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).
So why is COG proposing change?
Pretty simple: the present broadcasting rules are a massive rort by the major parties – they’re unfair and undemocratic, and they just don’t make a whole lot of sense in a multi-party election system.
It might help if I explained what it was first though. Before every election the Electoral Commission gets a pot of taxpayer money ($3.212m in 2005) to divvy up between the parties contesting the party vote. Taking into account votes at the previous election (and any by-election), the number of MPs it had, whether it was related to another political party, opinion polls and party membership, and a desire for fairness, it worked out who should get what.
The 2005 allocation can be found here. Labour got the most ($1.1m) followed by National $900k, ACT, the Greens, United Future and New Zealand First ($200k each) the Māori Party with $125k, Jim Anderton’s Progressive Coalition with $75k and a bunch of smaller parties getting either $10k or $20k (every party got at least $10k).
And it’s pretty easy to see the problem. New Zealand First, which in 2002 got nearly half the votes of National, had 13 MPs heading into election, and on polling was in no doubt of crossing the 5% threshold, got the same allocation of public funds as ACT (half the MPs, half the votes and supposedly zero chance of returning to Parliament). And only 23% of what National got.
So the two big parties have most of the money sewn up between them and new parties don’t have a great hope of competing, and that’s not even the worst part.
This money is the only money that parties can spend purchasing broadcast advertising at an election. So Labour, competing with National to see who’d lead the next government gets $200k more broadcast advertising than their opponent. And the Alliance, competing with Labour for the votes of blue collar workers, gets less than 2% of the airtime.
And they can’t even spend their own money to make up the difference!
This is incredibly unfair – it might be arguable that Labour should have gotten more public funding than National at the last election, but it is indefensible that they get more broadcast advertising.
It just makes no sense that National faced a $100k fine for breaching the broadcasting rules when (taking into account their GST snafu) they received *less* broadcast advertising than Labour. Now it was the law, and they the should have been charged, but it really shouldn’t be the law.
So what’s our proposed solution?
- Take the public money spent on the broadcasting allocation and use it as the basis for direct public funding of the parties – using a much fairer and more transparent allocation system than present (we’ll get to this in a later post)
- Allow every party to spend the same on election expenses and broadcasting advertising as everyone else – using their public funds, or their own fundraising.
It’s pretty simple. Having different spending limits for different parties isn’t only complicated it’s unfair and undemocratic.
The party in government or the parties in Parliament are going to have an advantage over the parties that aren’t – they’ll be in the news more, have faces and names we’ve heard of, and will be taken more seriously, but the rules shouldn’t be stacked to favour them, or favour one of them against the others.
Having a level playing field is a basic underpinning of free and fair elections, and having the same election spending and broadcast spending caps for each party is a must – the law shouldn’t ban any party from competing to the same level as any other.
Graeme Edgeler
Coalition for Open Government
