4. Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) Link to this
to the Minister of Justice
Does she stand by her statement “Government departments are there to inform the public legitimately about what programmes are available for them. They are not there to electioneer on behalf of any political party.”; if not, why not?
Hon PETE HODGSONWas the Minister advised that after an investigation by the State Services Commission, Commissioner Iain Rennie, as recently as 10 July 2008, had to send out a memo to the chief executives of 120 State agencies telling them that the use of the term “Labour-led Government” in departmental material and on websites was not appropriate under the Electoral Finance Act; and was this the Government’s intention when it passed the Electoral Finance Act?
I am aware that the State Services Commission has sent out guidance to its various agencies on a number of occasions, including on 10 July. All of that information has been made available to the National Party, in the interests of transparency, I suspect.
Can the Minister explain why, when the legal advice on this matter was so clear, the Minister of Finance left the term out of all the Budget material, but the State Services Commission has found 13,600 uses of the term “Labour-led Government” on Government department websites; and can she explain how this phrase, which is extensively used by the Labour Party, has found its way into departmental material when the legal advice was so clear that it was not allowed to appear in the Budget?
Why do I not actually read out the advice that the member refers to, so that we can all be clear of its nature.
Are the members all right? The State Services Commission stated that “each situation needs to be examined by content”. It stated: “In general, referring to the political composition of the Government of the day, e.g., Labour-led, will not be relevant or appropriate to include on websites.” It also stated: “In addition, reference to the policies of a political party will usually not be appropriate.”, etc. In other words, they are guidelines, and I hope that they are well followed.
So can the Minister confirm that despite the State Services Commission advising 120 agencies that the use of the term “Labour-led Government” is not appropriate, to use its words, it has been used 13,600 times on taxpayer-funded websites; if this is a breach of section 67 of the Electoral Finance Act, which bars the publication of electoral advertisements by Government departments, is she concerned that this law appears to be being breached so widely?
The member is of the view that somehow there is a brightline here, and what I have tried to do in my response is to indicate that the State Services Commission has said that each situation needs to be managed by content. If it has gone on to say that it would not be relevant or appropriate to include that term on agencies’ websites, then one assumes that as times goes by the agencies will take them all off. One thing is clear: they will not need to take off the words “National-led Government”, because we have not had one of those for a while, and we will not, in my view, for a while yet.
Given that Government departments appear to be ignoring the advice from the State Services Commission, does that account for the fact that the Department of Internal Affairs, through Ministerial Services, is publishing these unauthorised election advertisements, which were distributed by Labour MPs as recently as Monday, containing not only the phrase “Labour-led Government” but also “two ticks”—which is definitely an electoral advertisement—
—and which were published by the office of the Prime Minister; and can the Minister explain why this should be allowed to proceed under the law that was passed by the Minister, and pushed by her Government, to stop exactly this sort of activity?
It kind of goes without saying that I do not know about the piece of paper that the member is holding up. What I will say is that when that member was the leader of the National Party, two ticks was just about a landslide.
Can the Minister confirm that the State Services Commissioner has told State agencies not to use the term “Labour-led Government”, that the Minister of Finance and Treasury are the only people who have taken any notice of that direction because they did not put it in the Budget, that despite that advice the term appears 13,600 times on websites that are fully taxpayer-funded, and that the term also appears in an advertisement produced by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet this week, and that therefore the Labour Party is using Ministerial Services’ money to break its own law?
I have been asked to confirm either four or five things. The first of them I confirmed in my answer to the first supplementary question. The third is a piece of data that comes from the member who asked the question and I am certainly not confirming that, because he normally does not get his facts right. As for the bits in between, I have forgotten what they were.
I seek leave to table the results of a State Services Commission search of Government websites that record 13,600 examples.