Fran O'Sullivan: Poll spending revelations hit Labour and National

I am looking forward to the day when Parliament's Justice and Electoral committee calls police HQ to account for why its officers refused to ping the Labour Party for obvious overspending at last year's election.

Parliamentary select committees like "Ju" - as the Justice Committee is commonly called - are expected to take a rigorous approach when it comes to upholding the law.

What better way for a fearless Labour MP such as Lynne Pillay, who chairs this particular committee, to show her mettle than by socking it to her own party for its clear electoral misbehaviour.

As I reported in last week's column, it was the Prime Minister's very own chief of staff, Heather Simpson - otherwise known as "H2" - who authorised the pillage of parliamentary funds meant for the Leaders' Office to pay for Helen Clark's 2005 election pledge cards and pamphleteering.

Simpson denied the exercise had anything to do with swaying the punters Labour's way in last year's election.

But I'm picking that a fearless inquisitor would get some much more interesting responses from Simpson - and Labour Party general secretary Mike Smith, who pulled all sorts of semantic games to disavow knowledge over the risk Simpson's spendup posed to the party's need to stay within its spending cap - if she lined both players up in front of the committee and subjected them to a much more rigorous interrogation than our police carried out.

For their part, the police seemed to have taken the view that because Smith didn't personally stump up the cash for Clark's pledge cards, neither he nor the party is liable.

But he did know enough to originally count Simpson's spendup in Labour's total before changing his mind.

Not that I'm putting too much faith in our elected representatives to do God's work, when the police clearly won't.

But if we can't look to Parliament to be our court of last resort - when the system has clearly failed - then heaven help us.

As I continue to dig deeper into the cache of files on which I based last week's allegation that the police were "gutless" in their refusal to throw the book at Labour for its obvious breaches of section 221 and 214B of the Electoral Act, a disturbing picture emerges.

Not only did the police fail to do their duty as far as slamming Labour was concerned, but, they also took a cavalier approach to dealing with former Chief Electoral Officer David Henry, who asked them to investigate what he considered flagrant breaches by the ruling party in the face of clear warnings from him over where the limits lay.

Not only did Henry learn only from newspaper reports that the police were not going to proceed, he also had to stomach this statement by acting Deputy Police Commissioner Roger Carson: "We are hoping as a result of some of the recommendations we have made to the Chief Electoral Office and others that things will be a lot tidier the next time around. It is in everyone's interest - we want to run fair and proper elections in this country."

Henry's been around a long time. As a former IRD Commissioner he survived the fire of the winebox tax-dodging inquiry. He's no fool and knows better than most how to protect himself with file notes.

Hence Pillay's committee will have available to it a Henry reference saying the law was clear and had been discussed with party administrators pre-election: "He said the CEO had obtained Crown Law Office advice before referring the documents to the police and Crown Law had confirmed that the law on the point was clear."

If Pillay isn't made of the stuff to take on her own party - which could be a career limiting move - then her deputy chair, National's Chris Finlayson, will have to step into the breach.

Finlayson is a former Wellington-based lawyer - and is made of reasonably tough stuff.

But his party is also compromised by revelations - provided courtesy of the Electoral Office - that the Exclusive Brethren was prepared to spend $1.2 million to "get party votes" out for National to turn Labour from office.

The Brethren decided against making National Leader Don Brash the focus of its own advertisements after four of their members ran their proposed campaign past Henry.

The advertisements were modified to remove any suggestion they were designed to pump National and thus compromise that party's own spending limits.

But the generous offer by Andrew Simmons, Phil Win, Matt Goudie and Ron Hickmott has backfired.

The police decided the Brethren leaflets were not sufficiently similar to National's election material to base a charge.

But this is politics.

National will be mortified if the Brethren are asked to explain to the committee why the Christian businessmen spent such a huge amount on trying to get Labour out, when - as has now been revealed - their obvious agenda was to get Brash in.

They will not want to risk Brash making another fluff-up by putting him in front of the committee to re-explain his own personal dealings with the Brethren.

I'd probably get arraigned myself on a breach of parliamentary privilege charge if I suggested here that the two parties will find it in their mutual interests to shut down the review as soon as possible.

But hell - why not?

If the police come looking for me on this one, I'll quote precedent after precedent in my favour faster than you can say Nandor Tanczos - the only MP on this committee who is unlikely to feel any backroom pressure.