Has Len been harpooned?

WhaleOil has a very interesting post about Supercity mayoral aspirant Len Brown; very interesting indeed. He blogs:

I saw this arti­cle yes­ter­day about Celia Wade-Brown cam­paign­ing using inter­nal coun­cil email and then all of a sud­den I got sent more than a few copies of a Len Brown email that has been sent to staff at Manukau City Council.

The truly creepy thing about this email from the Brown cam­paign is that it was sent to inter­nal email addresses, and it was sent with embed­ded links that if you check the code are hard-coded to the indi­vid­ual receiv­ing it so that the mere act of click­ing on a link can iden­tify you to the Brown cam­paign team.

Not only is he solic­it­ing dona­tions from staff of Manukau City but he is also encour­ag­ing them to join the cam­paign and it is all being tracked in some sort of big brother creepy way.

The peo­ple that have received this and for­warded to me all say that they have never joined any mail­ing list for Len Brown. The code of the email shows clearly that this email was sent inter­nally, osten­si­bly from the Mayor’s office. OIA requests of the Exchange Server logs will show this.

There is some­thing sin­is­ter when a Mayor uses his own council’s resources for his own ends, but then again we have seen Len Brown do this before with the credit cards. One thing for sure, is it looks like Len has run out of his big devel­op­ers money and now needs to start pick­ing the pock­ets of Manukau City staff.

Bot­tom line is that Len Brown has used coun­cil pro­vided resources to cam­paign amongst coun­cil staff and thereby politi­cized the neu­tral hard work­ing staff of Manukau City.

DPF has also blogged about this at Kiwiblog, and received a very, very interesting comment just an hour or so ago - check this out (our emphasis added):

1. Owen McShane (1,037) Says:
   August 31st, 2010 at 3:51 pm

   I am reasonably confident that this breaches the Auditor General’s guidelines for behaviour of incumbent politicians during an election campaign period.

   Essentially the incumbents cannot use the resources of council in any way to further their campaign. Wellington Mayoral Candidate got into trouble just for sending email messages to staff. The Dom Post reported:

   Auditor-general guidelines for managing public communications before elections say local authorities must not promote, nor be perceived to promote, the re-election prospects of a sitting member.

   Members should not be permitted to use council communications facilities such as email for political or re-election purposes, as this was “unacceptable and possibly unlawful”.

   Council protocols say no council resources, including email, should be used for campaigning purposes. “Staff must not send or forward emails, either internally or externally, which seek support for a particular candidate.”

   Assistant Auditor-General Bruce Robertson said the guidelines helped ensure sitting members did not gain an unfair advantage over other candidates, but carried no legal weight.

   “The key issue here is it’s about political credibility. It’s potential political embarrassment, which is not a good thing in the middle of a political fight for success at the polls.”

There would seem to be a prima facie case against Len Brown here for breaching campaigning rules. Brown is a lawyer; he should know better than anyone how to follow the law, not to break it.

Following on from the debacle over Brown's infamous dinner at Volare, where he STILL refuses to disclose who he dined with, we would suggest that Len Brown's political credibility is pretty low tonight.Let's hope that we are not treated to another face-slapper once he realises the predicament that he has got himself into.