[political finance] Party political staff under examination

While most politicians complained that the Auditor General’s report on unlawful parliamentary spending interpreted the rules too tightly, I would argue he actually interpreted them incredibly loosely.  First, limiting the interpretation to only three months leading up to the election is arbitrary and pointless (but more on this in another post).  Second, in only examining the use of parliamentary resources used in the area of advertising/publicity, the Auditor General took a simplistic and very narrow approach to resource use. In my thesis chapter on the use of state funding, I looked in detail at how staff resources are being very widely used for non-parliamentary party political activity. And so now, all the parties are starting to point fingers at various staff employed by the parties for electioneering - in particular, Heather Simpson is in the spotlight (see here and now here), and Brash’s chief advisor’ Bryan Sinclair has been under gun from Labour (see also here). All quite rightly too.