The Electoral Finance Bill is back from Select Committee and can be downloaded here [PDF, 500k].
It’s huge and will take a bit of time to digest, but it doesn’t look like there are any major surprises. The overly broad definition of election advertising has been fixed and the amount of anonymous donations a party can receive has been limited to $240,000, with any donation above $1,000 having to go through the Electoral Commission.
As expected, National have renewed their vow to repeal the bill, largely because it will count their election spending from January 1st and limit their ability to run parallel campaigns as they did with the Exclusive Brethren and the Fair Tax lobby. Predictably, their online mouthpiece David Farrar is spinning like mad.
We’ll have more when we’ve had a chance to read through the bill properly.
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