Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): It is not often in this House that you get the opportunity to repeat a recent speech without being accused of repetition but on this occasion I am able to do so because having given my speech we were then told that we were debating a different bill—Jono Naylor: It's OK we all heard it.Hon DAVID PARKER: Ha ha! Actually I have made that sort of mistake before when it has been my mistake but on this occasion it was not. Of course the Minister in the chair Mark Mitchell because it turned out that we were debating the broadcasting bill rather than the electoral bill did not have to respond to my comments and I think the Minister should.Jono Naylor: He already did under the other bill.Hon DAVID PARKER: Ha ha! I do not think that we should be maintaining two separate lists of New Zealanders whom we have information about when we could actually have one. Virtually everyone in New Zealand who is eligible to vote has an IRD number and we know that overseas the Inland Revenue roll is the basis for their electoral roll. We know that superannuitants have an IRD number we know that everyone in work has an IRD number we know that everyone who is a beneficiary has an IRD number and everyone who has a student loan has an IRD number. We have almost a complete set of the people in New Zealand who are eligible to vote.There are some problems in there. There are some people who have an IRD number who are not eligible to vote so you have to sort that through. There are a couple of ways you could do that. You could work out whether it is actually an important enough number to worry about. It might actually be so infinitesimally small that you just ignore it and just change the law to let those people vote anyway because it is not going to change the outcome or you could actually just require a simple declaration when you vote that says … and I am a resident or citizen or have been in New Zealand for more than 1 year" which I think are the criteria to vote. If someone voted fraudulently in that situation it would be just like any other fraudulent vote. No doubt if there was an election outcome that came down to one vote people would be scrutinising whether there were possibly some invalid votes as already happens when you have got a close election and people are challenging whether people were enrolled in the right electorate or whether their vote was spoilt in some way as to mean that it ought not to have been counted.I do not understand why we spend all of this money every 3 years to create a separate list of New Zealanders when we have already got a list at the IRD. I have raised this on a number of occasions. I think this is a great area where we could actually improve the number of people who are eligible to vote whilst saving money for the Government. I heard the Hon Michael Woodhouse say that there are problems with that but the point has to be made that some of the best democracies in the world including Scandinavian counties approach it on that basis. I really think that it is worthy of consideration both to save money and to have better rolls.I think it is becoming more and more important that as people effectively abandon their letterboxes—people do not get much stuff through the letterbox now and their addresses are electronic. I am not sure that we actually need to have a residential address tied to everyone. I might have that wrong because maybe given physical constituencies we need accuracy on that in advance of election day but maybe again there could be just a declaration that "I live in the electorate". Or when you fill it in you put your address in—"I live at" you know in my case "95 London St Dunedin" and when I put it in that qualifies me to vote there if I have got an IRD number. We need to actually think some of these things through again because I think we overly complicate this. I am a little bit suspicious in this regard of the trend that we do see from time to time—I think we have to say this although I am certainly not suggesting that we have a corrupt system in New Zealand. It is true that most of the people who are itinerant or are moving between three or four flats are likely to be lower-income people than people who are stable at one home that they live in for the whole time. There is a socio-economic dimension to that that means that the rules presently work to the benefit of those who attract the most votes from people who are better off. And of course—this is poll proven—we all know that to be true that in New Zealand disproportionately those higher-income people vote for the National Party or parties of the right and disproportionately a larger number of the people who are at the lower to middle income groups vote for the Labour Party and parties of the left. We do not want a bias in the way in which we have electoral outcomes based on those sorts of facts and so we need to take special care that the people who are most often disenfranchised and unable to vote—actually for the health of our democracy we want to make sure that they have the opportunity to vote.In case the National Government was worried that that is going to change the outcomes of the elections in Australia they have compulsory voting. They have a very high rate of voter turnout. It is actually something that I wonder whether other democracies are going to consider over the forthcoming years and I do not think anyone on either side should be scared of that as an outcome because as you see in Australia you still get the same flip-flop from Government to Government as electors tire of one side and want to change sides. So I do not think that benefits any one particular side but I do think that the legitimacy of democracies in the Western World is being undermined by the decreasing rate of voter turnout.I think that the cynicism with which politics is regarded partly because of the disintegration of current media models and the parody that we sometimes also make so easy—the fodder that we give to those who would parody us is so much more easily exploited. Fashions change and as a consequence I think that there is a parlous decline in public confidence in democracy around the world. I for one really believe that that old saying that the only thing worse than a democracy is the alternative is actually a backhanded way of saying that democracy is incredibly important.In order to maintain public confidence in democracy we have got to maintain the highest rates of participation in elections as possible and we should consider all of the measures whether it be compulsory voting or different ways that we ensure that higher proportions of the population are enrolled. All of these things should be explored so that we can maintain public confidence in New Zealand's democracy.We can be a world leader in this area. We are one of the oldest unbroken democracies in the world—150 years without being broken by civil disturbance or internal wars. We really really should be holding on to what we have here which is so precious. I think our system is absolutely wonderful in New Zealand. It lacks some of the checks and balances that you see in other countries like the United States but its checks and balances have become so unwieldy its democracy does not work.We on the other hand have such a simple system that is even more reliant on being cleaned out by elections if there is a ruling party that gets it wrong. So in some ways our unicameral system with so much power in the executive attached to the party that gains power—I think that we really have to do our utmost to maximise both enrolment and voter turnout at elections."