Adams Amy: Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill — Second Readings 
Adams Amy: Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill — Second Readings 
[Volume:669;Page:15837] 
AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) 
: 
 It is a great pleasure to stand here and take a call on the second readings of the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill and the Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill. I will start my contribution by thanking the Minister of Justice for the way he has brought the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill to the House which is in sharp contrast to the previous iteration of electoral finance reform in this House. There has been a long deliberative consultative process and an overarching desire to ensure that the solution we come to as a Parliament will be an enduring one. That is worthy of this House’s support and I certainly want to congratulate the Minister on it. 
I will also take a moment to thank my fellow members of the Electoral Legislation Committee. In Parliament we tend to get fairly political on many occasions but this committee approached this matter in that same sense of needing to reach a sensible and enduring solution. 
I think all parties that were represented on that committee—and that was every party in the House—worked very constructively and collaboratively and they can take some credit for the state of the legislation that we have now brought back to Parliament. 
Finally in this introduction I congratulate and thank the officials and the committee staff because we were not always an easy committee to work with. The officials were certainly excellent in the support they gave the committee. The state of the bill now as it is before this House is in large part due to their work. 
There is a lot in this bill and there is a lot that one could make a contribution on and I am mindful of not taking up too much time. The points that I want to talk on very briefly in this contribution—and there will obviously be more time in the Committee stage to go into these points—are firstly the regulated period; secondly the electoral spending issue; and thirdly the issue of spending caps. 
The regulated period is one we spent quite a bit of time discussing and the tension we were balancing there was the need to ensure that no one in this House was faced with being in a regulated period without realising it—that need to avoid retrospectivity was certainly one of the driving factors for our committee—and equally our wish to get as close as possible to a situation where the regulated period would be around 3 months without acting to curtail the Prime Minister’s discretion in calling election dates. It was certainly my view that that sort of change to how elections are called and when and discretion around that is a major constitutional change that is best left for another forum. In this instance we did not want the regulated period to wag the dog in terms of how elections are called but we certainly wanted to come to a situation where more often than not the regulated period was around the 3-month period that we were very comfortable with. The default trigger of 2 years and 9 months from the previous election and the other triggers that are built into the legislation are a pretty good compromise in terms of the issues we were dealing with. 
I will touch briefly on this issue of election spending. Here again it is a matter of balance of making sure candidates for Parliament can adequately communicate with their voters. Coming from a large rural electorate myself I know very well that in an electorate of that size it is very difficult to get out and communicate who one is and what one stands for while staying within the spending cap as it is. Certainly we were mindful of the need to make sure that the limit allowed a meaningful discussion with voters while obviously recognising that we did not want it to be a contest in which the candidate with the biggest pockets won. We have raised the limit up to $25000 as the previous speakers have indicated. Arguably it could have gone higher but that is where we got to with the support of the House. 
As Ms Dalziel commented in her speech we have at long last got rid of the vexatious issue of second-hand timber. I know that many campaign committees around the country will be very pleased not to have to count nails any more and worry about whether they can reuse last time’s timber and how that will be costed. It was a nonsense and a waste of everyone’s time and it is certainly very good to be rid of that. 
The other point that is worth making in that context is that those figures along with the spending cap figures will now be CPI-linked thereby ensuring that we do not once more end up in a situation where we have a figure frozen in time which gets less and less relevant as time goes on. 
Very briefly to finish I will touch on the issue of spending caps. We have heard from the Minister and previous speakers that this is a compromise position and that all parties feel we have a workable and enduring solution. Our starting position obviously was not to have a spending cap. My own view—and I am quite happy to go on record saying it—is that the limit could have been and potentially should have been higher. But we had to balance the need and the entitlement of every New Zealander to meaningfully engage in the election process with ensuring we did not get a situation in which big-money players could come in. I do not think we have really seen that in New Zealand to date but we certainly have seen it in America and other jurisdictions. Therefore we ensured that there was some sort of limit across the board. Every other player in election spending is limited: candidates are limited in what they can spend parties are limited in what they can spend and in that sense it is only right in my mind that anyone who wants to play in that park should also have some controls on them. 
Finally I will touch on the Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill the second reading of which we are also debating. I just reflect what the Minister said about the importance of ensuring there is now absolutely no basis on which taxpayer funds can be used for electioneering activities as happened with the pledge card. That can never be allowed to happen again and with these changes it will not happen. 
I commend the bills to the House.