12 March 2009 Media Statement

National vote-buying with taxpayers’ money

Progressive Wigram MP Jim Anderton is appalled at National’s use of taxpayer money to change electorate office funding so that government MPs get an increase four times greater than Opposition MPs.

“They have noticed that government MPs have bigger electorates by land area than Opposition MPs, because the Opposition tends to hold inner city seats. So they have put a fix in and handed out more money to big electorates. This is a gerrymander.

Not only that but the rules they are putting in place are different for Maori seats. Maori seats qualify for extra funding if they are over 10,000 square kilometres. General seats qualify if they are over 20,000. I can think of no reason why a differentiation should be made.

“National is so brazen it has even left out the biggest electorate in the country – Rongotai.

“The busiest electorate offices in the country are inner city electorates. Imagine the outcry from National if Labour had given busier offices more.

“Most National MPs don’t need extra support staff; they just need to work harder.

“This is the same National Party that claimed to be the very soul of injured innocence when the Electoral Finance Act was changed - yet, whatever your opinion of the EFA, at least everyone was treated the same.

“The National Party has spent all this week reverting to form - backward-looking, mean and getting its priorities all wrong.

“Now National is taking money from higher priority uses to buy the votes of its own supporters. This is exactly the same National party that used to gave Alamein Kopu a nice Beehive office to secure its majority. Turns out that John Key is made of the same stuff.”

ENDS

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