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”.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.