John Roughan: Labour looking like a pampered beneficiary

Devotees of the television comedy Seinfeld will recall "the close talker", a typically acute observation of how unnerving it can be when someone without your admission pass has a habit of coming right up close. Helen Clark can tell a similar tale about men who have been haunting her of late, the Exclusive Brethren.

For a while they used to wait for her, apparently, on the concourse from the Beehive to Parliament House and when she made her daily walk to the chamber they would fall in step to try to talk to her - way too close.

Eventually she had parliamentary security erect a little barrier to keep them out of her personal space. She would like to do the same, no doubt, to the private investigators they have put on her husband's tail.

She tells the story with grim amusement, but they have rattled her. They are the answer, I think, to the question troubling every watcher of politics these past two nasty months: what's got into Helen Clark?

For nearly seven years she has led the country with conspicuous common sense and an unerring eye for the first sign that her party might drift into political danger. She has been the Dan Carter of politics, blessed with instinctive judgment and the flair to escape from a tight spot.

But she has been so distracted by these Brethren creeps that she has totally misread the run of play on her party's election spending. National has discovered that it has only to needle her with the word "corruption" and she starts on the Brethren, losing sight of the damage her party's attitude to election spending is doing to its prospects of winning another term.

She seems not to realise, even now, why the Auditor General, the press and the public find it outrageous that Labour financed election material as blatant as its highly effective pledge card from public funds intended for bona fide Government information.

She has been unaware at every turn that her excuses have only made her party sound more like a bleating, pampered, presumptuous public beneficiary - about the worst image a Labour Government can give because it accords so closely with the general perception of the party's social base.

The Government's first response to the Auditor General was to plead, "but we've always done it this way", as if that made it right. Then it tried, "nobody told us we couldn't any more", as if it should ever have needed to be told.

Then it tried to transfer responsibility to a body called Parliamentary Service, a supine bureaucracy that serves all parties in Parliament and routinely signs their chits. That body, it turns out, did query the pledge card claim but paid out after getting a strongly worded letter from the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Heather Simpson.

When it became a public issue Labour sought safety in numbers, rounding up support from minor parties and attacking National as a scab for paying back the amount the Auditor said was due.

Next Labour threatened retrospective legislation if the Auditor stuck to his guns, reminding the public that these presumptuous beneficiaries were in power.

And finally, they said that whatever anyone decided, Labour would not pay the money back, a sure sign that this Government, like many before it, has succumbed to third term hubris.

I'm not sure it can recover from this because it is trapped in its character on this issue. This is a party dominated now by people who have lived entirely on the public payroll - university lecturers, school teachers, health professionals, social workers, state employees of various sorts.

They are accustomed to the taxpayer funding whatever they do, and they are imbued with the state service culture that whatever they do is in the public interest.

Interestingly, the only ones who have shown the slightest misgivings about the pledge card funding were two with private sector backgrounds: party president Mike Williams and possibly Jim Anderton, whose own party has had a clean election audit.

But for Clark, Cullen, Simpson, Maharey and co, public funding of their activities is perfectly normal, and they have even tried to turn the pledge card row into a case for completely tax-funded election campaigns.

They are going to try now to banish the private sector from politics pretty much entirely, and cite the Exclusive Brethren as reason.

The Brethren have brought more dirt into our little democracy than we have ever had to deal with before, but we can deal with it, without cutting off our politics from the cross-fertilisation that comes from party fund-raising and corporate contributions.

Labour believes private finance is always suspect. Its members come from the same social science schools that believe advertisers control private news media too. You can sit in a seminar in these schools and attest that it doesn't happen and they simply don't believe you.

Successful political parties can, and must, maintain a wall between their fund-raising and policy making for the same reason that news media separate their business from their journalism: the public will soon sense if they do not.

As for the Brethren, we can be more sophisticated next time we are presented with a 'scandal" to match David Benson Pope's tennis ball and tape, which turned out to be a teacher's mockery of a persistent talker, or David Parker's dubious tick on a companies office form that was a legitimate answer, though even he didn't know it.

We can learn to mistrust far-fetched rumours that sound as unlikely as those circulating about Helen Clark's husband of late.

And when a rising star of the National Party reports twice seeing men in suits rummaging in his rubbish, we need not automatically suspect they are working for the Labour Party.

The Exclusive Brethren have plainly learned their politics in the United States, where it is not unknown for professional consultants to run a muckraking operation on their own candidates, just to be prepared for anything the opposition could find out.

We could even learn to distinguish bona fide opinion polls from the kind that American campaigns commonly use to persuade voters to a point of view and put subliminal misinformation into the electorate.

I would sooner live with these perversions than see them used as a pretext to turn our politics into the preserve of a state-funded, self-perpetuating profession, an exclusive brethren with power.