Chris Trotter paints Labour as Victim

Chris Trotter's propaganda piece below, published in the Dominion Post today and retyped here for your reading pleasure by yours truly, is attempting to paint Labour as the innocent victim of Auditor-General, Kevin Brady, who maliciously "fined" Labour $800,000 that he knew Labour could not pay back. What a piece of work.

Mushrooms and Toadstools

What are we to make of Labour's plan to have political parties partially funded by the taxpayer? Will NZ democracy be improved, or weakened, by transferring the responsibility for resourcing these crucial electoral organisations from civil society to the state?

The answer, as is so often the case, is both "yes" and "no".

State funding has become a matter of necessity for the Labour Party because of the unprecedented and massive political fines levied on it by the auditor-general in 2006.

Future historians' judgements of the auditor-general's actions will probably differ markedly from those of his contemporaries. They will note with interest - and perhaps a little cynicism - that the parties upon which his findings fell most heavily were those whose voices kept Helen Clark's Government in power.

They will also note the arbitrary character of the decision to restrict his investigation to printed material distributed in the final three months of the 2005 election campaign (thus excluding National's billboards). His legal justification will be critically scrutinised by successive generations of post-graduate law students. It is highly probable that future historians and jurists will be obliged to ask searching questions concerning the auditor-general's rationale for imposing such a crippling penalty on the governing party.

My prediction is that, like Sir John Kerr - the Australian governor-general who dismissed the Labor government of Gough Whitlam in 1975 - the Auditor-general, Kevin Brady, will come to be seen as a man who misconstrued his constitutional duty.

That he is not yet perceived in these terms is largely due to the way he has been lionised and hailed as the "People's Watchdog" by those who led the campaign against his principal victim, Helen Clark. Sadly, this includes a great many of my own profession who, along with all the usual right-wing suspects, somehow managed to convince themselves the 2005 election had been stolen by Labour.

Exactly the same process of demonisation preceded the sacking of Mr Whitlam. In Australia, too, the conservative opposition recklessly abandoned centuries-old parliamentary conventions in a bid to whip up a full-scale political crisis and force an early election.

The key difference, however, is that in this country there is no upper house to deny "supply" to the House of Representatives. (It was the opposition-controlled senate's refusal to pass the government's budget that spurred Sir John Kerr into action.) And while at least one right-wing commentator raised the option of attempting to involve the governor-general in the pledge-card "scandal", National's strategists were confident that the auditor-general's findings, by themselves, would be sufficiently swingeing to destroy Labour's re-election chances in 2008.

Because asking a centre-left political party to find $800,000 in the year immediately following a brutal and extremely expensive election campaign is tantamount to asking it to fight the next election without any funds at all. Labour parties cannot simply hold out their hands to big business and immediately fill their coffers (unless, like the Labour parties of David Lange and Tony Blair, they have already abandoned their democratic principles). If Mr Brady was not aware of that fact when he forced Labour to clean out its accounts, he should have been.

Labour's prospects were made more dire by the fact that National's Australian consultants, Textor-Crosby - certain that they 2005 election would be extremely close - had prevailed upon their client to keep enough money in reserve to fight a second campaign immediately, and without the need for additional fund-raising,

So, if Labour doesn't re-stock its war-chest with the taxpayers' money, the 2008 general election will be the sporting equivalent of the All Black vs Niue. That's because Mr Brady has set Labour the impossible task of raising the equivalent of three general elections-worth of funds in three years. That is, quite simply, a democratic and constitutional outrage. Why should working-class voters be made to suffer for Labour's spending "sins"? Especially when, three years earlier, they were not sins at all?

Long term, however, Labour would be much better advised to reassemble the sort of active mass membership which propelled it to victory in 1935 and 1938.

As the poet A.R.D Fairburn supposedly replied when asked if he favoured the creation of a state literary fund:

The mushroom grows in the open ground
The toadstool under a tree.

Related Link: Trotter from the Ivory Tower of Isengard