The Electoral Commission has said Climate Voter may be in breach of the Electoral Act so along with the other 5 groups who launched the intiative, we’re going to the High Court to test the Electoral Act.

This is an important free speech test case. Here’s a short Friday afternoon round-up of some of the news reporting and blogs from earlier in the week.

Radio New Zealand covered it on Morning Report - you can listen here.

One News and Newstalk gave it some airtime as well.

And both Stuff and the Herald filed pieces too.

A bunch of well-read bloggers considered the impending High Court case, in some interesting ways. Micky Savage on the Standard with ‘Dear Greenpeace – difficult cases make bad law’ ‘Climate Voter and the Electoral Act’ over on No Right Turn. The Jackal with Climate Voter and the freedom of speech, David Farrar on Kiwiblog writes ‘Greenpeace taking Electoral Commission to court’  and Andrew Geddis over at Pundit with possibly the most in depth analysis: ‘I’ve made a huge tiny mistake’.

And today the Herald’s Editorial delivered its verdict with ‘Election law on ads is an excessive gag’.

There’s no clear consensus but it is clear from all these offerings that a real lack of clarity exists around a very important law.

It’ll be interesting to see how the commentary around this develops. If there’s any interesting pieces you notice, please drop ‘em in the comments below.

 

Climate Voter is a non-partisan initiative powered by an alliance of New Zealand organisations including Greenpeace WWF-New Zealand, Oxfam New Zealand, 350 Aotearao and Generation Zero. It aims to empower climate concerned citizens to use their vote in the September 2014 election to make a difference for the good of present and future generations.