Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Thank you very much for the ability to give a contribution to this general debate. I want to talk about a group of people—a group of constituents—whom I support through my portfolio work and that is people with disabilities. They have been asking me and petitioning me over the course of the last few months to discuss issues of participation. So I had a look at the Justice and Electoral Committee's Inquiry into the 2014 general election and I want to commend the Electoral Commission and the submitters who submitted in that particular process.I want to quote from the report which said: A strong theme in the submissions relating to voters with disabilities was about media coverage around the election. Submitters call for a greater use of captioning on political media coverage and more media content aimed at voters with disabilities. Some submitters argue that interpretation captioning and election advertising targeted at voters with disabilities should be publicly funded or not count towards electoral expenditure limits." What this speaks to is some of the issues that people with disabilities have raised with me and those are around their inability to participate fully in the democratic process.When we look at the issue of accessibility one of the first things we need to look at is how we define accessibility. When we look at polling places they are listed as being "accessible" "fully accessible" or "accessible with support". Accessibility in that case means the ability to get a wheelchair into a polling place. But accessibility in terms of being a person with a disability has a much wider context and it is about access and participation. Currently there is a petition being run by Deaf Action that is calling for all the televised public debates for the election to be fully live captioned and to have sign language interpreters. You would think that in this day and age it would be an easy task to facilitate.When we think about people with vision impairment I note that in the 2014 election we had for the first time the ability for voters with a disability who typically needed assistance marking their ballot paper to be able to use a telephone dictation service. But I have recently spoken with people who have vision impairment who talk about the desire they have to be able to enter a polling booth and to mark their own ballot if that ballot were in Braille. So what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about it?What Labour believes is that there should be no barriers to participation for anyone who wants to engage in the democratic process and that when we find those barriers we should do everything we can to eliminate them. What we are going to do—what we have committed to do and what I know the Greens have also committed to do—is sponsor accessibility legislation. What that means is co-creating with the disability sector a piece of legislation that ensures that we provide accessible public information and communications; that we create accessible workplaces and employment; that we offer accessible goods and services; that we ensure accessible transport; and that we provide accessible customer services access to justice accessible housing and most importantly accessible participation in the democratic process. One of the things we will do to ensure that is we will make sure that the level of live captioning is 100 percent of public broadcasting and we will work with those providers' online platforms to ensure captioning of their online content.We commit to supporting children with special needs to participate fully in the education system. We support healthcare for all people with disabilities. We support ensuring that public transport is accessible and we will ensure resourcing transition services from school to tertiary education and employment. Together we know we can do this so let's do this."