Section 14

The Charities Commission today opened the Charities Register.

Chief Executive of the Charities Commission Trevor Garrett said that while registration is voluntary, organisations wishing to remain tax exempt on the grounds of charitable purpose should register before 1 July 2008.

Normally, a trivial piece of bureaucratic news like this wouldn’t register but cast your minds back to mid-October last year. In the heat of the debate over the Labour Party’s theft of public funds to pay for their pledge cards, when Labour was repeatedly coming up with new ways to limit campaining against them, not-too-subtle hints were dropped that organisations that spent too much time on political activity were at risk of losing their tax-free charitable status.

Organisations set up specifically to lobby the government - from the Sensible Sentencing Trust to the Child Poverty Action Group - were understandably outraged.

As I pointed out in an article last year on Labour’s recent attacks on free speech (Goskomizdat comes to Helengrad), there could be a significant chilling effect when the government threatens to strike charities off for unapproved political activity.

All charities will have to be registered from mid-2008 and then the ministerially-appointed board of the Charities Commission will decide who gets to keep their status. The temptation for charities to censor themselves to avoid being financially punished will be strong.

Charities Commission chief executive Trevor Garrett is glib: “We have got a lot of power when it comes to investigations. The trick is not to abuse that power.”

Freedom of expression should not have to rely on ministerial puppets performing tricks.

UPDATE 13/2/07: Germany is going through a similar exercise at the moment and the most high-profile victim could be Greenpeace. Greenpeace is currently tax-exempt because of its environmental activities but the problem is that Greenpeace’s environmental activites focus more on swaying opinion and lobbying politicians than actually doing anything that really helps the environment, hence the unwanted attention from the German Ministry of Finance.

The papers are reporting this morning that Helen Clark is pushing forward with her plans to limit anti-government speech at election time:

Stuff: Clark favours campaign law reform
NZ Herald: PM sure of support for election financing reform

The newly released December/January issue of The Free Radical carries my story of Labour’s stifling of anti-goverment speech as its cover story and now that story is reproduced here at FreeSpeech.org.nz: Goskomizdat comes to Helengrad.

UPDATE 6/12/06: National, in their newly discovered role as cheerleaders for the Labour Party, have just put out a press release saying, “We are happy to support moves to outlaw third-party advertising that attacks political parties.”

This filth comes from the mouth of the same Bill English who said, just a month ago, that we are living in “an atmosphere where criticising the government is becoming pretty hazardous“. At the time, I didn’t think he meant it approvingly but you have to wonder.

Free Radical Issue 73 is now available to subscribers and in the shops. The cover story, Goskomizdat Comes to Helengrad, was written by me and will be available on this site shortly.

All governments have a natural tendency to regulate and to censor. To maintain an open society the rules need to be deliberately tilted in favour of free expression. Political speech must be especially protected because it is in the political arena that all other freedoms must be protected.

The Clark government’s assaults on free political expression must be resisted because if we fail to withstand these assaults it may be illegal to resist the next.

In the wake of their shambolic handling of the election funding scandal and their disgust that people voluntarily give more money to the National Party than to them, the Labour Party called for a raft of changes to electioneering rules at this weekend’s party conference.

The NZ Herald reports that the remit called for state funding of political parties, a ban on anonymous donations to political parties, and constraints on third party advertising. The resolution was passed “unanimously and without debate”. And that’s how they like it.

All of these are attacks on free speech. State funding of political parties subsidises some political propaganda, in effect drowning out opposition. Banning voluntary donations can be seen as a move to protect against any potential corruption but, given the general lack of corruption in New Zealand, is more likely to be used as a way to find out who donates to the “wrong” party. Restricting third-party advertising is the most direct attack on free speech as it prevents unapproved groups from expressing their opinions at election time.

As Pulitzer Prize winning columnist George F. Wills puts it in the Summer 2006 edition of Cato’s Letter (PDF, 485 kB, 8pp),

There is no greater threat to liberty in [America] than the fourth kind of politics, the politics of speech rationing. It is commonly called campaign finance reform, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is simply the assertion of the government of a new, audacious right: the right to determine the timing, content, and amount of political advocacy about the government.

Restricting political speech in the way Labour intends is a serious threat to our freedom of speech and must be opposed vigorously. In the wake of National’s disastrous polling in 2002 some Labour members joked about New Zealand being a one-party state. Some of their leadership, less familiar with humour, may have taken the kidding a bit too seriously.