Locke Keith: Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:620;Page:15493] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Some members have been putting across that the Greens are trying to force this voting system on schools whereas the bill clearly states that it will be available to schools. Even if the national school trustees body is not at this point pushing for the system there are schools that would enjoy it and benefit from it. 
To me the compliance cost argument does not carry much weight. We live in a computer society and all that is needed is a little bit of software that can run the vote count. An initial cost might be incurred in getting the software into those schools that want to take up this system but once that software is installed the vote counting will be as easy as in any other system. Alternatively an agency may come in under contract to do the vote counting. As my colleague Rod Donald said such agencies have the software in their computers so there is no significant compliance cost there. 
This procedure will give minorities in schools better representation be they ethnic minorities or people with minority views about where their school should go. Some of the other speeches have reinforced that point in some ways. Deborah Coddington commented that only a few parents turn up to meet-the-candidates meetings. Often particularly in big schools parents who are confronted with having to vote for a certain number of candidates know only a couple of them—whom they will vote for—and wonder who else to vote for. They often end up exercising a less-informed vote in that they just tick the names of people who sound good in order to make up the number on their list. It is unfortunately true if we go by the evidence of the Auckland local body results—and I am not saying those elections are entirely identical to school boards of trustees elections—that people with “foreign-sounding” names miss out when that less-informed category of voting is exercised by people who are just filling up their lists. It has been indicated here that there is a lower level of Asian and other minority representation on school boards of trustees. There are fewer people from these groups on them than their presence in the population indicates there should be. So there can be a certain cultural conservatism in the voting that puts candidates of minority nationalities out of the picture. 
Other members have said that people vote just for the person. Well we can see from the situation at Cambridge High School recently that disputes can occur over the direction a school should take. We therefore want different views in terms of the direction the school should take to be represented on the board as well. Once again using the parallel of local body elections STV allows not only for broader representation but also for more positive voting. The reality is that in elections be they local body or school boards of trustees elections a number of similar candidates can be competing for the same spot—for example a number of candidates of a particular ethnicity. In the case of the Auckland mayoralty contest that is going on at the moment—which I am familiar with as an MP from Auckland—the incumbent had two challengers Christine Fletcher and Bruce Hucker then Dick Hubbard came into the ring making three challengers with overlapping constituencies one could say. Bruce Hucker thought it was wise for him to pull out at that point. Under an STV system he could have stayed in the race because even if he lost his preference votes would have tended to go to the dominant challenger to Mr Banks. 
I think an STV system benefits us all. One of the things about STV that has not been talked about enough is that through the preference system one gets to the quota. If there is a multi-member situation the quota can be relatively low so people from a minority ethnic group in a school can get representation and a block of the dominant ethnic group cannot out-vote all the minority candidates. The system is much fairer in that respect.