Coalition For Open Government, New Zealand

The second important aspect of ensuring we have electoral rules that politicians feel compelled to abide is serious penalties for breaches of those rules.

The current penalties are laughable; the Government’s proposed increases aren’t much better – what use is a new $40,000 fine for party secretaries (up from $20,000) when it’s introduced in the same law that gives some parties $3m+ each electoral cycle?

Breaches of the serious electoral laws need to carry penalties commensurate with the seriousness of the offences – it is ludicrous that a candidate found destroying ballot papers cast for their opponent faces at most 6 months’ imprisonment, and worse that a party deliberately overspending it’s spending cap can’t even be charged (and in individual in that party convicted of that corrupt practice faces at most a $4000 fine and 1 year in prison).

Politicians and others who deliberately flout the rules we have in place to protect our elections from corruption should face stiff penalties – penalties that, with strict enforcement, will act as a real deterrent to anyone considering breaching the law.

And COG has a bunch of plans to make this stronger.

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COG is pushing for pretty wholesale change to many aspects of our electoral system, but getting everything we want will mean nothing if those laws aren’t enforced or the penalties are derisory.

No matter how stringent the rules, if the police won’t prosecute clear breaches any efforts in bettering the system will have been wasted.

This is among the most important aspects of election reform – what good are rules if people are confident they can ignore them?
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We’re beginning to get a reasonable picture of the electoral reform proposals for which the Government is trying to stitch together a majority – over recent days the Herald has been running substantial stories detailing various aspects of Labour’s plans.

Here.

Here.

And here.

Whilst the devil is in the detail, and there is some good, there seems a lot that needs a lot of work.

And the Coalition for Open Government is here to help. Though I could write thousands of words covering the breadth of the Government’s leaks, few would read it, so I’ll temper myself (for the moment) to looking at the presumptive proposals around public funding.

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Over the coming months, as the campaign for stronger election financing laws heats up, we’ll be updating the website with our press releases and policy documents and asking you for your input into what our electoral laws should look like – something others so far seem reluctant to do.

And we’ll be updating the COGBlog – taking bits of the debate into manageable bits and seeing what people think, sharing horror-stories from other countries that sheet home the need for change, and presenting our arguments for some of our more controversial proposals, and the arguments for and against others where we don’t have a firm view (but please try to change our firmly-held opinions too, we want to be advocating for the best ideas, not our ideas).

Some of it’s easy, most of it’s hard; and I thought I’d start COGBlog by explaining the thinking behind the proposal that seems to have attracted the most adverse comment in the political blogosphere so far: abolishing the election broadcasting rules (which was challenged here by Jordan Carter, and here by Idiot/Savant).

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