Labour's web site needs fixing......

homepaddock posted about a Labour Party ad on the masthead of "The Courier" in Timaru. He felt that as Labour does not have a local MP, this ad alerting Timaruvians to a "Timaru Government MPs’ office" must be party political advertising and therefore was not properly authorised under the Electoral Finance Act (EFA). homepaddock attempted to find out who these Government MPs were for Timaru, but had no luck.

I had fun with this. The Labour Party web site used to allow you to put in the name of your electorate and find out which MP (list or local) covered one’s area.

They have now changed it, so you can’t locate an MP easily by electorate. You have to look either at a list of MPs names, or at your region and work out which MP is yours. There is no obvious way to tell what areas the list MPs serve without clicking on every single one individually.

If you’re in a National-held local seat, then you have to click on every list MP until you find the one with an office near you. There is no way to work out from your electorate which Labour MP is “shadowing” your area. You used to be able to do this easily. Now you can't. That is a step backward.

I called the 04-471-9998 number on the “Contact us” and found myself talking to the PM’s office. They didn’t know who was shadowing Timaru. They put me through to the Labour Party in Fraser House on Willis St in Wellington. They were helpful, but first I had to explain the whole idea of shadowing and then ask who it might be for Timaru. They didn’t know, but told me to call the Senior Whip’s office at Parliament and they would know as that was part of their job.

I did so and found out that, by coincidence, Tim Barnett, the Senior Goverment Whip is the “local” Labour MP shadowing the existing Aoraki electorate which includes Timaru. Apparently they are shuffling some of the list MPs around as local candidates, so the areas they shadow now aren't the seats they will be running in locally this time around. Timaru will be in a different electorate for the coming election due to boundaries being redrawn.

Bottom line: I found the web site made it very hard to work out who your Labour MP might be if you didn't live in a local electorate held by Labour. In my humble opinion, this aspect of the existing web site is poorly thought out. It should not be harder now to find out who is currently representing you than it was prior to the web site being "improved".

Also interesting was being told the Labour Party doesn’t currently have a party web site. The only Labour web site is the Parliamentary one at labour.org.nz. That’s why the phone number goes to the PM’s office. They said one would be up soon.

I explained the problem to the person I spoke to in Tim Barnett’s office and suggested they sort out this basic issue of finding out who represents you ASAP. For their own good. He said he would and he sounded like he meant it.