Franks Stephen: Electoral Amendment Bill Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Readings 
Franks Stephen: Electoral Amendment Bill Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Readings 
[Volume:622;Page:17337] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party to also comment on the two bills—the Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 2) and the Electoral Amendment Bill. First the Electoral Amendment Bill: we will support it on the basis that it is an improvement on where we are but not nearly as much as might be expected. We think that it could have been done a lot better. There is an embarrassment for Parliament in that bill. The principal amendments to the Electoral Act deal with the Duynhoven scandal. When Harry Duynhoven a very popular member discovered that he had taken a step that had apparently renewed his Dutch citizenship he fell foul of a provision that appears in the Electoral Acts of most similar countries that means the voters get a chance to decide whether they still want to be represented by someone who has signed allegiance to a foreign prince monarch or power. They are very old provisions. As I said they are in the electoral laws of a number of countries and they are pretty easy to understand. The voters can decide that they want to be represented by someone who might have divided loyalties by someone who has citizenship of another country as well as that of New Zealand or by someone who has a relationship with a foreign power as long as they know about it. 
 The voters can make that decision elect the member and so long as that position does not change the member’s entitlement to sit in this House should be unchallenged. But for very good reason the Electoral Act had a provision that said that when a new foreign allegiance is created the voters should get a chance to decide whether they still wanted to be represented by someone who might have a funkhole to bolt to—who had another country he or she could dart off to when they had made a mess of this one by their voting or party support in Parliament. 
Harry Duynhoven was in that position. He no doubt knows that the “Cullen Superannuation Fund” is smoke and mirrors; it is not going to give him in his old age a cent. So he decided he needed to qualify for the Dutch Government superannuation scheme. He renewed his citizenship which was a very sensible precaution I would say given he probably knows more about the Labour Government’s superannuation provisions than we do. 
However that action triggered the Electoral Act. So the Speaker failed to apply the law and held off for long enough for the Electoral Act to be changed. Well the Electoral Amendment Act will reverse that change. Yes it has what Rod Donald called “cosmetic tidy-up”; it now states expressly that if a member acquires citizenship by reason only of his or her birth in another country the member does not automatically trigger that re-election requirement. But that was the position anyway because the previous law required some positive step. So we have now fixed it up for Mr Duynhoven and all of those who are hiding behind him and reverted the law to the status quo ante. 
However it is really plain what we have been doing there; we revert it to the status quo only as from after the next election. So the Government did not want to risk any more of its folk being found out. This applies only after the next election. The Electoral Amendment Bill does not cover what should have been the other side of consideration by the Parliament of nationality and citizenship in relation to members of Parliament. It does not cover entitlement to vote. I believe that the bill should have made sure that only New Zealand citizens could vote for New Zealand representatives. It is long overdue that we require people to show their loyalty to New Zealand their long-term interest in being here by becoming citizens before they are electing representatives to govern this country. 
The other bill that we are debating in its third reading and for which I put the ACT position strongly is the Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 2). We have 11 pages of amendments to the Broadcasting Act to govern the broadcasting of election programmes. Now most New Zealanders probably find those about as dreary as anything that one gets on television. In fact most New Zealanders probably never come across it. Because if one does not watch Television One or listen to National Radio one will not see anything of an election nature that has not been filtered by the media establishment. The two old parties decided a long time ago that they were not going to risk any challenges to the status quo getting direct access to the voters through the electronic media. TVNZ and Radio New Zealand will be the only ones that we can speak to directly and that is only in the allocated time given by the Electoral Commission and for the parties other than National and Labour that is only in the fractional moments that they get. As I said yesterday it would not be enough time to launch a decent dog roll in a supermarket advertising campaign. The time that New Zealanders expect to learn about the issues facing their country and where the parties stand on them would not launch a new bus timetable on radio. It is utterly pathetic and that is New Zealand’s excuse for free speech at election time. 
The consequence of the amendments to sections 70 72 and 73 of the Electoral Act is that New Zealanders hear about their politicians only what the media establishment wants them to hear—that is what news editors decide is appropriate. If we want to think about what that practice has meant over the last 20 years just think how often people have said: “Why hasn’t someone been speaking for us about the treaty industry? Why wasn’t some politician arguing why didn’t we hear at election time the sorts of things that Dr Brash said at Orewa early this year?”. 
Well the answer is that parties were. The ACT party has had a one-law-for-all policy since 1998 but how will people know what their politicians are standing for if the only access to the media that most people use—the radio and television—is filtered first through the Electoral Commission and secondly through media editors and journalists? Actually those people do not share the views of most New Zealanders. They think they are so much better than the rest of us so much more noble and unselfish that they had better filter out those ugly individuals who speak directly as Dr Brash did in January this year. That sort of discussion gets filtered out by the elite who dominate our media. So we have an impoverished form of democracy and this Broadcasting Amendment Bill (No 2) simply cements that in place. 
We had an opportunity in the Justice and Electoral Committee to make a timid change which would have said: “OK we have spending limits in New Zealand on political campaigns so that people can’t go out there with big money and buy an election.”—although there is not any evidence that that can be done anyway. The spending limits could have been applied very simply across all the expenditure that parties make in an election campaign; and parties could have chosen whether they spent it on radio television direct mail postcards hip-hop gatherings or whatever else they wanted to do. The Greens could have been advertising directly on youth radio if they think it is only young people who vote for them. The National Party could have gone only on gardening programmes and those that appeal to the elderly. Winston Peters of course could have gone to the people in the rest homes and elsewhere where his support comes from. But we could have chosen who we were going to. Instead the parties in the select committee ganged up to make sure that once again this Parliament did not get a chance to vote on a proposal to allow free speech on— 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Uncharitable. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: That was the effect. They would not allow free speech through radio or television for fear of disturbing the status quo for fear of upsetting the applecart for a Government that has maintained a very tight restriction on the realms of permissible political debate in polite society and on radio and television for many years. The ACT party will support the bill because it is a slight improvement on where we are but it is a woeful bill compared with where this country should be in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of debate around elections.