Locke Keith: Electoral (Reduction in Number of Members of  Parliament) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Locke Keith: Electoral (Reduction in Number of Members of  Parliament) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:635;Page:6324] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is strongly against the Electoral (Reduction in Number of Members of Parliament) Amendment Bill and we are very surprised that an MMP party like New Zealand First has come forward with it. It shows the level of populism among New Zealand First members that they are willing to commit hara-kiri as an MMP party just to get temporary applause from a grumpy anti-political brigade. The opposition to the size of Parliament as it is—120 or currently 121—is from people who are grumpy about politicians and want to reduce the number of politicians and the expenditure on them but who have not really properly thought through the way to meet their objections to what happens in Parliament. People’s grumpiness with politicians is in many ways justified. It comes from the way that Labour and National Governments have performed in the past—the sell-outs in the past particularly during the 1980s and 1990s—and the fact that there does not seem to be much restraint on executive power in many cases. We can understand where that anti-politician sentiment comes from but this bill is quite the wrong way to go about addressing those concerns. It is the sort of thing that will produce the opposite effect of what it intends. 
Let us take for example people’s objections to the bad behaviour of MPs. There is a lot of concern at the moment about the way that National and Labour members trade insults across the Chamber and about the level of the noise in the Chamber. But the reality is that if the number of MPs goes down from 120 to 100 the 20 or 21 people who will get chopped off the bottom are generally the best behaved politicians. If we look through the list of the current Parliament we see that the MPs who would be chopped off it come disproportionately from the smaller parties and it is the smaller parties that are the best behaved in comparison with the two old parties. 
I think this bill is rather strange and I do not know quite where New Zealand First is coming from. New Zealand First has seven MPs. The Greens have six MPs. With six MPs and on 5.3 percent of the vote we have about 15 portfolios each. I do not know why New Zealand First wants to reduce its number of MPs which would give each of them even more portfolios and make it more difficult for them to confront the bigger parties—which have several times as many MPs as New Zealand First—policy by policy. Why does New Zealand First want to support a bill that knocks the very way that its MPs come into Parliament? 
As cited in the report back from the Justice and Electoral Committee the objections to the current system are basically to MMP as it operates. The report says: “In addition some questioned the current ability of defeated electorate candidates to enter Parliament as list members on occasion becoming ministers.” That seems to be talking about Winston Peters. He lost the Tauranga electorate came in as a list MP and is now a Minister. This bill encourages the sentiment that if one runs in an electorate—and I ran in the Epsom electorate in the last Parliament to get the Green Party vote up—and if one does not win that electorate somehow one does not deserve to come in as a list MP. That is quite the wrong concept in terms of the contribution that people can make to this House. 
Certainly as the select committee pointed out in figures in the appendices of its report Parliament would become much less representative under this measure. It has become much more representative through MMP and through having 120 or 121 members. Seventeen percent of the members of Parliament are Maori and 33 percent are women. That is a tremendous achievement of the MMP system. 
In fact select committees would not be able to function properly if we had fewer members. One of the things at the back of the minds of a lot of the people who voted for a reduction in the number of MPs was restraining the power of the executive. That is done in this Parliament to a significant extent by the select committees. Having sufficient people in Parliament to properly staff the select committees is a restraint on executive power—particularly in light of what Tim Barnett just said about us not having two Houses in New Zealand and hence having the problem that Ministers can drive through decisions very quickly. 
In terms of the cost we have to look at it proportionately. Sure it costs a few million dollars for the extra 20 or 21 MPs but we must compare that with the amount of money in the total Government budget and with the decisions it makes such as that to be made on the waterfront stadium. The figure of $700 million is being thrown around for that project which is about $400 million more than the Eden Park option and that may be decided on all of a sudden. That level of expenditure by the Government dwarfs the extra few million dollars needed to have 120 or 121 MPs. It is value for money to pay that extra money for the additional MPs because we do constrain the executive. We may even constrain the Government in the decision to be taken over the waterfront stadium proposal though the Greens have not been consulted over that decision at all and I think our Maori Party colleagues have not been consulted either. We need MMP parties in order to properly represent the total electorate and to constrain the power of the executive. 
The Green Party is certainly against this bill. We support the select committee recommendation to discharge it. We need to be proud of our MMP system and of the representation across the spectrum that the eight parties provide in all sorts of ways—in terms of gender of ethnic origin and of representing different migrant communities etc. We will not achieve that if we reduce the number of MPs and effectively undermine MMP.