Little Andrew: Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Little Andrew: Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 26 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8966. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ANDREW LITTLE (Labour) 
: 
 They say that politicians are like nappies. They need to be changed periodically and usually for the same reason. For that reason the laws that we have governing the election of politicians whether they are central government or local government need to be laws that promote and encourage integrity and transparency. If there is one thing that has been lacking from the local government laws up until recently and certainly during 2010 it is integrity and transparency. So we welcome the arrival of this bill and the opportunity to give closer examination to it because it does something that we did not previously have in place and that is to bring a level of at least transparency with integrity being the by-product of it to local body elections. 
Let us remember that what lies at the heart of this bill is the provisions that require greater and better disclosure of donations and better accounting of expenditure by candidates and there are other provisions too that relate to declarations to be made by candidates for example of not only the positions they are standing for but the ward or the area that they live in and those sorts of things. We are confident on this side of the Chamber that this bill will go some considerable way to preventing what we saw in the 2010 mayoral election at least in so far as the city of Auckland was concerned where we had money exchanging hands accounted for in different ways by different candidates and indeed behaviour by at least one candidate that was nothing short of an outrage. 
One of the remaining issues that we had with this bill as it left the Justice and Electoral Committee—and indeed the report of the committee noted this—related to donations in kind of a certain level and I think under $300 where a donation of that sort was made on a recurring basis to a candidate. Under the bill at that point in the interpretation of the relevant clauses of the bill there was an apparent loophole. I am pleased to see in Supplementary Order Paper 198 in the name of the Minister of Local Government that he has gone to now correct that with new section 103A inserted by clause 27 in the legislation which I think will fix or at least fill the gap that was left in the bill at the time that it left the select committee. On that basis we are confident that this will achieve the objective set forth which is to ensure that local body elections and we have them this year will now be conducted with a level of integrity and transparency that we are used to in central government elections in the general elections that we have every 3 years but that we have not seen in local body elections. 
Perhaps the reason for that is that local body elections were conducted in a very tame way—I would like to use the term “gentlemanly” but it is sexist in these respects. They were conducted in a way that everybody—candidates and those administering the elections—respected what it was all about which was putting themselves up for public office winning the confidence of the local citizenry of their area and generally behaving in a reasonable and sensible way. That habit if you like that practice and that culture very much evaporated in Auckland in 2010 and the need for this legislation was absolutely paramount. The Government has seen the need for that. We have all seen the need for that over the fiasco of the donations and so on to candidates in that election. This legislation will now address that problem. It will make a big change. It will be good for all candidates in the local body elections this year and ongoing. It may well be that there are some things in these provisions that we can now look to for general elections to make sure that those standing for election to Parliament might actually consider and get the benefit of them in terms of a greater transparency. 
These are good measures and this is a good bill. The Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper makes the changes that we think are needed to close out and make this a good piece of legislation that we will happily support.