Woods Megan: New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5485. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I was only too sad to hear that contribution from Jono Naylor come to an end. It was very enlightening on the word “if” and his views on local government.But I want to turn my attention to Subpart 4 in Part 2 of this bill particularly around the dispatching of voting papers and the marking and returning of voting papers in clause 21 through to clause 26 and clause 27 through to clause 30 in this the first of my contributions. I want to look at the way in which this referendum is going to be held. We are doing this in a way that is replicating a system of voting where we have evidence—which builds up every 3 years—that it does not work.My colleague Stuart Nash has talked about the very low voter turnout that we get at local government elections. So I want to turn our attention to clause 24 which sets out in this legislation some ways you might be able to vote other than by postal voting. It is reasonably prescriptive about how you might be able to get your voting papers by some other new and fandangled method such as a fax machine or by email or by having it dictated to you if you are on Tokelau Campbell Island or Raoul Island; if you are in the Ross Dependency; if you are on a fishing vessel or a naval vessel; or if you are in some remote location overseas. Also if you have not—Hon Ruth Dyson: Or Christchurch.Dr MEGAN WOODS: Yes if you are in Christchurch—would that count? Cook Strait is between these islands so we would have to question that.There is also the situation in subclause (1) where you have not received your voting paper that you might be able to apply to receive it in this way—that you cannot reasonably be expected in all circumstances to make your own arrangements for the voting paper to be forwarded and you have the facility for receiving the voting paper by the method applied for.In the justifications that we have heard from this Government for the ridiculously low turnout at the public meetings against the large level of spending we have heard from the Minister Nikki Kaye that we live in a digital age and that people do not meet in meeting halls any more. She pointed to the large number of online submissions. So why—and I would like to hear from the Minister in the chair Paul Goldsmith his contribution on this—are we persevering with this method of voting? Why is it postal voting a method that we know excludes young people? It has a predominance to exclude many groups which I will go through.Why are we not making allowances for the dispatching of voting papers in more innovative ways? We are not talking about voting in a council election or a community election where if it goes wrong you can change it in 3 years. We are talking about a symbol of nationhood here. We have a Government that likes to talk about itself as nation-building which is going through a tired exercise and a glory mission for the Prime Minister and not thinking about how we truly can have voter input on this.If we have a look at the evidence from local body elections about where these voting papers are going to be dispatched by the methods that are described in this piece of legislation we already know there are groups that are not going to turn out. We know that if people are young they are unlikely to turn out because the evidence points there. I would like to see the Minister make a call and hear him talk about what plans the Government has and what there is in this legislation to ensure that we are engaging young people—young people whose symbol of nationhood this will be if this referendum is successful for a very long time to come.I would also like to point to the low voter turnout we have in local body elections—well in all elections but particularly in local body elections—in low socio-economic areas. One of the reasons is actually New Zealand Post has withdrawn postboxes from a large number of those suburbs. It cites vandalism as the reason. The research has pointed to the fact that it is actually much harder to vote in these suburbs because there simply are not ways to return the voting papers in communities and neighbourhoods where people are often quite transport poor and they rely on being able to do things locally.What we also know is that new subdivisions that spring up do not necessarily have postboxes. Actually as a member of Parliament in the west of Christchurch where a large number of subdivisions are springing up I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get New Zealand Post to put postboxes into these new subdivisions so people do have that facility. This all goes to the fact that we are putting in place—