Parliamentary appropriation bill

RODNEY HIDE (Leader--ACT): The ACT party rises reluctantly to support this bill. We are reluctant to support it because I do not think anyone in this House finds the present rules satisfactory. We did not vote for this bill originally because our view then was that it was an attempt to legalise spending retrospectively that the Auditor-General had found to be outside the rules. It is now the case that every party has committed to paying back that money. Certainly New Zealand First will pay it back, once it has collected all the interest that it can gather. But the difficulty I have with this bill is that we have not yet fixed the rules. I do not know how any party in this House can, in good conscience, vote against it. The situation is that the Auditor-General said that the rules we were operating under were not good enough. In fact, I think he said that he would freeze our funding if we did not work to fix up the rules. I have to congratulate Speaker Margaret Wilson, who has been working assiduously with the Parliamentary Service Commission to try to come up with a decent set of rules that are workable and that get the big tick from the Auditor-General. I have to say that there have been some parties, and I am thinking of National in particular, that want to keep the rules as they were in 2005. That has been the big constraint to getting a decent of rules through with the Speaker. If we do not accept that there was a problem, and the problem is that the Auditor-General said there was a problem, then it is very hard to set about fixing it. The National Party’s position has been “Oh, we just want to stay with the rules as they were.” Well, sorry, the Auditor-General’s report ruled that out of court. We then had a situation where we were to come up with new legislation. It was actually the National Party that suggested it be rolled over. I can remember National members approaching me and asking me whether I would be comfortable with this bill, which I originally opposed, being rolled over. The idea was that they would roll it over until we had seen what the Electoral Finance Bill would do. My position then was that I was trying to get a decent set of rules for everyone. We failed to do that. So our situation is that we cannot be funded, unless we pass this bill, into next year unless we stick with the old rules. If we stick with the old rules, there is no doubt about it that the Auditor-General will ping us and probably freeze our funding. I do not know how we are supposed to operate as MPs. It seems to me that it is unfortunate, because it would be nice to have had a proper set of rules, ideally with bulk funding, proper transparency, and some accountability, with clear rules about what to do in the election period. But sadly that was not the case. For those parties that are voting against this bill, I would ask them to reflect on this: what rules are going to apply to their spending from now until next year’s election? It seems to me that if we vote against this bill, we are saying that we are happy to operate on the rules that the Auditor-General slammed. It is not only that the Auditor-General slammed the rules, but those of us who followed the rules, who got it all certified and ticked off that we were within the rules, got pinged. It seems to me that the ACT party reluctantly has no option but to support this bill. It is a second-best option. We have worked assiduously with the other parties to try to come up with a decent set of rules. Unfortunately, agreement has not been achieved around this Parliament. I make the point that it was the National Party that suggested we roll this bill over, until the Electoral Finance Bill is passed. It was the National Party’s suggestion, so I do not want to hear any criticism from those members. Thank you very much, Madam Assistant Speaker.