Audrey Young: Minnows gain strength

Smaller parties have not had much of a look-in while titans Helen Clark and Don Brash have been mud wrestling over election spending and funding, sex, lies and surveillance tapes.

That has suddenly changed in the past week.

An artificial ceasefire descended upon Parliament with the Prime Minister out of the fray, skiing with her husband in the South Island, and National distracted by the suspension of Rakaia MP Brian Connell. It has given the smaller parties a clearer run than usual.

The Greens have been able to revel in their successful campaign to keep the Overlander going. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters looked happier than Larry to be a statesman on the world stage at the United Nations, telling TVNZ later he was "just happy to be the Foreign Minister for New Zealand".

Act leader Rodney Hide bitched all the way from London about the lack of progress on the promised local body rates review. And Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia cancelled dinner with Brash in protest at doubts he expressed that Maori were Maori enough to be a distinct indigenous group. But then she dipped her toe into the election spending row, and within hours was up to her neck.

She claimed that the party had declined a $250,000 donation from a wealthy Labour supporter last election, conditional on it supporting Labour in Government. If her aim was to reinforce the Maori Party as a party of principled election spending and funding, it backfired. Relatively clean in the election spending row, the Maori Party party found itself on the receiving end of demands for more information by Labour and National, delighted to have the heat and murk shifted to someone else.

The potency of the 2005 election campaign appears to be increasing, not receding with time.

Labour minister Pete Hodgson and Clark's Chief of Staff Heather Simpson put the party's case to the Auditor General this week on his findings of unlawful election spending.

Labour has given no outward indication it intends wavering from its crash-through strategy to weather the Auditor General's report.

But the emerging positions of the smaller parties have undercut Labour's steadfast position.

The spending issue itself is not as defining an issue for the small parties as it is for Labour and National. But it defines their relationship with the big parties, which is just as relevant.

The emerging and changing positions of the parties have a ring of the Agatha Christie title And Then There Were None.

United Future is now the only party that still stands solidly by Labour as it attacks the Auditor General in a take-no-prisoners approach. Act protested as loudly with the others at first, accusing the Auditor General of making up new rules. Since whittling its bill down to $16,000, it has decided not to support retrospective legislation and will probably pay it back.

The Greens, after appearing to suffer real anguish, abandoned Labour for the moral high ground and will pay back any money the Auditor-General finds was spent unlawfully.

Peters abandoned the fence this week and indicated his party would pay back the money if he was convinced by the Auditor General's report that there was a case to.

"We have the capacity to pay, we will pay, when we know what we are paying and why we are paying it."

The Maori Party's position on election spending has been unequivocal and unassailable. Turia says she understood what the rules were - that no parliamentary expenditure could fund party electioneering - and she stuck to that.

When the Auditor General identified in his draft report one item of expenditure that was in breach - a small newspaper ad for a hui in Foxton - she repaid the $53 immediately.

Clark has scoffed at Brash's clean bill from the Auditor General by saying the party was so flush with funds it could afford not to use parliamentary expenditure for electioneering - oblivious to the self-incrimination implied in her statement.

But Labour has also conveniently minimised the clean slates of the Maori Party and Jim Anderton's Progressive Party - which alone incurred no breach at all - on the grounds that they are small parties and the sums are not big.

However, it is clear that they had as much opportunity as others to follow the spending rules or misinterpret them but they didn't.

The Progressives spent $218,000 on their election campaign and Anderton had a leader's budget parliamentary leader's fund that he could have raided - it was $245,000 for the financial year shortly before the election but fell after they lost their other MP, Matt Robson.

The Maori Party spent $100,896 in its election campaign. Its comparable parliamentary fund was $187,000 in the financial year just before the election, which rose with the election of three more MPs.

The Maori Party, with 4 per cent support, is now twice as popular than it was last election, according to the Herald-DigiPoll snap survey this week. The poll also rammed home the importance of the smaller parties in determining the outcome of the next election. Under the poll scenario, National would need to have the support of the Greens or the Maori Party to govern. And Labour would need the support of the Maori Party plus the Greens.

Neither the Herald poll results nor the One News Colmar Brunton poll contemplated a future for New Zealand First in the next Parliament, which would have surprised few in the party.

Peters has been invisible for weeks until this week, virtually ignoring his role as party leader, and when he has been visible, he has been visibly grumpy. He is due to face his party's annual conference in two weeks. If the Auditor General is on time, the conference will start four days after the Auditor General's report. Peters will need a response that shows he is not simply an instrument of Labour.

Each small party's reaction to the Auditor General's report has been slight but combined they have been devastating for Labour's case, forcing a reality check and a rethink.

Labour's submission to the Auditor General this week will be dual-tracked.

It will argue, first, that the process was unjust and that it should not have to justify any expenditure for 2005 under rules it believed were largely the same as before.

But taking that approach alone is high-risk: if Labour loses its argument with the Auditor General and any subsequent judicial review, it is still left with $800,000 of unlawful expenditure to legislate away. So unless it is unswervingly arrogant or stupid, it will also have submitted to the Auditor General, without conceding error, an item-by-item challenge in order to whittle down its unlawful expenditure total to something closer to the $447,000 taxpayers spent on Labour's pledge card - a much more manageable amount to pay back.