The Thorndon Bubble

John Armstrong puts the Mary-Anne Thompson issue into context of what responsibility Ministers have:

Try as he might, though, Cullen’s assurances to Parliament on Wednesday were never going to negate National’s assertion that Cabinet ministers were aware of the improper conduct by the head of the Department of Labour’s Immigration Service for months but did nothing about it until public exposure of that conduct forced some action.

It would be going far too far to say there has been a cover-up by ministers in the normal meaning of the term - a deliberate and sustained attempt to conceal what has really been going on.

But neither did those ministers go out of their way to reveal what had been going on.

Neither the Labour Department nor the State Services Commission felt any compunction to inform the public of last year’s inquiry into what was an astonishing breach of public service standards by someone running a major branch of a government department.

This is part of the wider problem in the public service, and the Government. The main focus has been on keeping things quiet and how to “politically manage” serious issues rather than actually confronting the core problems, and subjecting them to public scrutiny.

Ministers should have insisted that these breaches of law and policy be made public. They could have blanked out the names of staff involved.

Were it not for some concerted digging by journalists, the public would still be completely unaware of Thompson’s blatant conflict of interest in filling out residency application forms for close relatives. She would still have her job.

Once the details of the Thompson affair broke through the bureaucratic wall of silence, the two Cabinet ministers who already knew about the investigation inevitably looked complicit in officials’ inept and shoddy handling of the matter.

I think there is a growing realisation that one cannot trust internal inquiries anymore. National should seriously look at a replacement to the Serious Fraud Office which can also investigate the Government. I’ll post more on this at some later stage.

This has been an appalling week for Labour, with high-profile job losses, appalling retail sales data, the failure to be totally upfront about how much was paid to buy back the country’s rail services, further equivocation from Cullen on tax cuts just days out from the Budget, and yet another death knell-sounding opinion poll.

But hey Labour are helping with housing affordability a - a bold scheme to help oh 700 families out of the 1.5 million families in NZ!

The Dominion Post opines on the law of “common sense” known as the Electoral Finance Act:

In environs more typically frequented by murderers and rapists, election officials, National Party grandees and trade unionists gathered at the High Court in Wellington this week to determine whether the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union is able to campaign during the upcoming election, The Dominion Post writes.

Elsewhere, signwriters were busy adding the name of a Labour Party official to the gaily painted Volkswagen that serves as Cabinet Minister Trevor Mallard’s mobile billboard to make it comply with new election rules.

The law of commonsense is in full swing. It is a law few realised held legislative sway till Justice Minister Annette King airily dismissed Opposition concerns about how new electoral laws would work by telling Parliament last November “the law of commonsense applies”.

This law of common sense which has been repeatedly broken by oh the Labour, NZ First and Green parties which voted for it. Such common sense they Ministers are breaking it.

Instead, the pedants responsible for overseeing election campaigns are insisting that politicians adhere to the arcane rules in an obscure piece of legislation entitled the Electoral Finance Act. We say obscure because Mr Mallard, the Labour Party and assorted other politicians who have been found to have breached it, are clearly unfamiliar with its contents. ACT’s Heather Roy, who breached the act by failing to include an authorisation statement in her weekly newsletter, can at least argue that she voted against it.

And this is the problem for its supporters. If National or ACT break it (which is almost inevitable at some stage) they can just say hey we said this was a bad, confusing law and despite our best efforts we got pinged. But those who voted for the law and foisted it on New Zealand will always face questions of why they are breaking a law they insisted was common sense and voted for.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t seem entirely logical,” Mr Mallard said after being told his vehicle breached the act. Funnily enough that’s pretty much what the Electoral Commission, the Human Rights Commission and the Law Society said last year before Mr Mallard and 62 other MPs ignored widespread concern that the new rules were undemocratic and unclear.

They can hardly say they were not warned.

In retrospect, the teething problems caused by the new act appear to have been caused by a breakdown in communication.

Government irritation at being forced to jump through the ridiculous hoops created reveals it was never meant to hobble Government MPs, or even probably MPs of any persuasion, but rather to entangle other critics of the Government in a dense thicket of legalese and to limit to a pittance the amount they could spend advertising their views during election years.

Indeed the intention was to protect incumbents.

Sadly, for the Government, election officials have either misread or wilfully ignored the signals that have emanated from the Beehive and for some strange reason are applying the law to everybody. For that, the rest of us have reason to be grateful.

Indeed.

An example of how stupid the law is, can be seen by this very blurry photo below of a candidate’s name badge.

Yes you even need those fucking authorisation statements on a name badge - that’s the small writing at the bottom!

If National wins the election, it should introduce the bill to repeal the Electoral Finance Act immediately after electing the Speaker!

The NZ Herald has features on John Key and Helen Clark, as they are out on the campaign trail. First Armstrong following Key:

Some people just shake Key’s hand as he passes and express the hope that he wins and walk off. Votes in the bank. Those that do stop and chat almost on cue talk about it being”time for a change”. They don’t explain why.

This prevailing sentiment for “change” is extremely difficult for Labour to combat as it is based on feelings rather than cold hard logic.

A faltering economy will reinforce that sentiment. But National must be increasingly in two minds about the political advantages of a sharp downturn. One shopper sums things up. “I don’t envy you if you win,” he tells Key, as the entourage heads off to Napier’s seafront for his “ladies’ lunch”.

Indeed, National Governments always seem to come into office when the economy is heading downhill. Happened in 1975 and 1990. Key, if Prime Minister, will have a formidable challenge to grow the economy, slow the exodus, lift wages, cut taxes and maybe hardest of all actually implement a workable Emissions Trading Scheme.

The 29-year-old has voted Labour all her life, but she is not happy with the ruling party’s current direction. With four children and a husband who works full-time, she struggles to understand why Michael Cullen has not already cut taxes.

The irony is that the fiscal situation was far more conducive to cutting taxes from 2004 to 2007 than it is now. I doubt there is one other Finance Minister in the OECD who would not have cut taxes when there was a surplus of over $5,000 per household.

Meanwhile Paula Oliver is out with Helen Clark:

Clark handles the questions with a multi-pronged response. It is a style that isn’t reserved just for these students, but one she is using on her travels all around the country.

First she shows some empathy by acknowledging that the prices of some staple foods have risen faster than inflation, and petrol has zoomed up even more rapidly. “The family notices it in the car, and feeding teenagers who are always in the fridge,” she says with a wry grin to the students.

Then she breaks into what sounds like an Economics 101 lesson as she tries to project an image of someone who understands what is happening and is capable of leading the country through tighter times.

“The key thing for us is running the economy carefully,” Clark says, explaining that inflation remains a risk and the Government would prefer to see it slip back within the Reserve Bank’s target band of 1-3 per cent.

Then she reminds the students that Labour has only just days before done something to help with one aspect of the financial pinch - it delayed the introduction of transport into the climate change emissions trading scheme and thereby put off a further hike in petrol prices.

“We decided because people are already using less (petrol) as prices are high we shouldn’t push it up further,” Clark says.

Even though Clark is now 17% behind Key as Preferred PM, it is a useful reminder that she is a good campaigner, and while the fight may have gone out with some of her colleagues, it has not with her.