The Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill will amend the Electoral Act 1993 to provide a package of reforms to ensure greater certainty and transparency in the conduct of elections, according to the explanatory note of the bill.

As other speakers on this side of the House have said, Labour will support the referral of the new electoral legislation to the Electoral Legislation Committee, but there are some real concerns about this bill. The concerns that I want to speak about are very similar to those that I mentioned in respect of the electoral referendum legislation that parallels this bill and was dealt with in the House a week or two ago.

One major problem is the lack of any spending limit on parallel campaigners. No one in his or her right mind would want to see any election that is conducted at a local or national level in New Zealand be overrun by cash. On this side of the House we do not want to see that. We do not want to grant to parallel campaigners the ability to campaign on the two issues before voters without any financial limits, thereby overwhelming other voices in the election campaign.

It is clear from the debate around the Electoral Finance Act that there was widespread concern about limiting parallel campaigner spending to $120,000. Obviously, if there is to be a cap in the area of parallel campaigning—and Labour says there should be—we would consider a higher spending cap than that, but not unlimited third-party spending. Hopefully the Electoral Legislation Committee, under the chairpersonship of Amy Adams, will hear a lot of evidence on and address that matter. As I said in my speech on the earlier companion legislation, no one wants to see a rerun of what occurred at the 2005 election. The Government has not properly considered the effects of a lack of proper limits allowing wealthy individuals or groups to overwhelm other voices in the election campaign. If the Government has considered that and none the less has produced the bill in its current shape, then I say shame on it for actually allowing that to occur. That cannot be allowed to stand after the select committee process if we are to try, as a House, to produce decent electoral law.

It is a good thing that under the bill parallel campaigners will have to register with the Electoral Commission. Clearly that will increase the sort of transparency that anyone who thinks about this sort of law will want to see. It is an improvement on the current law, which requires parallel campaigners only to state their name and address on an advertisement and to get permission before advertising in support of a political party or candidate, so it should be supported. But clearly that greater transparency will have a beneficial effect only if forcing parallel campaigners to register reveals the person or entity responsible for the advertising. Under this bill’s regime it would be possible to use a front organisation to register as a promoter. A lawyer or another professional person could simply be used as an agent, and that would prevent the public from knowing who really was behind the group’s spending. There is no requirement to disclose where a promoter’s money comes from. That is not a satisfactory element of the bill, and the select committee will have to address that matter.

The Royal Commission on the Electoral System concluded way back in 1986 that limiting the spending by political parties but not that by parallel campaigners lacked any sort of logic, because political parties can simply give money to a lobbyist to run a negative campaign for them. Nothing in this legislation will address that evil; in fact, it will be exacerbated.

This very problem is also faced in the US at the moment. In January the Supreme Court struck down the “soft” money prohibitions in the McCain-Feingold Act, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of, I think, 2002. Eighty percent of Americans think that is a bad thing, notwithstanding that it was a restriction on absolute freedom of speech. There was a widespread acceptance, even in that bastion of freedom of expression, that in the area of electoral law we cannot allow money to buy votes. So now in the US there is a vacuum as to what to do with “soft” money. Everybody knows that in the November mid-term elections, if that striking down of the law is not remedied, then there will simply be a deluge of “soft” money from corporates in favour of conservative candidates. The electorate will be awash with cash from the cash-rich part of the political spectrum. People who support democracy know that that is not a good thing. It is not good to see us replicating in our own legislation the vacuum that exists through the result of a court decision in the United States.

Because political parties do face strict spending limits and, as I said, the fact that both National and Labour spent close to their statutory limit in 2008 is important here. There will be an incentive in this bill, if we do not address the parallel campaign issue and the campaign spending limits issue, for parties to work with parallel campaigners who are not subject to the limits, in an attempt to get round the rules.

I hope that the chair of the select committee is paying close attention to these issues. She is nodding. That is good to see, because if a credible result is to occur from this process—which will be to the benefit of her career—then it would be really good to see these loopholes being closed.

As initially proposed the new electoral finance provisions would have required parallel campaigners to register only when they were spending more than $20,000, but this bill contains a lower threshold of $12,000. It seems to us that it would be far better to go back to at least the original proposal. It is useful that the Minister has engaged in consultation prior to the introduction of the legislation, and I think it is appropriate to pay some tribute to him for that exercise, because the experience of the House has been that in producing sustainable and durable electoral law it is appropriate to have widespread consultation on its provisions, and, if possible, to achieve a consensus across the House on those provisions. I hope that will be the outcome of this process, but if it is to be the outcome, then the issues that I have sought to address in my speech do need to be sorted out in the select committee process.