Darnton vs Clark

Well, I thought it would never happen. Labour had actually handed over the $824,524 to the Parliamentary Service.

Of course, having legalised the misspending, there was no legal debt. The Parliamentary Service under Margaret Wilson’s guidance never asked for the money back. As such, the $824,524 given to the Parliamentary Service is a gift.

At the rates detailed in the Inland Revenue’s Gift Duty Guide (IR194, PDF), my calculations have the Labour party owing $193,850 in gift duty. Here’s hoping that Inland Revenue is as vicious towards the Labour party as it is towards more productive members of society.

UPDATE: A correspondent has pointed out that Jeanette Fitzsimons agrees that the payment is “a gift, not a debt”.

The Green Party has paid back the $87,082 of misspending that they were responsible for in the Auditor-General’s report.

“While we still believe that our spending was inside the rules as they were generally agreed to at the time, we want to start the new year with a clean slate and get on with the much more important work that Parliament should be focussing its attention on,” Ms Fitzsimons says.

It is important to note that the Green Party will not have breached its spending cap under the Electoral Act even if this amount is included in our total election expenditure.

Not everyone can say that, can they. And, as pointed out at Not PC, there’s still $1,054,325 to come, mostly from the ringleaders of the rort.

Labout party president Mike Williams is preparing the ground for Labour to break its promise to repay the public money they stole to pay for their pledge cards.

Labour president Mike Williams said yesterday that the party was still raising funds to pay the money by the end of June. But that could be reassessed if NZ First was successful.

“If the decision of the Auditor-General is turned over by a NZ First action, we will reconsider the matter.

“We haven’t paid anything back yet because we haven’t got it yet. We are over halfway there but we have got a lot of fundraising to do.”

The NZ Herald article suggests that Labour MPs have been urging NZ First to take this legal action. Now it should go without saying that Labour MPs were given an opportunity to have the legality of this spending decided in the High Court by me and they chose to scuttle that by rushing through retrospective legislation to kill the case the week before they were due in court.

And then, to appease the overwhelming majority of the public who demanded that they pay back the money they stole, they promised to repay the money. Now that the noise has died down, the promise to repay has evaporated. These are the disgusting people who claim to represent you.

UPDATE (Lunchtime): In a major backpedal, Mike Williams has just announced that Labour will pay back the stolen cash regardless of the outcome of NZ First’s court case. They must have done a quick focus group and found out that people still cared.

He earlier told the Herald that his party might reconsider the matter if a New Zealand First attempt to overturn the ruling by the Auditor-General was successful.

That comment is understood to have infuriated Prime Minister Helen Clark.

This must really stick in the throat of Williams who, as party president, would have known that the spending was illegal and would surely have urged Helen Clark and Heather Simpson not to go ahead with their rort.

It’s all officially over.

The case has been withdrawn - a victim of Labour’s egregious retrospective legislation. My legal advice says that there is no chance that the case can succeed since October’s hurried retrospective legislation legalised all Parliamentary Service spending for the year in question.

My initial premise, when I filed the case in June, was that a constitutionally limited government was not above the law. What this case has done is disprove that. There are no limits. The government is above the law. We are entirely reliant on the character of the people who populate Parliament. And if that thought doesn’t momentarily lower the temperature of your blood, it should.

Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn reports that the Appropriation (2005/06 Financial Review) Bill has been introduced into Parliament.

So, tell me, why could the “validation” of the pledge card expenditure not wait until this entirely normal Financial Review bill?

Could it be that the Labour party was due in court at the end of October and Labour couldn’t risk appearing in the High Court because the High Court requires rather more truth-telling and a lot less mud-slinging and obfuscation than Parliament?

I/S claims that “this sort of retrospective validation is entirely normal”. He is technically correct in that each year there is a financial review bill. However, the items that it tidies up are quite different from this year’s rort. Under normal operation the government sometimes spends more than is budgeted on (say) sickness benefits and, with the Minister of Finance’s approval, this money is disbursed because the Crown arguably has an obligation to pay those benefits.

What is not “entirely normal” is that Parliament appropriates money for one purpose and then the ruling party spends money already appropriated for one thing on something different in willful contravention of the rules - rules that the Auditor-General had explicitly red-flagged before the expenditure was made because he knew what the buggers were up to.

Just four weeks after legislating their way out the Public Finance Act scot-free, they’re at it again.

Legal advice given to Radio New Zealand (Newswire, via Not PC) indicates that the government may have breached the Public Finance Act when giving Fletcher Construction the contract to build the concrete platform for the Auckland waterfront stadium.

Government procurement rules require that contracts go to tender when they have a value of more than $50,000. The platform deal is worth a hundred million dollars. Luckily there’s no need for openness because Trev knows best.

We didn’t overthrow these contemptible bastards when they misappropriated a million dollars. What are we going to do when there’s a billion on the table?

I hope a few Labour supporters own Fletchers shares. They could use their windfall to pay Labour’s outstanding election debts.

Earlier this week I appeared on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint program. (The interview was recorded a couple of weeks ago.) The segment was called “Electioneering NZ Style“. Listen online or download the MP3 (24 MB). The programme’s about an hour long - my interview starts at 23:20 and runs until 33:40.

I assume that for slagging off the Labour Party overseas I’ll get charged with treason.

In the wake of the resounding success of his online petition to the Governor-General, Blair Mulholland is organising a citizen initiated referendum (CIR) petition.

The petition questions reads, “SHOULD Parliament outlaw any public expenditure supporting the election of individual candidates or political parties?”

If 10% of the people on the electoral roll sign the petition it will force a (non-binding) referendum on the question at the next election. To sign up to receive copies of the petition once the wording has been approved, go to www.thepetition.co.nz.

I’m not usually one to advertise other political parties, but this is good… (Scroll right.)

Apparently, this has been put up at Auckland and Christchurch airports but Wellington didn’t have the stones.

UPDATE (2/11/06): There’s a story about this in the Dom Post this morning. The print edition (p A2) has a full-page-width colour reproduction of the advertisement. There’s a suggestion in the story that Wellington Airport declined to allow the ad because of the pending decision by Pete Hodgson on the Qantas/Air New Zealand codeshare deal which could cut airport profits. If that is the case (and it may just be a journo interviewing his typewriter) then the chilling effect seems to have backfired.

There’s a very useful article on Public Address, In Praise of the Auditor-General, by Jim Evans, Emeritus Professor of Law at Auckland University. The main focus of his discussion is the difference between someone’s actions as a member of Parliament and their actions as a candidate that blows away much of the fog that the Clark government has generated over this issue.

Let me return briefly to the retrospective legislation. If any Member of Parliament or party disagreed with the Auditor-General’s report it was open to them to test the issue in the courts.

Indeed they were invited to!

That the Labour Party promoted, and other parties supported, retrospective legislation to validate expenditure the Auditor-General had held unlawful was appalling.

But the alternative was to was to sort it out in a courtroom without lies, mudslinging, and obfuscation, and clearly Labour just couldn’t work in such an open, honest environment.

Found on the corner of Taranaki and Arthur Streets in Wellington. (Hat tip: a comment by Seamonkey Madness on Kiwiblog.)

No doubt this falls foul of the Sale of Liquor (Not Making Fun of the Dear Leader) Amendment Act, which will come into effect on 18th September 2005.

Potential Labour star Andrew Little wants Labour to show contrition over the pledge card scandal at this weekend’s conference. Quoted in today’s NZ Herald, he says, “There has to be an acknowledgement that a mistake was made, that a wrong judgment call was made.”

Little is currently the secretary of the Engineering, Printing, and Manufacturing Union, has become the face of unionism in New Zealand, and is likely to become a Labour MP in 2008. Understandably, he’d like the stench of corruption cleared before he takes up his seat.

With this court case abruptly terminated, I have begun work on a new project - freespeech.org.nz.

The site will become a central resource for information on the freedom of expression in New Zealand. The site has been kicked off with a blog called Section 14.

Later will come background information on freedom of speech and it’s necessity, longer magazine-style articles on various topics relevant to free speech in New Zealand, information on how and when to annoy your Parliamentarians, and a range of other useful tools.

The pledge card auction has closed. The winner was ‘rumpol1386′ (aka Graham from Upper Hutt) with a winning bid of $700.

Many thanks to all bidders and questioners. You’ve all helped make this auction into a phenomenon which has entertained thousands, generated publicity for the case in a number of newspapers, and spectacularly shown up Labour’s sour-faced, tight-lipped $30 attempt to copy this success.

On Wednesday afternoon (17th Oct) Blair Mulholland expressed his frustration with Labour’s disrespect for the law by creating an online petition to the Governor-General and announced it in Kiwiblog comments. From there it has grown like crazy. Yesterday afternoon it was growing at 1,000 signatures an hour. As of this morning the petition has gathered 17,000 signatures.

It was created in a hurry, out of anger at Labour’s behaviour, and Blair has said that in hindsight there are things about it that he would change. He has followed it up with a formal letter to the Governor-General explaining his position. (An interview with Blair Mulholland is available from Newstalk ZB.) It also carries no legal force, but it has proved to be an effective way for people to express their anger towards Labour’s twisting of the rules to get itself out of trouble.

I spent some of this afternoon in the public gallery. Edifying it wasn’t. It’s very difficult to follow what’s going on when some awful screeching retard on the Labour back benches keeps yelling, “How many Maori in the Brethren?” As I’ve said elsewhere, Labour’s recent selection policy seems to be based on obedience rather than talent.

Just to get to the core of why the Appropriation Bill was rushed through under urgency, the following amendment was moved:

Clause 6A(1) Nothing in this Act shall affect the High Court proceedings of Darnton v Clark dated 29 June 2006 (Civ No. 2006-485-1398) in which the plaintiff seeks a declaration that the expenditure on the “pledge card” and related brochures by the Labour Parliamentary Party is a breach of the Constitution Act 1986, the Public Finance Act 1989 and the Bill of Rights 1688.

The noes had it.

This afternoon Labour explicitly used Parliament to kill a lawsuit that they knew they couldn’t win in the High Court. In the High Court you can’t lie, you can’t sling mud, and you can’t change the subject and Labour simply isn’t capable of operating in such a clean environment.

Libertarianz will be marking New Zealand’s transition from a land of constitutionally limited government to banana republic by declaring October 18th to be Banana Republic Day. Libertarianz members and supporters will be outside Parliament from 11:30 this morning handing out bananas to mark this inauspicious occasion.

It looks as if retrospective legislation introduced into Parliament today (bill online, PDF) will spell the end of this lawsuit but it remains a moral victory.

If Labour had thought they were in the right they would have seen us in Court. In reality, they knew they were going to get a hiding and so they’re changing the law before the case can be tried.

This government has proven that they have no respect for the law. They’ve said they have legal opinions that differ to mine but they aren’t prepared to see them fail in court. Right at the start of this case I said that this government thought they were above the law. They’ve proved me right in a very disturbing fashion.

Changing the law to escape charges against them is something I’d expect from a third-world dictatorship. Sadly, New Zealand has no constitutional protections to prevent this type of abuse by a government that is, quite literally, out of control.

Obviously, we’re still looking at any further legal options.

Hat Tip: DPF.

Parliament will move into urgency tomorrow to pass retrospective legislation to legalise Labour’s raid on the public purse. National says they haven’t seen the proposed legislation yet and so are reserving judgement on it.

Some of the details and the law’s potential effect on this court case was discussed on Newstalk ZB this afternoon by Barry Soper (audio, 7 min, Darnton v Clark discussion starts around 3:00). Until I actually see the proposed law I won’t know exactly what effect it will have on this case.

My interview with Larry Williams this afternoon is also available from Newstalk ZB (audio, 5 min).

If it’s so urgent that this situation is cleared up, and Labour are so convinced that they’re right, I would welcome them to join us at the High Court and agree to put this case through in urgency. That way, we’d sort out once and for all who is right and who is wrong. Maybe Labour doesn’t want to know who is wrong.

UPDATE: David Farrar also had his say on Newstalk ZB this evening (audio, 5 min).