advisory and policing powers it is a man with a hammer to whom every problem
resembles a nail. They want to interpret the definitions and exceptions to limit the
Commission’s discretion to intervene.
[35]
As we will explain, we see merit in both perspectives. Part of the solution to
the interpretive puzzle is that the Commission should assess effect in a
rights-sensitive manner: more so, as will be seen, than it did here. The definitions
and exclusions also limit the Commission’s capacity to intervene. We sympathise
with the Commission, which has a difficult mandate and must work with patchwork
legislation that is difficult to make sense of and only partly adapted to the disruptive,
unruly and increasingly powerful medium of communication that is the internet. We
will take interpretation so far as we can, acknowledging Mr Butler’s caution that
there comes a point where the legislature must be left to change the law if it thinks
fit.
[36]
We turn to the issues, which we preface by identifying the difference of
approach to election advertisement in the High Court decisions in Planet Key and
Greenpeace.
Planet Key and Greenpeace
[37]
Greenpeace addressed two separate publications. The first was a website
encouraging the public to become “climate voters” by voting on the basis of climate
change policies in the 2014 election. The site was avowedly non-partisan but it
advised that as the election approached political parties would be asked to respond to
questions about their positions on key elements of climate change policy. Mander J
accepted that issue advocacy was not election advertising in itself, even if the
advertisement took a position with which a given party or candidate happened to be
associated.34 But because the site identified party positions on those issues and
established a yardstick for evaluating such positions, it had the “inevitable overall
effect”, when read with Greenpeace’s wider campaign, of encouraging voting for or
against parties.35 Accordingly, the website was an election advertisement.36
34
35
36
Greenpeace of New Zealand Inc v Electoral Commission, above n 2, at [46]–[47].
At [89].
At [91]–[93].