did its homework really thoroughly and came up with a considered view of how democracy should proceed. I strongly recommend that process to this House.