Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I agree with the sentiments expressed by Kennedy Graham but I do not go quite to the extent that he does. I do not think a party of one person can expect to have representation on committees such as this. You know in the last Parliament we had three parties of one—we had the ACT Party United Future and Mana—and if you were to give each of them representation on a committee and still have that committee representing the proportionality of Parliament in order for you to achieve your second objective of proportionality you would need a committee of 120 people. It would not work; it is actually called Parliament. So you actually do when you have committees that are drawn from the members of Parliament have to have regard to proportionality but you cannot go down to having representation of individual parties of one.Andrew Little has got Supplementary Order Paper 270 here and where I do agree with Kennedy Graham is that proportionality is important and that extends to all parties that have what I would say is moderate representation or above. The reason that Andrew Little has brought his Supplementary Order Paper forward is due to the circumstance that we have in this very Parliament. If the Intelligence and Security Committee is limited to seven people and the Government wants with its coalition partners to have a majority—which is four of those seven—then that leaves three people between the Opposition and the current votes are roughly with Labour a little bit more than 30 and Greens and New Zealand First with 14 or 15 votes each. To have proportionality in respect of the Opposition you effectively need four seats: two votes for the Labour Party or two representatives from the Labour Party one from New Zealand First and one from the Green Party. So you would need four from the Opposition to achieve a fair level of proportionality in representation. So it is for that reason that Andrew Little I think quite forcefully makes the point that a committee of nine maximum is preferable so that in this sort of eventuality which is not unusual I do not think under MMP you can have genuine recognition of the rough proportionality of Parliament.The issue as to whether that becomes an unworkable size of committee—I did give some consideration to that and you know I am not in favour of overly large committees. But then I reflected upon the fact that actually nine is very normal for our select committees. Indeed the committee that heard this very piece of legislation the New Zealand Intelligence and Security Bill was a committee of nine people. It did a very good job and it was not unwieldy by virtue of having nine people. So with respect to the Attorney-General we do disagree with him on this occasion and we do think that the maximum should be nine rather than seven. We do not go so far as Kennedy Graham in saying that any party that is represented in Parliament should have a right to sit on this statutory committee. We think that is going too far.The second part of Andrew Little's Supplementary Order Paper is the reference to proportionality requirements which he achieves through making a slight amendment to clause 156(5). I did I think hear that Kennedy Graham was going to put a Supplementary Order Paper on that proportionality point in itself but if that goes so far as to parties of one having a right of representation sadly we cannot support that because we think that goes too far. The Labour Party is proposing through Andrew Little's Supplementary Order Paper a reference to proportionality: a maximum of nine which in the current configuration of Parliament would enable the Leader of the Opposition to effectively have two representatives from Labour and have one from the Greens and one from New Zealand First which would fairly reflect the wishes of the New Zealand population who vote for the representatives who appear in this Parliament. I know it is not a select committee; it is a statutory committee but I still think that the Committee should support the Supplementary Order Paper that is in the name of Andrew Little.