Ruling sought on legitimacy of tax advertisements

Press, 15 September 1988, Page 2

Ruling sought on legitimacy of tax advertisements

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

The Controller and Au-ditor-General has been asked to rule if full-page tax advertisements designed to popularise the October 1 tax reforms are a legitimate use of public money. “These advertisements have a very simple political motivation,” said the Opposition associate spokesman on finance, Mr Simon Upton. In his report to Parliament last year the Audi-tor-General, Mr Brian Tyler, noted that a Government might legitimately publicise its policies at public expense. But Mr Tyler also said, “There is a point beyond which the tenor of publicity material ceases to have that characteristic and becomes instead political material designed to persuade rather than inform.

“Publications in the latter category cannot, in my

opinion, properly be paid for at public expense.”

The Government this week began a public education programme on this year’s tax changes, showing advertisements on television and in the print media.

These advertisements explain the tax changes in detail. Booklets on the changes can be obtained by sending a coupon that will appear with the print advertisements.

Mr Upton said the advertisements that had been printed went beyond the point of informing and had become instruments of persuasion. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bolger, said the advertisements had been commissioned by the Labour Government “to sell Finance Minister Douglas’s tax changes to a disillusioned New Zealand public and to mark the launching of Labour’s General Election campaign.” These advertisements,

like the “Rub out the Crim” campaign before the 1988 election, were nothing more than blatant politicking and it was “absolutely unacceptable” that taxpayers should be expected to pay for them, said Mr Bolger.

“We all realise that the Labour Party is in dire financial straits, but neither State funding for political parties nor tax-payer-funded political advertising is acceptable to the National Party or to the public,” he said. Mr Upton told Mr Tyler that the tax cuts were contentious, many Government supporters seeing dramatic cuts in personal income tax for highincome earners as being contrary to equity. The “highly coloured language” of the advertisements was designed to justify these changes to a section of the voting public with a clear intention to persuade rather

than merely inform, he said.