Written By: - Date published: 10:43 am, April 22nd, 2008 - 47 comments
Categories: labour -
Tags: labour
If there’s one thing the confused saga of Mike Williams and the Labour Party’s secret plot to use KiwiSaver and Working for Families pamphlets as campaign material has shown is that there never was a secret Labour Party plot to use KiwiSaver and Working for Families pamphlets as campaign material.
Laila Harre put her finger on it yesterday on National Radio:
The tape demonstrates the line was a throw away line in response to a question raised from the floor and certainly didn’t measure up to the front page story in the Herald last Monday that portrayed this as a deliberate strategy by Labour to circumvent the limitations within the Electoral Finance Act and a plan to harness the money of government departments for its own election campaign
Why he felt the need to deny everything is what I think will stun people within his own party because the tape makes him look pretty innocent…”
You bet it did.
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Meanwhile Government Departments have an annual spin doctor budget of $47m.
You mean the budget that provides information about entitlements like WFF and KiwiSaver? The publicity campaigns about drink driving and domestic violence? Do you seriously want to argue Billy that the government of the day can’t communicate with the public? Careful Billy, your team might be the government of the day next year, so cheap attacks on government practice might come back to bite you.
all our worst fears are realised.
C’mon Billy, Helen Clark did the ethical thing here and quashed a suggestion that dangerously blurred the distinction between Party and Government. How about a little credit where credit is due? How about a contrast with National in the 2005 campaign, which kept the letter of the law while throwing ethics out the window to evade the intent?
r0b,
I was pleased that the PM could obviously see the problem. You obviously can. Ruth Dyson’s husband obviously can’t. Mike Williams can or can’t depending on which of his stories you beleive. I was a little surprised that Iprent couldn’t.
Billy: Helen obviously sees a political problem and maybe a question of ethics. I’m not all that sure I’d agree with her. This is material that I’d like to see dispersed as widely as possible at grassroots level.
So why exactly do you think there is a problem?
Given that IRD and WINZ have all the necessary data to administer and distribute WfF without government or individual intervention…
… Why should they need to advertise WfF at all?
Iprent,
Frankly, I find it a little scary that I need to spell this out for you. Government Departments have $47m to spend. It is illegal for anyone who disagrees with the government to spend more than $120k.
That creates the very unlevel playing field that the government’s critics have been alleging the government carefully designed to silence anyone who disagrees with them.
You and your mates have been saying for a year that such concerns were just frothing. If you can’t see the problem, perhaps Whaleoil was right all along.
It is illegal for anyone who disagrees with the government to spend more than $120k.
Now Billy – you know better than that. It’s also illegal for anyone who agrees with the government to spend more than $120k to publicise that fact.
Oh and Billy? That $47 million is such a red-herring it’s not funny. You know full well that road safety ads, anti-violence ads and public health ads are part of that spend. Stop trying to spin shit because every time you do I find myself feeling embarrassed for you…
Billy, Lynn said above that advertising these things is fine, just that Labour would have to be careful with which materials they used:
“What exactly is unethical about promoting the implementation of policies that Labour has been putting into practice? There are just limitations on what material we can use – we can’t use the material from the ministries for campaigning.”
Your last post has missed the crux of his comments – that it’s ok for Labour to trumpet WFF, KS etc from the rooftops – just not with ministry material…
You actually agree here (unless you want to argue that Labour can’t, under it’s own volition and financing, advertise their own policies), BTW.
“Ruth Dyson’s husband obviously can’t. Mike Williams can or can’t depending on which of his stories you beleive.”
That’s a tacky blow if ever I saw one. It was something like a workshop/brainstorm session – remember all that stuff – there’s no such thing as a bad idea? Y’see, you suggest everything, and then only enact the good ideas. Now you can’t exactly say Williams had pondered it seriously either. Maybe at that level you need to be more on your toes, and within a split second he should have considered the idea, the EFA ramifications, and said ‘no’ but he didn’t. It’s not a big deal. Off with ye!
Congrats Billy. I’ve been after that for days. A reasonably coherent reason why not to use materials.
Kept having to raise the irritation levels to get past the usual sniping to an explanation. Do you realise that in the debate on this site and in the origional articles, there wasn’t a good explanation about why it was an unwise idea. It was implied a lot, but I’ve never seen it stated.
I actually agree with you for much the same reasons. But I was getting a bit astonished that noone had actually said explicitly why it was a bad idea.
Iprent,
So pleasant to have a grown up discussion.
I realise some of this stuff it is obvious to the regular commentators.
But there are a *lot* of lurkers who look at the blogs and the comments who don’t speak up. It’d be nice for them to know the issues underlying what is being discussed. Most of the time it isn’t an issue. But in this case I realised that there hadn’t been a clear explanation.
I could have written it. But this was more fun…
Weird, Iprent could see it all along. That just leaves ‘sod and Matthew Pilott who don’t.
Oh really?
Do explain.