Good riddance

Perhaps the most telling indictment in the long and often acrimonious saga of the Electoral Finance Act, repealed by Parliament on Tuesday evening, lay in the numbers. The vote was 112-9 in favour of repeal, with only the Green Party arguing for retention.

A clearer admission by the Labour Party, which controversially and determinedly pushed the legislation through against vociferous opposition inside and outside Parliament, that it got wrong one of the most important pieces of law sponsored during its nine-year parliamentary tenure would be hard to come by.

And if there was a degree of humiliation in the party's being unable to defend its own law, then the comprehensive victory was a triumph for National and Act New Zealand. It was a piece of legislation that incited great bitterness during its passage through the House, but given it concerned itself with the very nature of our democracy, and, crucially, how it is funded, this was perhaps unsurprising.

With justification, opponents complained that the EFA stymied political debate and freedom of expression. But equally, it was the Labour-led government's determination to push ahead, with little consultation and without achieving a greater degree of cross-party consensus, that outraged many.

For its part, the Labour Party was determined to restrict third-party advertising - which allowed aligned interests to spend large sums in support of favoured parties, and thus undermine the intent of electoral law - and was concerned to introduce greater transparency to the funding of parties and elections, through donor disclosure clauses.

The third-party thrust arose directly out of the attempt by the Exclusive Brethren to run a covert campaign opposing Labour and the Greens, and favouring National, during the 2005 campaign.

The attempts to restrict advertising emerged from Labour's conviction that campaigning outside of the declared election period, as National had done in 2005 with its effective "Iwi-Kiwi" billboard campaign - thus escaping the electoral spending cap - also contravened the spirit of the law.

But the haste with which the legislation was drafted saw free speech curtailed and led to confusion and near farce in the run-up to last year's election. Unclear definitions of election advertising caused problems for almost all parties, with even the Electoral Commission having difficulty interpreting and enforcing its provisions.

There has been a degree of magnanimity on the part of the victors on this issue. Act MP John Boscowen, who led a campaign against the Bill and was then moved to stand for Parliament on account of it, is just one of the opponents of the old law who seems to be holding out an olive branch to all parties on the matter of its replacement with talk of the need for a non-partisan approach.

Whether this holds good as the debate is joined over the exact form of a new Bill is another matter. There are technical issues over which many citizens remain bemused, but one thing is clear: most people want the confusion over electoral funding clarified and greater transparency over the funding of individual parties, including the disclosure of the roles and nature of attendant trusts.

This may mean certain provisions in the Electoral Finance Act find their way back into a new law - albeit in a different guise. Or it may not, in which case the debate over the new law may end up being as heated as it was during the last Parliament.

The Electoral Finance Act was bad law and the statute book is the better for being rid of it. But it arose out of an old Act being ill-equipped to cover the increasing sophistication of 21st-century electoral politics. Change was and is required. The conciliatory noises emanating from the Government benches are promising. It must be hoped that bipartisan commonsense over this critical element of the New Zealand democratic system does indeed prevail.