In my recent post about Brand Consistency I talked about Labour and a lack of brand consistency in the emails listed on their candidate contact details page. I noticed one other thing, that I thought was worth its own blog post.
If you look closely at that screen grab, there are four Labour Party candidates on there whose contact details include an @parliament.govt.nz email address.
The Parliamentary Service has very strict rules on the use of Parliamentary Service resources for explicit electioneering. This is expanded on by the Parliamentary Service in their Publicity Guidelines:
“The prohibition on explicit electioneering extends to any use of Parliamentary Service funds. This includes phone services, postage, email, and staff time. “
So the question has to be asked, have the Labour Party and their MPs breached the rules by using Parliamentary Service resources?
If you have any evidence of this, or other parties doing the same, feel free to send it in to politics@matthewbeveridge.co.nz
UPDATE: I have checked the page listing National Party Candidates and firstly it has not been updated since 5 Feb, but it has no emails at all.
I remember National used to have those @national.org emails (or something like that) – do they still run those? Sounds a lot safer to send and receive everything through a non-parliamentary server…
Or are there rules about having to use an @parliament.govt.nz email address for parliamentary business? I’d presume that for OIA purposes, there’d be some sort of guidelines about using private email addresses?
I checked on the National Party website, on the list of their MPs they all have @natiional.org.nz addresses.
Unless they are a Minister, MPs are not subject to the OIA. To me, the issues is they are being referred to as candidates, yet have their email address as @parliament.govt.nz.
There is also the brand consistency issue I talk about in the other post as well.