Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a rare and great thrill for me to be able to join with our friends in the Labour Party and agree with them that in an area of electoral reform we're on the same side. We both agree that something's not right here but we both agree that this particular bill put forward by the Green Party the so-called Electoral (Strengthening Democracy) Amendment Bill is not a good one. It is one that we won't be supporting either partly because of the reasons outlined by the previous Labour speaker Ginny Andersen: that many of the issues put forward in this bill are to be considered over the next couple of years by the Government's independent panel.I do want to take issue however with the previous speaker's reference to it being bipartisan. Quite frankly it followed this Government's definition of bipartisan engagement" when it came to the selection of an independent panel which is to say that they come up with a list of names send them to us on a letter and say "These are the names that we want to appoint and if you object well tough luck because they are the ones that we're still going to appoint." And so it's a very strange form of bipartisanship on their part. In fact we'd have a very different view on how you could get a broader support for it. We do have serious concerns about a lot of electoral reform being pushed through by this Government without bipartisan support and we can point to a bill currently before the House which we strongly disagreed with and they're still pushing through regardless. So unfortunately they're not quite consistent on those matters.But nevertheless we agree with them that what this bill does is a whole bunch of things. One of them of course is giving murderers the right to vote—as one thing which seems like an odd and strange priority for any parliamentarian at the moment. We would sort of take the view that if you take somebody's life maybe you have forfeited the right to vote while you're in prison for having done that. But clearly that's a priority for the Greens to change.When it comes to extending the voting age to 16 I'll be very interested to see the arguments put forward over the months and years about that. I certainly would think that if we were talking with the Green Party about youth justice they would have a very strong view that 16- and 17-year-olds are kids and should be treated very differently in the justice system and in a very different way to adults. Now their brains haven't formally developed and so they're not fully responsible for criminal activity in the same way as adults. But when it comes to electoral law it's a very different standard. So I'd be very interested to see how they square those two different views.We could go through all of these issues but the sad reality is that this bill having being opposed by Labour—which under the current electoral laws have an insurmountable vote that will stop anything that they want to stop—this bill is unfortunately dead on arrival. And so whether we support it or not is irrelevant to the matter. But on that basis I just want to make clear that we won't be supporting it. Thank you very much."