Foster AndyANDY FOSTER (NZ First): Look Mr Speaker thank you. Like it or not this is the three coalition parties doing exactly what we campaigned on delivering on our promises to New Zealand. Now you might not like it but that is the fact of the matter. I want to focus my comments—Hon Member: You're better than that Andy.ANDY FOSTER: Doesn't take them very long does it? I want to focus my comments on Labour's minority view in the Justice Committee report and make four points. The first of those is that Labour has complained that this is a rushed process. Well Simon Court has already covered that. This has taken us two months to get to this point. It took Labour just two weeks to get through the entire process last time round. So when they complain about the difficulty in making submissions I think the pot is calling the kettle black.The second point I want to make—and this might be educational for people on the other side—is that there were some consequences of rushing this process. One of the consequences was because they rushed the process in 2021 it also meant that councils had to rush their process. Now I've been through quite a lot of representation reviews put on a council and those are long detailed processes where you look at demography you look at geography and so on. That was denied to councils if they wanted to adopt a Māori ward for the 2022 election. It also meant the councils' engagement processes were relatively limited in time in analysis and in who got to have a say.I was the Mayor of Wellington when we brought in a Māori ward under that legislation and I actually believe that people should have the right to determine their electoral representation system. I also believe that having Māori voices in councils is important and there are a number of different ways to deliver it but whichever way those are delivered.In Wellington there was support from the submitters who made submissions for a Māori ward. But there's also another really really important thing which I'll come back to and that is really really important that each vote has roughly the same value and we have a problem in that. The submission process we had was very very constrained. As I said councils had to complete that process by 21 May 2021 so it was a rushed process. The third point was one that hadn't occurred to me and that is that there were people who said to me that because they were on the Māori roll for the national election because this was a rushed process in 2021 they automatically ended up being on the Māori ward for the local election but some of them didn't want to be. I know that might be changed but this is a consequence of rushing that legislation. Some of them would have liked to have voted in their own community ward their general ward and they were denied that opportunity.Point four is the one that I really wanted to focus on. I was actually disappointed when I read the select committee report and that's disappointed across the board that there was little consideration in that report back of the critical democratic principle of fair representation. A democracy is underpinned by two key principles: one person one vote; we all know about that. But the other one that's really really important is that each vote has got to be worth roughly the same amount.Look we can all remember the failed anti-democratic Rotorua council bill but I was interested in references to the departmental disclosure statement in the select committee report. They referred to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and they talked about Article 25 which recognises and protects the right of every citizen to take part in the conduct of public affairs and that's not been denied to anybody. Article 26 which enshrines a right to equality before the law—and there is a question mark there and that question mark's been raised across the House. Somehow these created concerns for the officials in regards to the bill.What I was interested in is that they didn't actually refer to an article further up the tree in that covenant which is Article 2. It says that each State party undertakes to ensure that all individuals subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognised in the present covenant without—this is the important bit—distinction of any kind such as race colour sex language religion political or other opinions national or social origin property birth or other status. So in other words treat everybody the same is that article that this country has signed up to.Now section 19V of the Local Electoral Act tackles that very principle of fair representation. What it says is that the council or Local Government Commission must—not may but must—ensure that electors effectively have votes of the same value plus or minus 10 percent. We all know that rule that exists there in that section.The only exceptions that are allowed are for island or isolated communities or where you're splitting communities of interest or where you're putting two together which don't have anything in common. There's nothing in that section which says Māori wards are exempt from that requirement and there's also nothing in section 19Z which sets the framework for establishing Māori wards or constituencies.Rawiri Waititi: Well amend it.ANDY FOSTER: It's also—coming to that. It's also silent on the plus or minus 10 percent. It's when you look further into the Local Government Act right at the end there's a Schedule 1AA which gives the answer.Now Kieran McAnulty when he spoke said that there is no difference but actually there is a big difference. It's a very big difference because what that simple formula in section 1(a)(ii) does it absolutely does not adhere to the plus or minus 10 percent. It actually allows you a variation as high as 50 percent because what it does is it says it takes the number of people enrolled on the Māori roll with a calculation for non-enrolled people like children and it divides that number by the total population multiplies the result by the total number of councillors and if you're still with me if you're a mathematician there if the result is above 0.5 you round it up. If it's below 0.5 you round it down. But what that means in theory is that a ward with 50.1 percent of the general number will be entitled to a whole councillor so it could be a long long long way out.Now for illustration I'm going to use Wellington as an example again. The calculated entitlement on the basis of the population enrolled on the Māori roll was 0.609 councillors but what that means is that was rounded up for one councillor. What it means is that in effect for every—and at the time I can remember thinking That's uncomfortably low." It means that every prospective voter—and I say "prospective voter"—in the Māori ward is worth 1.67 prospective voters in the average general ward. That's a big big difference. That's not plus or minus 10 percent; that's a lot more than that.Labour's minority views said the existence of Māori wards or seats increases voter turnout and I thought "Actually I agree with that." I thought that this exciting new innovation it might encourage more people to vote. Actually it didn't. It did exactly the reverse. The turnout in the Māori ward was very very low.What happened then as the result was under single transferrable vote to get elected in Wellington on the first iteration candidates in a general ward—and these are the numbers; the actual numbers. Celia you're shaking your head. These are the actual numbers: between 3123 and 4277 first preference votes in the general ward. In the Māori ward Te Whanganui-a-Tara ward it was 888. The difference on average was four times as much. That is a significant issue and it's something which we should be paying some attention to.Look I'm not saying that all jurisdictions are going to be the same. I'm not saying that all jurisdictions are going to be the same and I'm going to do a bit more digging into this one. But the problem you have is that if this legislation passes as it is there are going to be people who might say "I like the idea of a Māori ward but I don't like the idea of the electoral unfairness it brings." Which way do they vote on that one? That will challenge some people. It is an issue to me of electoral fairness.I'd like to remind you one more thing: we in this House have a clear laser-like focus a legislative requirement to deliver electoral fairness. Each vote is worth very much the same. In fact the law says plus or minus not 10 percent but 5 percent and that's general and Māori wards. To achieve that in the last electoral review in 2019 what happened? An extra seat was created and 22 seats—22 seats—had their boundaries changed. That is how much electoral fairness matters in this place. My question to you is: why doesn't it matter for local government? At this stage I commend this bill to the House."