John Armstrong: Labour squirms under long arm of the law

If the Labour Party is squirming right now, it is embarrassed because the investigation into its election expenses is not just another bureaucratic inquiry or audit. It is now a police investigation.

The word "police" makes all the difference. In a political culture where politicians routinely outbid one another on law and order, no party is going to feel comfortable while its affairs are under scrutiny by the police, even when the investigation is merely confined to how the Electoral Act should be interpreted.

However, the major plus of the Electoral Commission's referral of Labour's expenses return to the police has been to highlight what is the real issue: Labour's rort on the taxpayer which saw it shamelessly spend some $446,000 of its parliamentary funding on blatant political advertising at the height of last year's election campaign.

Rules covering such spending specifically allow parties to publicise their policies - but not to solicit votes.

Labour made a complete nonsense of those rules.

Getting the taxpayer to bear the cost of producing and distributing its signature pledge card was breathtaking in its audacity.

Labour's mistake was to go a step further and try to exclude that spending from its expenses covering the three months prior to the election. In the commission's view, that took Labour over the limit.

Regardless of what the police determine, pre-election arrogance has boomeranged badly on Labour.

The pledge card - a device designed to increase trust in Labour - has been devalued.

Labour now looks shamefaced. To defuse things, it is deliberately fudging and confusing the separate issues of election overspending and spending of parliamentary funds.

The law is unclear. The law is confusing. The law needs clarifying. We are only doing what we did in previous elections. Other parties do it.

Michael Cullen yesterday pulled out that old standby. If parties were denied parliamentary funding to promote their policies, he warned there would have to be some other form of state funding.

Helen Clark also sought to brush the problem off, noting it was the responsibility of the Parliamentary Services Commission to "engage".

Fair enough. It is the commission's responsibility. But the commission is comprised of representatives of parties in Parliament - most of whom have a liberal interpretation of the rules. Stricter enforcement requires the equivalent of poachers turning gamekeepers.

So far, there is no sign of any mass conversion. The referral of Labour's expenses return to the police has - with one notable exception - been greeted by a deafening silence from other parties.

The exception is National, however, its main gripe is with Labour's alleged overspending of its limit.

The reality is that the parliamentary funding is too valuable for all the parties.

It is in no one's interest to sever the hand that feeds. Even the qualms of the Greens have not stopped them pushing the boundaries, although with nowhere near Labour's inventiveness.

When someone like the Auditor-General points out the taxpayer is not getting a fair go - as he did last year - they run into a rare brick wall of multi-party solidarity.

The question now is whether the combination of last year's critical report by the Auditor-General, Labour's claiming to fall victim to the vagaries of electoral law and public pressure will force a clean-up.

Don't hold your breath. However, Labour's decision to fund its pledge card and main election brochure out of the taxpayers' pockets via the money budgeted for Parliamentary Services has rendered the rules on how that money is spent utterly meaningless.

In short, anything now goes. That is unacceptable - and even the blinkered Parliamentary Services Commission cannot pretend to be indifferent to that.