Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I just wanted at this early stage to respond to a couple of things that the Hon Dr Nick Smith has just said there. He is right that there are other aspects of the current legislation that do cause distortion. The one seat-rule is one of those things and arguably the threshold set at 5 percent rather than for example at 4 percent—as recommended by the royal commission—has the potential for a distorting effect.I suppose why I'm stunned by that contribution by Nick Smith is because his party when in Government had the opportunity to change that. They actually had a report that recommended that they make that change and they would not do it. Here's the argument they used. They said: But we can't get the agreement of all parties in Parliament." Do you know actually what that was? Do you know the one party that didn't agree? Them—they wouldn't agree. So their argument was "We can't possibly change this because we need the agreement of all parties in Parliament. Oh by the way we don't agree."—that was their argument.That is how hideous that party is when it comes to constitutional and electoral principle. It is outrageous that Dr Nick Smith should stand up and say that just now but he has done. It is good to be able to correct once again the historical record just so we understand the kind of character of some of the people we are dealing with.I want to make this point too and that is to say this: I was also stunned at Dr Nick Smith's representation of another factor that distorts proportionality of party representation. That is—although he didn't use the words—the wasted vote. We know there are parties that stand perennially—or at least every election—who have no chance ever of getting elected but they might get you know 0.01 percent of the vote share and between them they can get 2 or 3 percent or sometimes 4 percent. Sometimes there is a huge wasted vote. The poor old Conservative Party of New Zealand in the 2014 election—they got over 4 percent; not quite 5 percent. What a wasted vote. The Opportunities Party had a go. Gareth Morgan had a go—2.5 percent or whatever it was—but ultimately the vote was wasted.So while Nick Smith is technically correct in the kind of engineer's sense that Parliament isn't fully proportionally represented because there is this thing called the wasted vote. That's what happens when you have a threshold and you have some parties that don't make the threshold. It is called the wasted vote. Now unless Dr Nick Smith is suggesting that we start ruling out parties—a bit like we see in countries in other parts of the world where there are committees that decide whether or not particular parties can stand or not. Maybe that's what he's proposing—I don't know—but that's not the system that we've got. We do allow all-comers to come and offer themselves to see if they can get a share of the vote. Maybe they can get 5 percent on a good day. There have been all-comers that have tried this and many have struggled to do it. But I suppose what it really highlights is that we are now very much into the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" territory when it comes to arguments from the National Party about this piece of legislation. I go back to the point. This is a very simple piece of legislation. It doesn't need further provisions requiring definitions of distortion or what it means to act in a distorted proportionality. We don't need that because the principle is very simple. This is about affirming that principle under our current Electoral Act that once the electorate has voted and we've established the proportionality of representation in this Parliament—taking into account the wasted vote taking into account all those other things—then it is not for individual members to undermine that proportional representation by flitting off and doing other things for whatever reason.The one thing that of course will remain in all of that when politicians act when parties act when party leaders act and when caucuses act is that people will make political judgments bearing in mind the political dynamics of the day. There are shifts of mood and shifts of support in things amongst the electorate. People will kind of work within that and that will determine what happens. There is every possibility that an MP will go off and set up another party while in Parliament join another party and nothing will happen because that's the political judgment of the day. It suits everybody to do so."