Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. The ACT Party stands in opposition to this shortened report-back date. For people who may have just tuned into this the Government is trying to ensure that a law it wants to pass instead of going to select committee for proper consultation of the public over six months like the rules of Parliament require they want it to happen for about six weeks and report it back in November.This is something that has gone on too long and is happening too often under this Government. It's the second such debate that we've had in Parliament tonight so far. We have already had exactly this debate on the previous piece of legislation the COVID-19 Response (Management Measures) Legislation Bill.Hon Chris Hipkins: This from the party founded by Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas.DAVID SEYMOUR: And the problem is—and Chris Hipkins says this is the party founded by Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas. Can he tell us what the relevance of this comment was?Hon Chris Hipkins: Because they never consulted on anything.DAVID SEYMOUR: Well actually I'll have the record set straight as Chris Hipkins says. They consulted very widely and the Labour Party then a fine party committed to better public policy had in its manifesto that it would remove unnecessary regulation and indeed they did. People voted for them on that basis and they implemented their agenda.Hon Chris Hipkins: They sold everything off!DAVID SEYMOUR: Chris Hipkins might be interested to know now that he's bought this into the debate that that particular Government that Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble were an integral part of introduced a Constitution Act that stopped what used to happen; the disgraceful suspension of the Standing Orders where people used to just say the rules don't apply and do almost anything in this Parliament. They actually introduced for example the Public Finance Act so that Governments had to properly budget.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! I have explained to the House that this debate has to be confined to members' views on why or why not the report-back date should stand.DAVID SEYMOUR: Madam Speaker thank you.Chris Bishop: Point of order Madam Speaker. I want to clarify because I for one was enjoying that exchange and the Minister was making repeated interjections so is it the case that a member can respond during the debate to the interjection in relation to that or—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Thank you—thank you. I'll take some advice on that thank you. Thank you both for your points of order. Members can respond to interjections by other members of the House but those responses should be in passing and should not then become the main body or an extended argument of their intervention.DAVID SEYMOUR: Well thank you Madam Speaker. I did want to set the record straight. To say that Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble never consulted on anything is grossly unfair historically inaccurate as I was just demonstrating for the education of the new Labour members who often aren't particularly familiar with their own history.If I really wanted to go off track I might have referred to the first session of Parliament in 1854 in which the Standing Orders were suspended and it actually descended into a fist fight as members of the Opposition attempted to scale the walls into the public gallery to deny the Government a quorum. But Madam Speaker that would be going off track on this—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I think it would be. I would invite the member to come back to the debate in hand.DAVID SEYMOUR: No no. I certainly won't talk about that. We should actually talk about the shortening of this select committee because it is I think increasingly relevant to democracy not only in New Zealand but around the world that we are seeing less and less respect for democratic processes. When this bill goes before a select committee it's not being examined by the half a dozen or a dozen members of a particular select committee the Health Committee in this instance; it's actually being examined by them on behalf of the citizens who elected them. The right to elect somebody to speak for you into a Parliament is something that half the world's never had and that the other half has had to fight for desperately and we throw it away at our peril.We need to be perfectly clear that it's not about rushing this legislation past those MPs; it's actually denying the rights of those citizens to vote for a representative to scrutinise the legislation in any proper way and it's critical that if we have these rights we actually preserve them. And if you look at the wider context tonight three bills in a row: the COVID-19 Response (Management Measures) Legislation Bill. Well that's going to have a two-week select committee process even though it is for the first time in a very long time if not in New Zealand history showing Parliament retrospectively altering the terms of private contracts. It's never been done before. There's going to be a two-week consultation on that.And the bill that is scheduled to be debated after this the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill well that was at select committee. Four months had passed. The members of that committee had been listening to members of the public making their submissions. And then what happened? We had our tragic event in LynnMall West Auckland at the Countdown out there. The Government panicked and decided to take that legislation away from the select committee who were just doing the important part of their work in the fifth and sixth month where they actually take what they've heard from listening to people and put it into the legislation so we can actually have laws that benefit from hearing the public. What did the Government do? They said We're going to drag that out of the select committee and we're just going to do it ourselves."Well this is something that has to be seen in a wider trend of a Government that is not giving voice to New Zealanders is not allowing them to be heard. It's a threat to democracy generally because all around the world we see people losing faith in politicians. We see people losing faith in the democratic process. We see fewer countries practising democracy and those that do are not practising it as well as they used to. Don't take my word for it. That's Freedom House. They're based in Washington DC. They've been studying democracy around the world civil liberties and political rights—they've been studying those since 1944—and for the last 15 years around the world the respect for and practice of democracy has been in decline. We in this House have a duty to uphold what we have inherited. We stand here surrounded by the names of battles where usually young boys but also men and women of the New Zealand Defence Force have been sent to their death to uphold those values. And here we are three times in one night denying New Zealanders the right to have their legislation properly considered in front of a select committee. In the case of this latest legislation it's being done simply because the Government wasn't prepared. They've been underprepared all year. They took the world's longest nap. They thought they had COVID beaten. They got to the stage where they actually thought it was a good idea to spend half a billion dollars on a boomer bike bridge to Birkenhead. That how off track they got. That's how long their nap was. And then there was an outbreak and they thought "Oh we should do something about that." and as a result of their own unpreparedness they are introducing legislation and rushing it through undemocratically. Now I think there's a simple choice here. Either the Government should accept that its response and its measures are late and give people the due process and opportunity to have their voices heard and proper lawmaking process considered or democracy can suffer. That's really the question. This Government's level of organisation this Government's reputation; that's one set of considerations. And the other set of considerations is the long-term health of New Zealand democracy and the simple idea that every adult New Zealander has the right to elect a representative to speak for them go to select committees and scrutinise bills and be heard—a proper democratic lawmaking process. In fact it is probably the singular New Zealand political achievement at a global level—the simple idea that every adult New Zealander has the right to vote something that the Prime Minister and many other politicians in this House were celebrating just nine days ago on 19 September. And then what are we doing tonight? Three times in one night saying: "Actually the people that got represented the people that got representation that Kate Sheppard and her petitioners won that right for well we're not going to listen to them in select committee; we're just going to rush the bill through and who cares? The Government knows best. We don't really need democracy."I think that is an enormous shame but from a Government that was quite prepared to have stand-ups with two dozen journalists in a tiny room of the Beehive Theatrette but thought that having this Parliament sitting in person with them standing on the same carpet as every other representative was somehow far too dangerous—I'm not surprised that democracy is in a certain amount of trouble. And that's why this motion to rush through select committee should fall tonight. Thank you Madam Speaker."