Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green) (remote): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak to this bill and take a short call because it is a bill that is urgently needed and hopefully will pass quickly and unanimously it sounds like in this House. I do want to as others have done congratulate the new Minister—Kieran McAnulty—and the Justice Committee on their diligent work. It is a bill that will make our democracy more accessible more equal more safe as others have said and as the Justice Committee report reflects it's one that people have called for for safety reasons in particular and I can relate. I want us to remember—and I don't know if everyone in the House would even know this but Amnesty International the year after I ran for the first time which was in 2017 Amnesty International New Zealand actually named the online abuse of women in New Zealand as a key human rights issue in terms of impacting women's right to freedom of speech and assembly and engagement in public life. In particular their study finding women who engage in political life to be targets—and in particular women of colour and other marginalised backgrounds trans women and other women in the rainbow community to be targets—and to notice the connection between that online abuse and this bill. It was not the case that that only ever happened online but that a proliferation of that type of attack against certain women in particular cases did then spill over into real life and made women physically and psychologically unsafe through real life interactions threats. So it is a bill that's overdue. I wrote to the Prime Minister about this calling for this change in April this year and it is a change that's proposed in my Electoral (Strengthening Democracy) Amendment Bill for both national level politics and local politics but it's a nice step to say that at least in local elections which is the election that's coming up this year that we will in fact make some of those most vulnerable safer. It's the kind of law change that will mean that more [Audio issue] people are more likely to run. More communities will see their lived experiences represented without those types of barriers that are so ad hoc that we don't even notice them which this is. So to require a residential address or a business address means that somebody in their place of work or home will have to be exposed not only to abuse but to that kind of interaction that they can't control and we can. So that kind of benefit of incumbency the benefit of being a member of an established parliamentary political party shouldn't mean that we or people candidates like us have an advantage in putting our names forward. That's not good for democracy; it never has been. And to say that the communities who don't have a secure or stable residential or business address will kind of automatically in fact not even just for safety reasons but automatically be excluded seems antithetical to democracy. I don't think it's only floods and earthquakes that mean that someone doesn't have a stable address as my colleague from the National Party Chris Penk just said. I think that sometimes it's because they're students they're renters—we still don't have security of tenure in our rentals here—and they could in fact be homeless. We are living through an unprecedented housing crisis. So in fact we urgently need the voices of those who are in less stable living situations in local elections and in national elections. So actually removing those barriers is going to mean that we get some lived expertise that we urgently need. So this is a good bill. I do commend it to the House and hopefully the change will be extended to protect and include more candidates at national level elections as well.