Clendon David: Electoral Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Electoral Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 13 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15938. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to take a call on the Electoral Amendment Bill. In a sense this bill is a fine-tuning bill. It does not make any dramatic changes to our electoral systems but it is still important that we continue to address the whole matter of how we conduct our elections. We are very privileged I would have to say to live in a country where we have regular free fair and open elections. That is something we ought never to take for granted. We should continually strive to make that process as accessible as reliable and as secure as it can possibly be and I think this bill is in the spirit of that. It does seek to make some improvements. We do not think it is the best it could have been. There are some things we would have liked to see in it that are not there but for the most part—and the point has been made—we did achieve a reasonably high level of consensus at the Justice and Electoral Committee.I will respond to just some of the points that have made by our Labour colleagues. I do recall the conversation that was had about the matter of the verbal confirmation—“Yes this is I who is handing you this piece of paper with my name on it.” I supportedit in the sense that I thought it was a good idea. Labour is clearly determined to reopen that particular conversation. So be it—that is the nature of the game. This bill is not yet signed off in its final place so we would be very interested in perhaps seeing some documentation or an argument put forward to reopen that part of the select committee process. We are certainly persuadable—although having said that we do wholeheartedly support the initiative from the New Zealand First member. It was a good select committee. I sat on it. Normally my colleague Holly Walker would have done that but she was rather busy seeing to the important business of delivering a young baby safely into the world. It was enjoyable thoughtful and occasionally humorous and I think we got to a pretty good place with the bill.I said that the bill is not all it could have been. I think it is unfortunate that there is still nothing in legislation anywhere that I am aware of that obliges us to deliver civics education in our schools. I think it is still the case that it is possible to get to the age where one can cast a vote with very little notion of exactly how the system works and what it all means. Reflecting on my experience as a lecturer in political studies I know of first-year politics students clearly with an interest in these things who were not confident and could not articulate the difference between the head of Government and the head of State and their relative status and powers. I think that is very dangerous. I suspect that would still be the case today so I would argue very strongly that we need to get serious about civics education.I think there is another missing part of this bill. It is unfortunate that we did not implement the whole raft of recommendations from the MMP Review Committee. I say that knowing full well that the Greens did not actually love all of them. There were some that were not in line with what we would have preferred. I think the Minister of Justice in introducing the bill talked about the importance of consensus around electoral practice and so on. I think we had an independent review committee that came back with some very good recommendations—a good broad range of recommendations—out of which all of us would have felt we had lost one and won a few perhaps. I do think it is unfortunate we did not just accept those recommendations wholesale. I think this selective notion was a bit unfortunate. It certainly made this Government vulnerable to accusations of self-interest and that is unfortunate.I think some of the key provisions of the bill which will make voting easier and more accessible are important not least of all because we have seen a significant decline in participation in voting over the last decade or more. That is most unfortunate and we do not want to see that continue. We need to make voting accessible. We need people to be excited and engaged in the political process. I think that full online enrolment—making it possible for people to get on to the roll from scratch online—is a good step in that direction. Younger generations are accustomed to doing most things online. For a very long time it has been possible to amend one’s personal details change one’s address—whatever it might be—online. There have been no apparent security breaches there so I think that was a good move and a good provision of the bill to advance.We certainly support the requirement in this new legislation that some light be shone on the business of loans becoming donations. I think people would be surprised to learn that a political party could accept a loan before an election and it would not need to be declared as a donation but afterwards the lender could simply excuse the party from ever having to pay it back. That invites corruption in a way that we certainly do not want in this country. I think the provision to close that loophole and to ensure that is a good one and it does not constrain anybody from giving substantial donations to parties. But it is important that those are transparent and visible and that everybody knows whois paying what to whom. It is important that we all understand where the source of funding for election campaigns is coming from.I think that the humour I mentioned in the select committee debate was very much focused on this rather unfortunate proposition about banning streamers and colours and so on. How far would you go? Would it make it an offence to walk your small child with a red ribbon in her hair or for somebody to wear a green T-shirt or dare I say it blue stockings? Where would you actually draw the line? I think what we came to was that we just let things go on as they are for the moment. Obviously scrutineers are identified and party workers can be identified. For a lot of it there was a lot of humour in it and I do think the outcome was the right one.I think as other speakers have mentioned that it may be timely to have a little bit more of a hard think about the extent to which electioneering on election day is tolerated or not. The general rule is that we knock off at midnight the night before and I think that is a good rule. There is no doubt that others have had the experience of pulling down billboards in the rain at 20 to 12 the night before because somebody had rung up and said “Hey do you remember that one on Boundary Road?”—that was my personal one.More serious I have done a very quick oversight of what other countries do in this regard. It is interesting to note that a lot of countries not dissimilar to ours—those with reasonably robust electoral systems—will often have a 24-hour election silence as it is often called. So 24 hours before the booths open there will be no campaigning of any sort. I think that is something we could usefully consider. Other countries will have 2 or 3 days where there is no broadcasting allowed so television and radio and newspaper advertising stops but on the ground the campaigning can advance apace. In the UK I believe there are some voluntary restrictions where parties collectively agree on certain practices that will or will not be allowed.So I think we ought not simply rest easily and think “OK we have a sort of a workable option in what we do.” I think we could interrogate that a bit more. I think we need to look very hard at the matter of polling because we know that people’s votes are significantly influenced by polling results which may be substantive and defensible or may be entirely bogus. Personally I think we need to put some limits around polling and the announcing of the polling results because they are not necessarily robust or reliable and I do think they have an unreasonable and sometimes unfortunate influence on voter behaviour. That is one of the things that I think we need to have a good conversation about.The final thing I will say is that this bill does deal around the margins with the Māori electoral option. It does make some minor changes to it. I think it is long overdue that we made it possible for people with whakapapa to be able to move on to or off the Māori roll—to switch between the general and the Māori rolls—more often than on a 5-yearly cycle. Effectively that covers two election cycles. I believe that there is no reason that we could not do that once every 3 years. I look forward to making a further contribution at future readings of the bill. Thank you.