Darnton vs Clark

This case is completely separate from the previous investigation of whether the spending on the pledge cards should have been counted in the Labour Party’s election expenses. This is not about spending limits - I don’t believe in spending limits. This is about whose money was spent and whether spending public money on the pledge cards was illegal.

Inevitably though, there will be comparisons drawn between this case and the Electoral Act investigation. The best summary of the Electoral Act investigation I have seen was done by David Farrar. He has a good summary on Kiwiblog and an article detailing the case in the current edition of The Free Radical (issue 71, out on Monday).

The basic points are:

• Labour were told 18 days before the election that the Chief Electoral Officer considered the pledge cards electoral advertisements.
• Labour offered, prior to the election, to include the pledge cards in their election return.
• That offer was withdrawn almost immediately after the election. The large cost of the pledge cards makes it difficult to reach any conclusion other than the offer was made with bad faith to stop the CEO referring them pre-election to the Police. In other words they lied to the CEO.
• The overwhelming view of the top electoral and legal authorities, including the Secretary of Justice and the Chief Electoral Officer, was that the pledge cards were very clearly electoral activity and expenses.
• The Police investigation was superficial, and did not even investigate the over-spending charge.
• The Police bought into the view of Heather Simpson that the Parliamentary Service Commission rules over-ride the Electoral Act. This is despite the PSC rules themselves referring to the fact some parliamentary expenditure can be electoral expenses under the Electoral Act.
• The Police kept confusing the two issues, right up until after the public release, when the Chief Electoral Officer put them right.
• The Police failed to consider that Section 214B offences have strict liability, where intent is not required.

“So Labour got away with electoral over-spending of $418,000. They got warned in plenty of time to adjust their spending to stay within the law. Instead they tried to deflect the electoral authorities in a game of bluff. Finally a few days before the election Labour blinked and agreed they would include the expenditure in their return. However this turned out to be a lie, and they reneged on their agreement. The electoral authorities, blocked from taking direct action, turned to the Police to prosecute Labour for what they saw as very clear breaches of election law.

“The Police came to Labour’s rescue, bungled the investigation in every way possible, and — despite the over-whelming specialist and legal opinions — decided not to prosecute.”

See The Free Radical for the full story.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.