Speaker by Various Artists

It’s not often I think it’s a good idea to sit outside for three hours on a cold London Saturday afternoon. Then again, it’s not often the wife and I are invited to the opening of the NZ Memorial “in the presence of her Majesty the Queen.” In fact, the whole splendid event that took up most of my day was kicked off with another splendid event – the invite some months ago from the NZ High Commission inviting me and Shelley, as a couple - that is, not me plus guest, but as a proper truly recognised couple. Civil Union in NZ, Civil Partnership in UK – it’s still not marriage, but it’s a lot more than I ever expected twenty years ago.

So there we were, Kerry Fox on one side (with Tupperware of homemade Anzac biscuits she’d brought to share – good woman), Barbara Ewing on the other (checking if I was crying at the same moments she was – we were), and Sean Fitzpatrick, Craig Dowd and Andrew Mehrtens in front of us. Brilliant view until they stood up, obviously. As Barbara pointed out, the sportsmen were in the row in front of the artists. Definitely a kiwi event.

I’m the youngest child of seven, unlike most of my contemporaries, both my parents fought in WW2. My father was in NZRAF 75 squadron. He joined up early on. A Martinborough boy, no doubt some of his reasons for getting involved in the conflict so very soon were to do with him being eighteen in 1939 and wanting a bit of excitement, this was long before Martinborough counted as a chic destination. I know he chose the Air Force because it had the most chance of that excitement – and a good uniform. Our dad understood the value of a good uniform.

But he also joined up because it was the ‘right’ thing to do. A Labour man all his life, I know as an adult he cared about politics, took it seriously. I don’t know what he thought when he was eighteen, there’s some family story about my Nana knowing Mickey Savage, maybe they really were sitting around debating politics long into the night at Venice Street, but as a grown man the little he did tell me about his long war experiences, was that he thought it was the right thing to do. To try to stop what was happening in Germany, to stop the fascist rise, to do his bit.

In my father’s case, doing his bit involved being an air gunner/wireless operator in Lancasters. Bloody dangerous. Of the 12,000 NZ airmen in WW2, a quarter of them died. In the past few years I’ve had several friends die of various illnesses, it’s been awful. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to think a quarter of my mates had died before we were twenty five.

Tom was shot down over Germany in 1941, he spent the next four years in a succession of German Prisoner of War camps. He did not have a glorious war. The very little he ever shared with us was about hunger, cold, boredom, and longing for New Zealand while looking at Austrian mountains through barbed wire. But he never said he didn’t think he should have gone, and he always reminded us that what he and his mates suffered was nothing compared to conditions in the concentration camps, reminded us too that what our grandfathers and their mates went through in the First World War was bloodier and dirtier still than the action they’d seen in Germany.

He was generous too about ‘ordinary’ Germans. Aware that they were as caught up in the conflict as he was, that the average German soldier was not the same as an SS member. That war, on either ‘side’, is dirty and nasty and brutal. And not at all glorious. When I was twenty my father gave me the diary he kept as a PoW. It’s very brief, often sarcastic, definitely sad, and it astonishes me it was written by a twenty two year old boy. They were such boys.

Which is kind of the point. This memorial – elegant, strong, beautiful and evocative – is very much about youth. Because it was predominantly young (and young-ish) people who gave time, years, and lives in wars. And the wars are still going on. The one this country – Britain – is currently engaged in is no less sad and destructive than any other. Certainly there doesn’t seem to be much chance of a positive outcome.

It was clear yesterday that the NZ Memorial, both the art work itself, and the opening ceremony, with a swathe of royals and two kapa haka companies, music and speeches, was absolutely not about glorifying war. My parents (my mother was in the UK army during WW2) both believed in remembering in order to stop it happening again. None of our memorials have yet achieved that, but the point of a memorial is still to try to do both. Remember the past, and hope for the future.

At the reception afterwards (at the RAF club on Piccadilly, again I could feel my father’s pride all the way from his Tokoroa grave!) I talked to several of the NZ veterans who’d come over for the event. Lovely old guys. Warm and generous with their time and stories. And not a little flirty. One of them thought he might have known my Dad. All of them were moved by finally being part of a long overdue recognition of their past work, and the deaths of their young friends. Of making it this far.

It’s a good piece of art this memorial, pieces of art. It has poems on it, pictures carved in. It stands proud and stands out. Hyde Park corner is hardly a stopping place, it’s basically an enormous three-lane roundabout. But the stands were lit last night when we went home, and the Southern Cross shining out from the top of them does look like a beacon. I’m delighted that it is on my way home from most places I go to in London. I’ll see that and get to remember my Dad, and home, and acknowledge some past in the hope that we can find a way to stop the violence in the future.

And, for an ostensibly sad and solemn occasion, a lot of the afternoon was fun, exciting, a bit silly. The Queen, in the flesh is very small, and seemed quite old. She looked a lot like someone’s Nana in a very good hat. Helen Clark sounded good. She and Tony skirted ever so carefully round the whole Iraq thing in both their speeches. He mentioned global warming. Ngati Ranana’s version of Po Atarau had me in tears. Dave Dobbyn sounded great. Hayley Westenra is tiny. Gaylene Preston still looks like a very groovy film-maker.

At the reception, the younger NZRAF blokes were exceedingly charming, as only men who fly planes and wear a great uniform know how to be. I talked to Roger Donaldson about my Dad’s diary and those many untold stories. The RAF people gave us good New Zealand wine – there’s always give good wine at the New Zealand events. And I sat in the cold of Hyde Park Corner and shared an Anzac biscuit with an All Black. My Dad would have been really proud of that too.

I welcome Jim Evans' article, because I believe it – wittingly or otherwise – confirms the two major planks of my argument.

First, I argued the Auditor-General applied a definition of 'electioneering' that no-one involved in the Parliamentary party spending system (not the politicians who wrote the rules and sought to follow them, and not the bureaucrats who had administered the system) had ever understood to be in play.

Evans writes, 'The boundaries of parliamentary purposes have been progressively pushed by MP's and parties for some time back ... a similar pushing of boundaries may have taken place for some other expenditure, such as meetings held solely to discuss an election campaign.' Actually, there’s no evidence of MPs ‘pushing the boundaries’ – on the contrary, the Parliamentary political spending system, and the behaviour of political parties with respect advertising around election times, appears to have remained largely unchanged since 1989. The boundaries and the politicians’ behaviour didn’t change in 2005; the Auditor-General’s reaction to them did (changing from no discernable reaction, to a vigorous one).

Rather, where Evans sees pushing of boundaries 'for some time', I see a clear consensus among all political parties and the bureaucrats administering the system that everything but explicit vote-seeking or revenue-raising was okay. Evans might find this distasteful, but this practice over many election cycles illustrates that all political parties (who, after all, wrote the rules) understood a narrow definition of 'electioneering' was in play.

Fundamentally, Evans and I disagree about how to determine what the law was. Drawing on the Speaker’s directives, he points to the prohibition of spending on promotional material which is ‘for the purpose of supporting the election of any person or the casting of a party vote for any political party’. When considering whether something breaches this prohibition, I ask: ‘As the writers and followers of the directives in question, what test have political parties, the Speaker, and the Parliamentary Service used since 1989 in determining whether parliamentary advertising has an electioneering purpose, and does this fail that test?’ Evans and the Auditor-General ask: ‘Would a reasonable member of the public think this is electioneering?’ In general terms, I regard looking at the intent and understanding of those that wrote, followed and administered a rule a more robust legal approach than asking what 'a reasonable member of the public' might think. When interpreting what a particular law means, exploring Parliamentary intent is a valid method; I’m not sure that asking what the man on the street thinks is quite so valid.

While it is laudable that the Solicitor-General, the Auditor-General and Evans all wish to 'keep alive the difference between the activities of a member of Parliament as a Member of Parliament and the activities of a Member as a candidate', anyone who has worked in Parliament will know that the system is designed in such a way as to deliberately blur this distinction. Not surprisingly, MPs set themselves up a parliamentary funding system which gave them considerable benefits of incumbency. That might seem anti-democratic and immoral, but that's how the system was set up. The proper way to combat such anti-democratic conduct is not to brand it illegal, when those that devised the system clearly intended for it to be legal, but to seek changes to the system through public pressure.

As an aside, I find it curious that Evans is willing to defend the Auditor-General's approach whilst admitting to 'not know the character of each item' [deemed unlawful]. Alas, the devil is in this detail. Evans says he is 'inclined to think the [Green Party] newsletter may be okay, so long as it merely keeps the public informed of public issues'. Revealingly, something the Auditor-General has pinged the Greens for - regular Green Times newsletters - Evans thinks may be okay under the appropriation. Much of the other material that the parties were pinged for (especially that for which the Greens, United Future and NZ First were in the gun) was of a very similar nature to these newsletters Evans possibly approves of. This suggests even those who support Brady's man-on-the-street definition think he may have applied it erroneously. Indeed, even under Evans’ own definition of acceptable material – that which ‘merely keeps the public informed of the issues’ – much of what the Auditor-General deemed unlawful was in fact lawful.

Second, I argued that the Auditor-General's approach to 'electioneering' (and, by implication, 'parliamentary purposes'), if applied consistently across all areas of parliamentary party spending, would call into question hundreds of millions of dollars of spending over many election cycles. [I made this argument for two reasons: first, to illustrate that his interpretation was completely out of step with the practice of all political parties, and therefore could not have been what those who wrote the rules intended; second, to make the point that his report was highly selective in its treatment of election-related parliamentary party spending.]

Evans acknowledges the correctness of my argument when he writes 'things other than communicating done by an MP as a candidate are not covered by the appropriations and are therefore unlawful ... Payments out of public funds to a campaign specialist to run an election campaign seem highly dubious.'

This is indeed my point. Almost none of the Parliamentary party spending in the three months before an election is for 'parliamentary purposes' as Evans and the Auditor-General understand that term. Leaders flying to the election debates? The salaries of spin doctors feeding the media the party's daily talking points on the campaign issues of the day? The salaries of Richard Long and Bryan Sinclair advising Brash how to overcome his Brethren gaffes? Taking the approach Evans commends, all of this is 'highly dubious', as he himself seems to admit.

So, having both acknowledged that the Auditor-General's approach calls into question huge swathes of parliamentary public spending over many election cycles, Evans and I must then ask: Does it matters that he only looked at a small portion of that spending? I don’t know about Evans, but I think it does, because the consequences of the Auditor-General’s selectiveness are pernicious. His ruling pings parties (financially and politically) not according to how much they breached the appropriation but for how much they breached the appropriation in the small area the Auditor-General looked at.

To illustrate my point, let's take a look at how much Parliamentary money three parties had under 'party and member support' for the three months before the 2005 general election: Labour had $1.33m, National $0.90m, and Act $0.26m.* Of this money, the Auditor-General examined $1.16m for Labour (87%), $0.14m for National (15%), and $0.18m for Act (69%). So, the vast majority of Labour and Act's spending went under the stern gaze of the Auditor-General; only a small minority of National's did. This suggests the only reason National has come out of this smelling of roses is that the Auditor-General hasn't examined 85% of its expenditure in the campaign period. My educated guess is that, had the Auditor-General looked at all parliamentary party spending in the three months prior to the 2005 general election, National would also now be facing public outrage.

This matters, because if you believe (as the Auditor-General does) that widespread unlawful spending went on in the 2005 election campaign, then you should be examining it in a comprehensive manner, which looks into all possible avenues of sin (such as financing campaign operatives and MPs taking flights for campaign purposes), not just the one that has happened to come to your attention (the pledge card) or the stuff that happens to have an easy audit trail. Indeed, it seems the only reason Brady didn't look into non-advertising spending is that it would have been too difficult.

Evans argues the Auditor-General was 'scrupulously careful to be impartial'. I don't disagree that his report was carefully considered, and I think it's mendacious to suggest (as Labour has done) that he was somehow politically motivated in reaching the conclusions he did. But that he's an honourable man doesn't obscure the fact that Brady's work was, in this case, shoddy.

The fruits of his labour were anything but impartial. His report pinged parties for failing to follow principles they didn't understand to be in effect; and he didn't apply those principles consistently across all areas of parliamentary party spending. In the process, Brady let National escape his stern gaze, thus allowing it to claim a huge moral and political victory it did not deserve. That's many things. Courageous isn't one of them.

*I arrive at these figures by dividing the total 2004/5 and 2005/6 appropriation by eight - as two years divided by eight equals three months. While parties probably spend more of their appropriation just before an election than just after it, this holds for all parties, so isn't material.

I'm not sure who appointed Sheikh Taj Aldin Alhilaly as the mufti of Australia, but he certainly has no position in this country. He is the Sheikh for the Lebanese community in Sydney, a fact they seem to be regretting now.

There are claims that he has been quoted out of context. That seems a little difficult to believe. Even if it is true, I just can't imagine a context that could justify comparing a woman to a piece of meat. Nor any explanation that would allow a woman to be blamed for an act of rape.

For all the Sheikh's knowledge of his religion, he appears to be unaware of some simple facts. He follows a religion that requires him to lower his gaze when speaking to women - irrespective of how they are dressed. His religion is one that expects women to be treated with respect. There is no aspect of his religion that would excuse men who do otherwise.

Crimes of sexual violence are a man's problem. It doesn't matter how women dress. Completely covered women have been sexually abused, as have women who are scantily dressed. Women in the safety of their own homes have been sexually abused by people they know well and are closely related to. Women over the age of seventy have been subject to rape, as have young girls.

The only way to solve this problem is to change the way men think and behave. If the Sheikh had any concern for the women of his community, then that is where he should be directing his efforts.

If sexual violence is a man's problem, then why do Muslim women cover up? There is an argument that by covering up, women buy into the argument that rape is a woman's responsibility. They make it worse for the women who don't cover, because they create the impression that such women deserve to be abused.

Yet that seems to me to be a circular argument. It again relates sexual violence to women's behaviour (ie their clothing - too much or too little) rather than men's behaviour. It's the same as the argument that covering up allows men to beat women without the results being visible. If that were the case, then women who dress scantily would suffer much less from domestic violence.

The fact is that New Zealand has a shamefully high rate of domestic violence, even though women here are free to dress how they please. In the same city, we have boobs on bikes and women in burqas. We were the earliest to give women the vote, we have great female role models, and while gender inequality is still rife in many areas, in comparative terms Kiwi women live in a pretty good environment.

Clearly then, we should be safer than women in other countries, yet we aren't. It seems that the answer to reducing violence is in the hands of our men. In the same way that the answer to reducing violence against children is in the hands of their parents.

Requiring women to dress more (or less, as in the case of the French headscarf ban) is not going to solve these issues. This is why the Sheikh has and should be taken to task over his comments, whatever the context. It's heartening to see so many Muslim voices condemning his words and rejecting the thought behind them.

For many Muslim women, the requirement to cover is related to respect. It's related to another form of exploitation. It's a rejection of the societal pressure to be pleasing in appearance, and all that requires in terms of make-up, treatments, cosmetic surgery and the like. Yes, we are sexual beings, but we are so much more. We shouldn't be pressed to fit into norms devised by those interested in moving product. We shouldn't have to feel inadequate because of our bodies.

To put hijab (covering) in the context of rape-prevention is to negate its power. In reality, that is why the Sheikh's comments are so destructive and harmful, and why they make me so angry. For me, hijab is a position of strength, but he turns it into a position of weakness and oppression. For me, it's a personal statement of my relationship with God, but he makes it a statement about my relationship to man.

My wearing hijab should never have any negative impact on the woman who doesn't. I may dislike the way she dresses, but I can never accept that she has foregone the right to safety. I know my religion doesn't accept it either.

In the end, all we can do is educate and articulate, in the hope that our men-folk hear and respond. The message is simple and universal. We want to be respected, we want to be safe. When you hurt us, in the end you hurt yourself.

The article by "Rex", "Auditing the Auditor-General" (Public Address, October 13, 2006) is typical of various attempts that have been made in recent weeks to obfuscate1 the issues surrounding the Auditor-General's report on advertising expenditure by political parties in the three months before the last general election. Now that Parliament has passed retrospective legislation to validate the expenditure that the Auditor-General held unlawful, this obfuscation is particularly dangerous, since it may make that legislation seem justified.

In this article I will try to remove some of the confusion surrounding the report. I will start with the relevant law and then discuss some of the arguments made by Rex and others.

The law starts with the Appropriation Acts of 2004 and 2005, by which Parliament appropriated funds (in each case a little over $14m) to be spent on "Party and Member Support", within a broader allocation for "Vote Parliamentary Service".

A long-standing constitutional principle is that the Crown or an Office of Parliament must not spend public money except as authorized by an Act of Parliament. The Public Finance Act 1989 states this. It also provides that the authority to incur expenses under an appropriation is limited to the scope of the appropriation and must not be used for other purposes.

It is therefore important to determine the scope of these appropriations. Some assistance is provided by the more detailed description of them in the relevant Budget estimates. Although these were not part of the Acts, they provide an indication of the purpose of the appropriations. In the 2005 Budget estimates, the appropriation was made to each party "to support its Leader's office, research operations, Whips' office and members' parliamentary operations".

Another important indication of the purpose of the appropriations comes from the Parliamentary Services Act 2000. This had as one of its purposes "to establish mechanisms for providing services and funding entitlements for parliamentary purposes". It does this partly by imposing a continuing duty on the Parliamentary Services Commission "to administer, in accordance with directions given by the Speaker, the payment of funding entitlements for parliamentary purposes".

Both members and officers of Parliament have always assumed that the appropriations for "Party and Member Support" were to be administered under this provision. So, clearly, the appropriations were understood as being for "parliamentary purposes".

This Act also required the Speaker to give written directions to the Commission annually on the nature of the services to be provided. Across the period covered by the Auditor-General's review, the Speaker's directions allowed expenditure on "communication services" including "signage and advertising". But they excluded the use of funds:

For producing or distributing promotional or electioneering material by mail or other means of communication for the purpose of supporting the election of any person or the casting of a party vote for any political party.

The directions are also important because they defined "parliamentary business":

The undertaking of any task or function that a member could reasonably be expected to carry out in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament and that complements the business of the House of Representatives.

This, then, was the business for which MP's could incur expenditure.

To sum up, the Auditor-General potentially had two questions to consider for each item of expenditure he reviewed: (1) "Was it for 'parliamentary purposes'?" and (2) "Was it electioneering material produced or distributed to support the election of any person or the casting of a party vote?".

However, because he was concerned only with communications he in fact considered only the second question, since that was sufficient to settle the issues in front of him. He says in his report, "I took a common-sense approach based on what I considered a reasonable member of the public would think from looking at the advertisement as a whole, in its full context." He judged that each of the items he identified as "unlawful expenditure" was for producing or distributing "electioneering material".

I do not know the character of each item, but like most other households in the community ours received the Pledge Card from Helen Clark about a week before the election. I think it is beyond serious argument that this was electioneering material distributed for the purpose of supporting the election of any person (i.e. in each constituency, the local Labour candidate) as well as the casting of a party vote for a political party.

Rex argues that the term "electioneering" should be understood to apply only to communications that explicitly ask people to vote for a candidate or a party. He relies on the opinion given to the Speaker by Hodder and Davies, from Chapman Tripp.

They argue that there is a need for a "bright line" test to separate legitimate and illegitimate expenditure, and that this is the only workable test available. They disparage the test suggested in the opinion of the Solicitor-General, upon which the Auditor-General relied, which argues that electioneering material is any material that attempts to persuade a voter to vote for a person or a party, whether or not it says "Vote for X", "Vote for the Y Party", or similar.

Hodder and Davies are no doubt right that their test would be easier to apply than that proposed by the Solicitor-General. However, I do not agree that it would be a better test.

The problem with it is that it trivializes the constraint. Any competent Member of Parliament could frame a communication designed to persuade voters to vote for a candidate or party without explicitly asking the voter to vote that way. The Pledge Card is a good example.

Like the Solicitor-General and the Auditor-General, I think it is important to keep alive the difference between the activities of a member of Parliament as a Member of Parliament and the activities of a Member as a candidate (which I shall take as shorthand for as a candidate or prospective candidate or as an advocate for the election of a party). The first are properly fundable out of public funds, but the second are not.

But, even if Hodder and Davies test would be a better test, that is irrelevant. It simply was not the test in operation at the time of the expenditure. The actual test used the words "electioneering material" and something that displays an intention to persuade people to vote for a person or a party is electioneering material. (That is also the view that courts have taken in cases on excess election expenditure.)

Rex makes a great deal of two points. The first is that other similar expenditure had not been challenged in the past. The Pledge Card was a particularly blatant case, but I think Rex is partly right about this. The boundaries of parliamentary purposes have been progressively pushed by MP's and parties for some time back so as to include advertisements or communications that are essentially for electioneering purposes. As Rex suggests, a similar pushing of boundaries may have taken place for some other expenditure, such as meetings held solely to discuss an election campaign.

Expenditure of this second type is in a different category to advertising, since the explicit exclusion of electioneering does not apply to it, but if it is not for "parliamentary purposes" then it is not authorized by the appropriation.

But all any of this shows is that it was past time that someone took a stand. The Auditor-General did so, and in a careful and measured way.

His report says that in June of 2005 he reported to the House of Representatives a range of concerns he had about how parliamentary advertising was managed, drawing attention to the need for MP's and parliamentary parties to take care when advertising in the pre-election period. Worried about some of the expenditure in this period, he sought legal advice from the Solicitor-General and then proceeded to a careful review of the expenditure on advertising in the three months before the general election, being scrupulously careful to be impartial.

That seems to me exactly the course of action we should expect from a public servant in his position. So what is "difficult to stomach" is not the Auditor-General's decision, but Rex's unfair criticism of him.

The second point made by Rex is that the Auditor-General's definition of "electioneering" would include vastly too much. It would include all sorts of activity going way beyond advertising, such as travel to meetings purely for planning an election campaign or the employment of staff to help with a campaign.

In fact, the Auditor-General did not define "electioneering", for the rule on electioneering applied only to communications, not generally. He defined "electioneering material", which, he says: "is something that is intended to persuade a voter to favour a candidate or party in an election, and is not limited to material that expressly solicits votes".

The Auditor-General had given warning only about advertising. As his report shows, even investigating that required a great deal of work to ensure fairness. A wider enquiry would have involved a wholly different undertaking.

Nevertheless, on the principles applied by the Auditor-General, things other than communicating done by an MP as a candidate are not covered by the appropriations and are therefore unlawful. Let us then consider the scope of work for "parliamentary purposes".

We can start by noticing the obvious point that MP's will often intend their competent performance as a member to encourage people to vote for them or their party. Plainly, that should not render expenditure that is properly incurred in the performance of their role as an MP unlawful. But simply because competent work as an MP may be one way of securing votes it does not follow that everything done to secure votes is work as an MP. That point implies, of course, that we can draw a line between work as an MP and work as a candidate.

So what, then, is the role of an MP?

Very broadly, it is participating in the work of Parliament. The core work of Parliament is to keep a check on the Government, including the bureaucracy, to approve the expenditure of public money, to review the law and to make legislation. No doubt that is not a complete list. Nowadays, keeping the public informed about proposals, reviewing issues of public concern and giving people an opportunity to be heard are rightly thought to have value for their own sake and not just to be of value because they can improve Parliament's performance of its core activities (although they can also do that).

My point is that while the scope of work as an MP may occasionally be controversial (as many concepts used in the law may be) we share enough common understandings about the role of Parliament to be able to agree on most occasions about what counts as something done by an MP for a "parliamentary purpose" and to know what is relevant to arguing about the remaining cases.

In their opinion to the Speaker, Hodder and Davies seek to expand the notion of things done by an MP for a parliamentary purpose to include all lawful means of seeking votes, so long as one does not explicitly say "Please vote for me" or similar.

Their argument is that a robust political process serves to create a better parliament. That may be true. But it does not follow that everything done by MP's that is part of a robust political process is part of the work of Parliament. Like other members of the public (for example, constituency members of a party), MP's may engage in activity that contributes to a robust political process without thereby engaging in the work of Parliament. Activity as a candidate is of this type.

Would a strict approach to the boundaries of expenditure for "parliamentary purposes" include vastly too much?

Rex takes a very broad interpretation of the word "persuade" in the Auditor-General's definition of "electioneering material". He treats any communication that may be intended to make it more likely that a voter will vote for the MP or her party as intending to persuade voters. He then applies that idea to all forms of expenditure. That is how he is able to suggest that the Auditor-General's interpretation would require refunding "possibly more than a hundred million dollars".

Perhaps "persuade" is capable of bearing that meaning in some contexts, but in the context of the Auditor-General's report it does not. The Auditor-General plainly understands "persuade" to require an active attempt to persuade voters to vote in a particular way. For example, he does not preclude MP's or parties from efforts to keep an electorate informed about public issues or of their views on them.

One more point will have troubled the reader. What is the position if something is done partly for one purpose and partly for another? The Solicitor-General's opinion gives the example of a monthly newsletter that informs constituents about matters of parliamentary business but also contains electioneering material. The Solicitor-General took the view that at least in the case of this example the wrongful purpose would make the whole act unlawful.

I think that is right when the same act serves both purposes; but in other cases a division of the expenditure may be appropriate. The point is tricky, but my tentative view on the example is that the whole cost of distributing should be recoverable, since all of it serves the wrongful purpose. But the cost of publication might be divided between the bits that are lawful and those that are not.

I have been asked what all this implies for the Green Party's monthly newsletter or payments to a campaign specialist. It will depend on the detail, but prima facie I am inclined to think the newsletter may be OK, so long as it merely keeps the public informed of public issues and of the Party's views on them. Payments out of public funds to a campaign specialist to run an election campaign seem highly dubious.

Let me sum up. I think the view the Auditor-General took of the law was right. It requires a distinction between the work of a Member of Parliament as a member of parliament and his activity as a candidate. Properly understood, that is neither an impossible distinction to make, nor one that has absurd consequences. It is no more difficult than many distinctions that lawyers and others have to make in applying the law.

It seems to me better to have a law that maintains that distinction than to abandon it simply because its application may occasionally be controversial. However, whether or not that is so, the law at the time of the expenditure reviewed by the Auditor-General required that distinction.

Not only did the Auditor-General get the law right, he acted with sense and courage in a difficult situation.

Let me return briefly to the retrospective legislation. If any Member of Parliament or party disagreed with the Auditor-General's report it was open to them to test the issue in the courts. That the Labour Party promoted, and other parties supported, retrospective legislation to validate expenditure the Auditor-General had held unlawful was appalling.

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The Auditor-General's Report can be found here:. The Solicitor-General's Opinion is available as Appendix 2 to that report. The opinion of Jack Hodder and Briony Davies is Appendix 3 (at page 14ff) to the Speaker's Report on the Report of the Auditor-General.

For some time now we have been lobbying against the proposed extensions and alterations to our city art gallery. With few carrying the banner in protest of the changes, why then do we persist with the cry to stop works and review the process?

The architects have done everything in their power to create the best possible result within the constraints of a very difficult brief - very successfully, I might add. The problem is that the constraints are so debilitating that the end result can never be anything but a compromised solution. What are these compromises?

For starters, the council has a traffic management plan in place which sees Kitchener Place designated as a major arterial route for heavy traffic (buses), as determined by the city's traffic management plan. At the same time, the gallery cites an increase in visitors to 400,000 people per annum once the development is in place. Even as you read this (well, maybe not in the middle of the night) there is a good chance that traffic is currently banked up along Kitchener St towards Wellesley St. The new traffic plan will see this increased significantly. A proposal for increased traffic and increased people sounds to me like a recipe for accidents.

Ah, but the gallery proposed a solution to this problem! Narrow the road down to single file via means of a "throat". This will allow frustrated motorists to take ten calm breaths while they watch hordes of visitors make their way across the new art gallery pedestrian crossing to the current exhibition. Result: a major arterial route narrowed to a single lane and a whole lot of breathing going on.

The existing building is a listed as a heritage A historic classification, which includes the French colonial building as well as the sculpture garden and water feature. With the new entry lobby proposed (which amounts to little more than a large convention area), the heritage A listed sculpture garden is substantially compromised, whilst the water feature is demolished, to be replaced by a new (smaller) water feature.

The proposed development, in order to achieve the brief put forward by the Auckland Art Gallery, required a reclassification of 1,117 square metres of Albert Park (itself a protected area) under the Resource Management Act so it would become build-able land, i.e. "local purpose (art gallery) reserve" instead of "historic reserve".

The consequence of this is the loss of 13 trees (of more or less significance) and a major loss of the view and access through to Albert Park from Khartoum Place. While Auckland City, and, in particular, the inner city, swells in numbers by virtue of migration and immigration, demands on parks and recreation areas increase. Parks serve as incredibly important spaces which facilitate mental and physical health and social understanding at a critical time in Auckland's developing multicultural city. A major entry point to Albert Park from the city end is via Khartoum Place. Recent upgrades of High Street and Lorne Street by council have as their goal the aim of encouraging people to take these as a route to Khartoum Place (also planned for a substantial upgrade) through to the park ... except the park is now to be reduced in size and blocked off by a proposed art gallery extension ... oops.

Anyone with any travel experience to major world cities knows that in the years to come, as cities become more and more populated by residents and workers, parks are critical to the health of the city. We should, common sense and logic say, be looking at ways to increase the size of our parks, to increase and make more welcoming the entry to these parks, rather than reducing their mass, removing trees and cutting off access, as per the current proposal.

The significance of a well-appointed, world class, iconic building (incidentally, the gallery maintains that the proposed development is of a "world class gallery" and an "iconic contemporary building") cannot be underrated. This project is simply NOT a project with a big enough vision. Yes, (gallery director) Chris Saines has vision, but it's small.

His vision is for a larger gallery with improved operations, better security and enhanced facilities for sponsors. His location is on the Auckland map, on the corner of Kitchener St and Wellesley St. Mine is on the world map. My vision is for a world-class city and a world-class country.

The gallery fails to understand (or simply ignores) that this project is an opportunity to create a world statement. The applicant (the Art Gallery) does not seem to see that architecture serves to manifest a people and a culture in one of the most powerful and visual ways, that, given the chance, the whole world can see and recognise. The Auckland City Art Gallery does not just serve the people who frequent the gallery. It serves all the people who live in Auckland as well as the rest of New Zealand.

In today's world, where religion is on the decline, our iconic buildings will no longer be cathedrals and temples. Instead we need to look to galleries and museums and other cultural facilities for this opportunity.

In the end, a project like this will tell on us and we will share what it says with the rest of the world. If it goes ahead in its current format it will say that the people of Auckland did not care one way or another about a world class, iconic art gallery.

It will say that parks are just not that important. It will say that the people in positions of influence have no vision. It will say that we have no culture, because we are a young country, so we are still developing. It will say that Auckland as a city has no real identity. It will say that as a city we have been demolished by developers with faceless, mediocre developments and appalling apartment blocks, and, more than that, it will say that the city residents will get what they asked for because most did nothing to change it anyway. It will say that we are all lost in our own tiny life stories and that as a people we have no greater story to tell. It will say that we suffer from a severe lack of ability to think, with logic and reason, with a rational approach to problem solving.

It is futile and dangerous to enter into the subjective territory of what is good architecture and what is not. We all know that what one person likes, another does not. However, there are some academic criteria which can be used to guide us in determining the value of a design which is largely achieved by analysing the characteristics of what the world sees as world class and iconic. What are the hallmarks of these works? Location.

The space around a building ("negative spaces" is the jargon) has as much influence over the form as the form itself. So many of the world's great buildings, whether located on the waterfront (which so frequently they are) or inside parks, have generous spaces around them to enable them to breathe and come alive. Most are standalone buildings (as opposed to being attached to another building from a different period) and have their own cohesive and distinctive design language.

Frequently, creators of world class, iconic buildings are risk takers, producing daring and breathtaking results, like the Sydney opera house with its orange peel forms or the Pompidou Centre with reversed structure or Frank Gehry's Bilbao museum in Spain with an almost chaotic and hectic management of form.

Daring developments will frequently push the boundaries of materials and necessitate research and development into new technology. Many times they will challenge building rules as they push for a better environmental partnership, as they push for more sustainable, green buildings. They make daring statements. They have grand entryways. Often they enter the master planning of a city so streets and boulevards are along sight lines of entry and interior vistas and landscaping hails their presence before your arrival. In time they mature so that our great grandchildren learn of them in history books.

As a participator in these buildings, you are left with a feeling of being uplifted and empowered. You have a sense of wonder at the combination of excellent minds that worked together to achieve the end result. You are empowered, because, without even recognising it, you admire the vision that created this building. This is a vision that has moved a nation forward. It has not been compromised by meeting the status quo. People send postcards home to their friends and family of the building at sunset with a note that says..."Why can't we do something like this?"

If the art gallery project moves ahead in its current form, what will our visitors write on the postcards of the gallery? Or maybe there won't be postcards. Instead, maybe there will be an e-mail with a low resolution snapshot ..."Hi Mum. This is the city gallery. I'm off to Piha tomorrow, so hope to see something interesting there ... "

Chris van Ryn is director of freestyle design ltd.