Peter Dunne
Wellington, October 25, 2024
The only thing missing when Speaker Gerry Brownlee solemnly announced Darleen Tana’s political execution this week was the Black Cap Judges used to wear in the days of capital punishment when sentencing some hapless criminal to death.
While there will be little sympathy for Ms Tana’s plight, because of the way it was played out, and she herself seems relieved that after more than seven months the saga is over, questions remain about whether the Electoral Integrity Act is fit for purpose and desirable.
Internal Argument
Whatever else she did, Ms Tana did not vote against the Green Party in Parliament, nor take positions contrary to the policies of the Green Party. She was held to have breached proportionality because by leaving the party she deprived it of one-fifteenth of its resources and allocated speaking time in Parliament. Her actions had no effect on the stability of government, nor did they reduce the number of votes available to the Opposition in the House.
Ms Tana was expelled because an internal argument with the Green Party over her family’s business affairs led her to resign from the party.
This dispute led the Green Party to invoke the Electoral Integrity Act’s provisions, despite its previous long-standing, principled opposition to such legislation. When the crunch came, the party showed that regaining access to the financial resources and speaking slots in the House it lost through Ms Tana’s departure was ultimately more important than the principles it had paraded for so long.
Ms Tana’s private affairs and how truthfully she may have explained those to the Green Party certainly deserved investigation and raised questions about her suitability as a Member of Parliament. But they were matters for the Green Party to resolve directly with Ms Tana, rather than rely on a piece of dubious legislation.
Introduction of the Act
It should never be forgotten that the Electoral Integrity Act was utu legislation dreamed up by New Zealand First after the break-up of the coalition with National in 1998, and the subsequent defection of many of its MPs to the short-lived Mauri Pacific Party. New Zealand First has insisted on the legislation being part of every coalition or government support arrangement it has been part of since then.
It has nothing to do with democratic or Parliamentary principle, and everything to do with being a mechanism for keeping potentially dissident members of the New Zealand First under control. The Green Party, ACT and, in its day, UnitedFuture were right to oppose it as anti-democratic and unnecessary.
The legislation is anti-democratic because it turns MPs into mere ciphers, slaves to the dictates of their party, and unable to express contrary opinions or views of their own, lest they be expelled from Parliament for breaching proportionality. Until the politically awkward Darleen Tana situation arose, the Green Party had been consistently the most strident opponent of the legislation, arguing that the right to freedom of speech and opinion should always be upheld for Members of Parliament. It is an unremovable stain on its integrity that it should so readily abandon its principles the way it has done in the Darleen Tana case.
From what we know now, the blunt truth is that the skeletons rattling around in Ms Tana’s cupboard meant she should never have been selected as a candidate by the Green Party in the first place. Proper due diligence by the party during its internal selection process should have identified the potential risks Ms Tana posed, long before she was selected.
Proper scrutiny at that stage would have identified the issues that were to sink her career and should have prevented her selection in the first place. That they were not, is as much an indictment on the way the Green Party went about things as it is on Ms Tana.
Appropriateness
The wider question this whole situation raises is the appropriateness of the Green Party relying on legislation to resolve an internal situation largely of its own making. Legislation should focus on broad areas of policy or principle, and not be a device for helping political parties to patch up their internal mistakes.
Ms Tana is undoubtedly a major loser from these events. Her Parliamentary career was abruptly ended before it really started, and her reputation has been shattered. It will take a long period away from the public eye for her to recover that. But she is not the only one – the Green Party is also a big loser.
Its actions have shown it to be just as craven and opportunistic as it accuses its political opponents of being. They have destroyed forever its unctuous, self-righteous claim to be the only party of principle in Parliament.
The process has shaken the notion that Members of Parliament are chosen by the people, not anonymous party delegates doing their leadership’s bidding. It has left a tawdry shadow over Parliament, which the sombre discomfort detectable in Brownlee’s announcement reflected. To recover the mana it has lost, Parliament should now move to dump the repugnant and draconian Electoral Integrity Act, as unceremoniously as Ms Tana was.
Peter Dunne was a Minister of the Crown in the Labour and National-led governments from December 1999 to September 2017. He lives in Wellington and writes a weekly Column.
