The Standard has been outed as a Labour Party blog

The Labour -friendly Standard blog , whose authors are all anonymous, has been outed as a Labour Party blog, possibly breaching the Electoral Finance Act.The Standard's IP address is 202.74.226.11

Accorcing to "Tane" who won't reveal his real name, nor whether he works for the EPMU, he put out a call and at the end of last year and someone from Labour - no idea who - emailed and offered them some temporary server space until "they worked something out "(well it will be temporary now they have been outed).

Let's see the e-mail.

The Labour party rented servers; and one of a block of reserved IP addresses are used to host the blog ( tap in the IP addresses 202.74.226.112 - 202.74.226.127 here) for about $300 per month.The server space was donated to the NZLP by people in the IT industry but it is unknown whether that was declared as an election expense.

The server identifies itself as mail.labour.geek.nz on port 25 and relays mail for younglabour.org.nz, thestandard.org.nz, rainbowlabour.org.nz, timbarnett.org.nz and tonymilne.org.nz. So who pays for it if it isn`t the Labour Party or the taxpayer?

Some of the Standard bloggers appear to work in the communications area for EPMU . If so, it would be interesting to see whether the EPMU is in breach of the EFA for its failure to register as a third party. Probably not. If the taxpayer is paying for it it should have a valid parliamentary crest.

Oh dear.

Wouldnt it be ironic if this blog was the first to be prosecuted under the Electoral Finance Act? But it won't be because If Labour has authorised the spending of money on The Standard they will have to include that expense in their expense return after the election.