Darnton vs Clark

Audrey Young has a useful summary of questions around the pledge cards in this morning’s New Zealand Herald. It covers Parliament’s rules for spending the leader’s funds, how the rules are administered, how they’ve changed, and what the Auditor-General’s report is all about.

She describes the pledge card row as “the most complicated and charged issue to have visited Parliament since the foreshore and seabed decision”. Another example of the government laying its sticky fingers on something that didn’t belong to them.

Stuff reports this morning that

Labour’s plans to change the law to legalise the use of taxpayer funds for electioneering are unravelling fast after NZ First appeared to join parties lining up against the move.

Winston Peters said,

“We have the capacity to pay, we will pay, but when we know what we’re paying and why we’re paying it,” he told Radio New Zealand.

This is very good news. Retrospective legislation really would have shown that the government considers itself above the law and made a mockery of any supposed constitutional limits on government.

Labour seriously needs to rethink its arrogant, aggressive stance. The latest Herald-Digipoll survey shows that 52% of the population think it was right for Don Brash to call Labour “corrupt”. Worse for Labour is that 28% of Labour supporters think it was OK for Don Brash to call Labour “corrupt”. While a minority, it is a significant figure supporting a very serious charge.

There is a gap appearing between rank-and-file Labour supporters and their power-crazed elite and any up-and-coming Labour members who want there to be a viable Labour party in the near future would do well to consider the damage being done at the head.

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has just released a remake of the Rolling Stones classic “Paint It Black” as, you guessed it, “Pay It Back”.

Don Brash has demanded that Labour release the full correspondence between Heather Simpson and the Parliamentary Service that was released in part to me and published here yesterday in the Parliamentary Service’s defence.

“Meanwhile, evidence presented in a court case against Helen Clark suggests Labour bullied Parliamentary Service into making Labour’s pledge card payment - which the service rightly resisted because it was against the rules.”

Dr Brash is referring to a terse letter from Helen Clark’s chief of staff, Heather Simpson, to the service on 17 November demanding that ‘the payments are made without further delay’.

“Labour has previously argued that the service approved such payments.  But Heather Simpson’s letter seems to contradict that claim,” says Dr Brash.

“Labour should release the full letter and other correspondence with the service.”

Labour claims that the Parliamentary Service approves everything. The Parliamentary Service says that all approvals for payments come from members of Parliament and it just signs the cheques. Releasing the full correspondence would really help us figure out this apparent mystery in how Parliament operates.

Transparency International NZ’s Shane Cave was recently interviewed on bFM (MP3, 5m 43s, 1.3 MB), talking about Transparency International’s work, corruption in general, and retrospective legislation in particular, the reasons New Zealand should be concerned, and why we should never be complacent. Well worth a listen.

(Hat tip: Julian Pistorius)

Vigesimal Pundit makes a point so clear, so right, and so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t make it myself.

“Allegations of corruption are intolerable in a Western liberal democracy.” - Helen Clark.

No, Miss Clark. Corruption is intolerable. When allegations of corruption are intolerable, it’s no longer a Western liberal democracy.

(Hat Tip: Not PC)

Yesterday, the Prime Minister claimed that the Auditor-General had privately given his backing to retrospective legislation to fix up Labour’s pledge card shambles.

Labour has proposed retrospective legislation to validate any illegal spending, but the Greens yesterday said they would not support such a move.

However, Miss Clark today said Mr Brady himself had privately expressed support for that course of action.

“The Auditor-General has said privately to at least one party leader that the appropriate course is for Parliament to validate,” she said on National Radio.

Apparently not. The NZ Herald reports* this morning that Kevin Brady has denied saying any such thing.

In a rare move, Mr Brady yesterday denied Helen Clark’s suggestion that he had privately told an unnamed party leader that this was the course to take.

“I would never say that,” Mr Brady said when contacted by the Herald.

That it’s a “rare move” is presumably what the Prime Minister was relying on when she made her comments. It’s not usually done for the Auditor-General to call political leaders liars but I guess sometimes, when they’re taking your name in vain, you just have to.

And this is not the first time that Helen Clark has talked crap about the Auditor-General that he’s had to correct.

*Interesting side-note. When the story first went up it had the headline “That’s Not True, Auditor-General Says”. It has since changed to “‘No View’ On Law Change”. A grumpy phone call?

The Parliamentary Service has filed its statements of defence (one to my claim and one to Labour’s cross-claim).

The defence is as expected: Expenditures are incurred on the direct authority of members themselves and that it’s not the job of the Parliamentary Service to approve payments, it’s simply to write the cheques.

Invoices were provided to the Parliamentary Service stamped “approved for payment” and signed by Heather Simpson and, further, Heather Simpson informed the Parliamentary Service that

To my knowledge they comply with all applicable laws and procedures for such publications. That is entirely sufficient certification for your requirements. Kindly ensure that the payments are made without further delay.

The defence goes on to say that even if the payment of the invoices did constitute “a decision or action in the exercise or purported exercise of any statutory power” by the Parliamentary Service the Court should decline to review that decision or action because it is “a matter properly within the purview of Parliament and the subject of an investigation by the Controller and Auditor-General and possible response by the Speaker.”

New links: Parliamentary Service’s defence to my claim (PDF, 179 kB)
Parliamentary Service’s defence to Labour’s cross-claim (PDF, 95 kB)

Previous documents: Labour’s defence (PDF, 375 kB)
Statement of Claim

UPDATE (22/09/06): The NZ Herald has covered the defence: Pledge Card Invoices Stamped ‘Approved’.

Hearing Helen Clark’s latest outburst got Lindsay Mitchell to thinking:

Just out of interest I searched “corrosive and cancerous” thinking she must have picked it up somewhere. It keeps coming up as a description used by a US governor referring to corrupt political campaign funding. That’s a coincidence.

As Belt notes in the comments on Lindsay’s piece, it looks as if Labour’s speeches are being written in America.

Labour could write the book on the first law of politics: “Always accuse your opponents of your own most obvious faults.”

The Green Party announced yesterday that they would be paying back anything the Auditor-General says they owe in his final report. More importantly, Jeanette Fitzsimons also said that the Greens would not be supporting any retrospective legislation.

Our decision to pay back any spending eventually found to be outside those rules does not constitute an admission of guilt – merely an acknowledgment that once there is a final legal ruling we will respect it.

As Bernard Robertson said in this month’s Law Journal editorial,

If a government can knowingly and deliberately break the law and then ram through retrospective validating legislation then it can do anything. We have a government composed of people who simply do not recognise the concept of government under law.

Well done to the Greens for standing up against this abuse of power.

The New Zealand Law Journal has joined the pledge card debate with an editorial slamming Labour’s behaviour (New Zealand Law Journal, September 2006, p281, not online). Pretty much everyone else involved gets a telling-off too.

The overspending on election campaigning neatly encapsulates the nature of the two main parties. Labour is invincibly arrogant and considers itself above the law and National is plain incompetent.

Journalists and the Police are taken to task for not asking the right questions during overspending investigations and giving a “clear run” to “Labour Party hacks” allowing them to muddy the waters.

Having further dealt savagely with overspending, which is peripheral to my case and this site, the article moves on to the misappropriation of the Leader’s fund.

There are now two severe threats for the future, both of which are already on the table. One is state funding of political parties, another hobby-horse of the left which is objectionable on so many grounds space forbids reciting them here. The other is retrospective legislation validating Labour’s chicanery at the last election.

This second idea might have been expected to raise howls of protest from, amongst others, the New Zealand Law Society which rested its argument for monopoly regulation on the idea that it plays a role in defending the rule of law. One listens and the silence is deafening.

The piece concludes (emphasis mine),

The prospect remains that Labour will be able to buy the support of enough minor parties, especially those that would suffer if an election were called now, to get this legislation through the House. If a government can knowingly and deliberately break the law and then ram through retrospective validating legislation then it can do anything. As this page has said before, we have a government composed of people who simply do not recognise the concept of government under law. But this Bill will require the consent of one person of honour and integrity in the form of our Governor-General of recent and popular appointment. Having acceded to public duty by accepting appointment, he may now soon have to consider his position.

There’s been a military coup.

“Never in [our] history have the people been so divided,” [Lieutenant-General] Prapart said.

“The majority of people had become suspicious of this administration, which is running the country through rampant corruption,” he added.

“Independent bodies have been interfered with so much they could not perform in line within the spirit of the constitution.”

Oh, I should add it’s in Thailand

David Farrar has an interesting thread on Kiwiblog (PM Accuses Auditor-General of Smearing Labour). Based on something he picked up out of his comments section, the article discusses the Prime Minister’s latest attack on the Auditor-General. On Close Up last night she charged the Auditor-General with “smearing the reputation of [the Labour] party.”

This is classic Helen Clark. Whenever she’s confronted with her own wrongdoing, her tactic is to try and confuse the issue by conflating it with something else.

When accused of illegally taking public money to fund her election campaign, the only thing she’ll talk about is other people spending their own money voluntarily on someone else’s campaign.

When the Auditor-General rightly criticises Labour’s election misspending she calls it a “smear”, trying to make it sound like some tacky tabloid scandal rather than a serious charge about Labour’s cavalier attitude to public money with the consequent questions about her fitness to govern.

Over the last week we’ve seen what real smearing is about and people have rightly recognised it as dirty and irrelevant to the real questions. Clark’s accusation of “smearing Labour” is an attempt to make the Auditor-General’s findings sound as disreputable as the contents of Investigate. It’s another example in a long line of trying to confuse fact with rumour, good with bad, relevant with irrelevant, voluntary with compulsory, democracy with dictatorship.

A quick update on progress.

The next event in this case is the filing of the Parliamentary Service’s defence. That was supposed to happen this week but has been delayed. The reason for the delay is that Crown Law has been disputing that the Attorney-General is the appropriate respondent in respect of the Parliamentary Service. We’ve agreed with Crown Law that the Attorney-General will be substituted by the Speaker of the House as the second respondent.

The Speaker had previously been set apart from the rest of the Labour MPs and dropped from the list of first respondents because the Speaker, by convention, doesn’t take part in Party decision or actions.

So, once we have the defence from the Parliamentary Service on Monday, Labour will finalise their affidavits and then everyone can sit down with the judge and the timetable can be set for the rest of the trial.

I’m informed that Phil Goff was on Williams Up Front (Sky TV) last night saying that New Zealand is a first world country. This is a bit like telling people you’re cool. If you have to tell them…

Having led the charge into the Africanisation of New Zealand politics, Labour needs to realise that they’ve put this up for discussion. Now, about those comments made by Transparency International and Mike Moore, both of whom know how weak institutions destroy life in the third world, …

Further to yesterday’s story on Transparency International’s warning to Labour, there’s a piece in today’s Dominion Post (Keep NZ Clean, p. B5, not online) by Transparency International New Zealand’s chairman Michael Morris.

He says,

It is a fundamental tenet of New Zealand’s legal system that ignorance of the law is no defence, nor is the possible guilt of others a defence, so it is disturbing to see the lack of a consensus (among our politicians at least) over the illegal spending of public money for partisan political gain.

and later,

To compound [the advantage of incumbency] by using money intended for legitimate parliamentary purposes to help get votes, and then to avoid the issue of culpability, brings the law, the people who make the law, and the system that generates the law into public contempt.

Vituperative finger-pointing, seeking legitimacy in past practice or the recent practice of others, or hurried repayment of money already illegally spent - none of these is a legitimate defence to breaches of the law, and nor should they be.

Morris concludes,

The absence of those priceless values brings misery to many parts of the world. The illegal spending of public money will tend to erode those values here, and the conduct of the very people who make the laws will pose a threat to the respect which allows our laws to work.

So, unless we want to find ourselves living in Tajikistan or Chad, we need to stamp this out right now because tomorrow might be too late.

Don Brash issued a statement this afternoon asking that people respect his privacy as he takes time to work through marriage difficulties.

No doubt Labour will assure us that it’s a complete coincidence that this occured less than a week after Trevor Mallard promised to dish the dirt on anyone who dared to criticise the government.

While Helen Clark joked about getting a taser to keep Mallard in line, you can be absolutely sure that tactics like this were discussed and approved at the highest level. Mallard would not have made that threat without the knowledge and approval of Clark, Cullen, Hodgson, and the other low-lifes who seem willing to not only steal hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to buy their way back into power, but to personally destroy the lives of anyone who gets in their way.

Any Labour member with a shred of decency should be figuring out how to excise the cancer at the heart of their party.

UPDATE: Also any National member with a brain should be figuring out how to excise Brian “people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw cats” Connell from their party. Just bloody typical. Labour are on the ropes and so National goes for it’s own jugular. Hopeless.

Although this event was precipitated by Brian Connell, and no doubt Labour are thankful for that, it was precipitated out of an atmosphere of filth created by Mallard et al with the express intention of causing a diversion from their already very public wrongdoing.

Global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, publisher of the internationally regarded Corruption Perceptions Index, has warned Labour that New Zealand’s low corruption reputation is at risk if it doesn’t pay back the pledge card money and passes retrospective legislation to cover its wrongdoing. (Reported in today’s Dominion Post.)

Labour risks harming New Zealand’s reputation if it refuses to repay taxpayer funds unlawfully spent on campaigning and changes the law to make it legal, an anti-corruption watchdog has warned.

They say they’re also concerned about the anonymisation of donations through trusts.

New Zealand ranks second on the 2005 corruption index, equal with Finland and with only Iceland less corrupt than this country. A ranking like this is something to be proud of and it’s something that needs to be actively protected. It is at risk from Labour’s pillaging of the public purse to prop up its power.

[Executive Officer] Mr Cave said Transparency International directors in this country – which include former ombudsman Mel Smith and former auditor-general David Macdonald – had grave concerns at Labour’s stance.

“Any retrospective changing of the law to legitimise something that was previously illegal we would criticise in the strongest possible terms.”

So, to the list of people (too long to repeat here) who think that the Labour Party are a pack of dodgy buggers who need to be reigned in, you can add the world’s premier anti-corruption watchdog, Transparency International. As Transparency International says, “Corruption ruins lives. Fight back.”

About three weeks ago I reported that David Farrar had set up a sweepstake on this court case. Well, the fun’s all over.

Some busybody has alerted the Department of Internal Affairs to the fact that people were amusing themselves on the Interweb and naughty old David has received a stern letter from name deleted some tax-funded noddy with a clipboard.

And, by crikey, I’m guilty as well under Section 19, subsection (i), part (i) of the Gambling Act 2003 because I (gasp) “inform[ed] the public of places where illegal gambling takes place”.

As a master strategist, I’ve given a lot of thought to my defence. I’d just like to say that the rules were confusing, I was never given a personal audience by the Senior Gambling Inspector to explain the rules to me, and a year ago I saw some other people gambling in a legal way but they were wearing funny clothes. Oh my God! Look at the funny clothes!

According to a story on Stuff this afternoon, Labour will not be paying back the pledge card money under any circumstances.

Mr Hodgson was asked today on National Radio whether Labour would pay back money on election campaign advertising a preliminary investigation by the auditor general found to be unlawful.

“No, we won’t pay the money back,” Mr Hodgson said.

One reason that Hodgson gives is that the spending in 2005 was almost identical to the spending in 2002 and 1999, i.e. we’ve done it before so it must be OK. By this logic it’s fine to arrest a murderer but once they become a serial killer stopping them would be unfair.

The other reason is that the Auditor-General’s judgement came out after the expenditure had been made. Yes, Pete, that’s how cause and effect works on this planet. First you do something wrong and then the judgement for that wrongdoing is passed. It’s very difficult to get things the other way round.

Using the leader’s fund for election advertising has been explicitly banned for a long time. The only change in the rules is that Labour is finally going to be held accountable for breaking them.