Not only are parliamentary resources used for electioneering purposes, but they are also used to help run the parties’ extra-parliamentary organisations. In order to take advantage of the many lucrative forms of state resources available, the functions of the party organisation or their national offices are now increasingly carried out both in Parliament and MP electorate offices. [Read more below]
As journalist David McLoughlin has pointed out, ‘Cash-strapped parties like New Zealand First, the Alliance and Labour would probably collapse without the parliamentary lifeline to covert public funding of their party machines’ (McLoughlin, 1997a: p.32). This is an international phenomenon – for example, according to Pierre et al., ‘In Denmark, the national party organisations moved part of their staff to the parliamentary secretariat when subsidies to parliamentary staff were introduced’ (2000: p.7).
Moreover, it is also worth noting that in contrast to the traditional parties, the newer parties like New Zealand First, the Alliance and United Future barely even present the façade of pretending to have a physical national office outside of Parliament’s office buildings. When asked if United had any sort of headquarters outside of Peter Dunne’s parliamentary office, chief adviser Mark Stonyer, answered: ‘no... but one of our members has a sort of office-cum-garage in Auckland’ (Stonyer, 18 May 1999). Similarly, the Alliance disestablished its national office in Auckland in 1997, then operated out of its parliamentary offices in Wellington and electorate office in Auckland (O’Sullivan, 2001). Tracking down the New Zealand First office is difficult, and their website only has parliamentary contact information. The Act office is on the same premises as its Auckland electorate offices. The Green Party national office shares office space with an electorate office in Wellington.
The parliamentary offices of the MPs have now even replaced their extra-parliamentary headquarters as the meeting places for many party organisation meetings and election strategising. For example, as Audrey Young noted, the 2002 National Party campaign strategy committee ‘met weekly at Parliament until the election campaign’ (Young, 2002c). Parliamentary rules allow party volunteers and officials to be given access to offices to carry out their activities assisting the parties.
Part of the reason for the increasing dominance of the parliamentary offices over party head offices in campaign organisation is because the parliamentary leadership no longer desperately need the services of autonomous central and local party organisers. The essential functions in modern elections are provided by the media advisers, opinion polling experts, and advertising experts and general parliamentary staff employed out of state funding. In part, therefore, it is the evolution of modern communications that makes the old-style party headquarters somewhat redundant. According to party finance expert Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘Now that television has come into almost every home, party leaders no longer need the services of local party organizers. The essential skills in modern elections are those of media advisers, opinion polling experts, and advertising men’ (Pinto-Duschinsky, 27 Aug 1998). Even overtly extra-parliamentary activities are largely organised by parliamentary staff. For example, parliamentary staff commonly organise, attend, and carry out duties at party conferences as part of their parliamentary job. [For examples of media reporting parliamentary staff organising or working at party conferences, see Watkins (2003b).]
This trend to base party-political national office operations in parliamentary offices is a relatively new one that became established in the 1990s. In fact it was reported in 1989 that the establishment of the NewLabour Party was being carried out from within Jim Anderton’s parliamentary offices:
Ever since the New Labour Party sprang up, Jim Anderton’s office and that of his secretary, Sally Mitchell, have been used as a de facto headquarters. As a result, the rooms have been turned into everything from a clearing house for donated cheques and loose dollar bills, to the party’s public relations nerve centre (Dominion, 1989b).
The Alliance’s time in Parliament (1993-2002) presents an interesting case study in the use of state resources. Following the election of its 13 MPs in the general election of 1996, the party closed its Auckland-based head office. It subsequently set up the ‘Electoral Liaison Unit’ (ELU) within the Alliance’s parliamentary offices, which was otherwise known as the ‘head office’ within the party. [The author worked in the ELU during 2001.] The Parliamentary Service funded the ELU and employed six staff (including the party president and the general secretary) who looked after party matters such as membership issues, correspondence, website management, party conference organisation and campaign strategy (O’Sullivan, 2001: p.2). The resources for the unit came largely from the Leaders’ Funding obtained by the party. Connected to the ELU were 11 regional out-of-Parliament Alliance offices funded from Members’ Support Funding (ibid).
It is also common for parliamentary staff to look after the communications of their extra-parliamentary parties. Often email correspondence to the party is answered from Parliament, and party free-phone numbers are serviced from there too. The most recently publicised example was when Jim Anderton and his faction broke away from the Alliance to establish the Progressive Coalition Party, and used their parliamentary offices and resources as the base for establishing the party. In particular, one staff member, employed on the Alliance’s parliamentary payroll without a job description, was answering calls to the ‘Jim and Sandra hotline’, which was taking donations for the breakaway MPs (Langdon, 2002a). At the same time Anderton wrote to hundreds of people that his office had dealt with. In an obvious politicisation of a ministerial office, he used a database, compiled by his ministerial staff, of people who had written positively to him as deputy prime minister, inviting them to be involved in his new but unlaunched party (Milne, 2002c).
The Act party has also used staff to establish and maintain a sophisticated database, into which it feeds data it receives back from its extensive direct-mail campaigns (McLoughlin, 2003d). Act also constitutes an interesting case study in the use of state resources. As outlined elsewhere in other blog posts in this series, Act appears to be one of the most adept users of parliamentary resources for party-political purposes. Most famously, it had its electorate agents working in Parliament instead of in the electorate. The deeper significance of this scandal was that Act had been using taxpayer-funded resources for party-political purposes because it could not afford to fund these political functions itself. For although Act is typically thought of as being the most well-resourced party in New Zealand, as another blog post will show, the party has been struggling to raise money since the tide went out on new right ideas. Consequently, the party organisation has been through a financial crisis, and in 1996 it had to slash its head office budget in half. Then in 2001, the head office operations were again severely cut back, with four out of the five staff positions being axed. This was driven, no doubt, by the realisation that many of the political and organising functions of the head office could be shifted to the 20-odd taxpayer-funded staff in Parliament. The savings could then be used for Act’s surprisingly large $1.7 million election campaign in 2002.
