KEY POINTS:
As a much-needed antidote to the third-term arrogance which periodically afflicts the Government, Labour could do itself a power of good by acknowledging it occasionally gets things wrong.
The obvious place to start is the Electoral Finance Bill, which, amid much heat and noise, will be passed through
its remaining stages in Parliament next week.
There are times to stand firm. And there are times to retreat. Or at least give the appearance of retreating - especially when the polls show you trailing your main rival by a double-digit margin.
Certainly, Labour already has the means by which it could give the impression it is listening to the barrage of criticism directed at the Electoral Finance Bill - without actually having to drop any of its highly contentious provisions.
When the initial version was tabled in Parliament in July, then Justice Minister Mark Burton indicated some of the more complex questions surrounding election campaign funding would be referred to an independent review.
He offered little detail of what this review might encompass and who might conduct it. It looked more like a device to get state funding on to the political agenda after the refusal of Labour's allies to countenance something so hugely unpopular.
Little mention has been made since of the review and whether it is still a goer. With public fury over the bill reaching a crescendo, however, the smart thing for Labour to do now would be to highlight this safety-valve and promise some form of independent or non-partisan inquiry after the election into some, if not all aspects of the rules covering party funding and campaign spending.
Labour must be thinking of offering some kind of palliative. National is certainly expecting Labour to come up with something.
One source close to the Government suggests Labour is thinking of supporting a Greens' amendment to set up an inquiry.
However, that amendment would see new campaign finance rules hammered out by a "citizens' assembly" of voters drawn from across the country.
It is unlikely any other party in Parliament would support an untested mechanism on something so important. However, if NZ First would wear it - and that cannot be assumed - Labour could put forward an amendment of its own guaranteeing an inquiry. Alternatively, Labour could write a sunset clause into the bill setting an expiry date post-2008.
Such an initiative would be regarded as a sop by the bill's fiercest critics. But it would go a long way to reassure voters who feel queasy about the bill's contents and its impact on free speech.
It would also make things tricky for National. That party would not wish to back an inquiry which would take the steam out of an issue which - largely thanks to Bill English - it has exploited to the maximum. But neither would National wish to look churlish by being seen to be rejecting an inquiry out of hand.
The difficulty for Labour is that any inquiry would beg the question of why the party did not try to rewrite the law in a non-partisan fashion from the very start. That failure is the fundamental reason why Labour remains so much on the defensive, even though it can point to the 1987 royal commission on the electoral system as justification for levelling the playing field.
Had it sought a broader consensus from the beginning - and had National walked away from any subsequent multiparty talks - Labour would be firmly ensconced on the moral high ground.
Instead, the bill has been written and rewritten in the back rooms of the Beehive with Labour's prime motivation being the short-term political imperative of knobbling National's financial advantage in the run-up to next year's election. Labour's self-serving behaviour and departure from the norm of cross-party co-operation when writing electoral law made a gift of the moral high ground to National even though National's objections to the bill could likewise be regarded as self-serving.
The other difficulty of trying to appease the bill's opponents with an inquiry is that it would beg the question of why not simply discharge the bill altogether and conduct next year's election under the old rules.
Part of the rationale for the bill is that the $1 million spent in covert advertising by the Exclusive Brethren to help National effectively made a nonsense of the $2.4 million limit on a party's spending during the campaign period. The sect's clumsy intervention sparked debate on whether those with financial clout should be able to "buy" elections.
It could be argued that a toughening-up of the Electoral Act and a hefty increase in fines might have served as sufficient deterrent to anyone contemplating a covert advertising campaign next time - rather than bringing in a Heath Robinson-like regime which tries to cover all conceivable loopholes and has generated mass confusion in the process.
Labour argues the system would have been open to the same abuses as last time if the bill was abandoned.
The more prosaic reality is that having come this far - and having largely got what it wants - Labour is hardly going to drop the measure now.
But it still leaves open the question of what happens after the election. National is promising to repeal the bill. The Greens and United Future back some form of rethink.
Inevitably, Labour will instinctively recoil from saying anything which might be interpreted as a backdown. However, in this case, a backdown might do Labour no harm. Quite the reverse.
If Labour is worried about loss of face in agreeing to an inquiry, it could draw a distinction between principle and practice.
It could remain steadfast that limits be placed on what so-called "third parties" can or cannot do. It could offer a review of how the rules work in practice as an olive branch.
This will happen anyway. Parliament's justice and electoral law select committee always conducts an inquiry after an election to assess whether there are shortcomings which need fixing.
Labour could simply make a point of stressing this will happen. It could give such an inquiry more weight by stipulating in the bill that the select committee undertake such an inquiry. Or it could offer the prospect of a wider inquiry post-election via Burton's independent review.
It all adds up to an opportunity to get off the back foot. The question is whether Labour has become so blinkered in its determination to get the bill into law that it will let the opportunity go begging.
