Sage Eugenie: Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 06 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6333. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the Local Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) and I think the “John Banks Bill” would be a very good title for it. The Green Party will be supporting this bill because it was the so-called anonymous donations from Mr Kim Dotcom and Skycity to Mr John Banks in the 2010 Auckland mayoral campaign where Mr Banks allegedly cannot recall the donors’ identities that highlighted the significant gaps in our electoral law. The bill requires that candidates declare any donation over $1000 if they know the source yet Mr Banks’ convenient memory lapses allowed him to circumvent this. That is why the Green Party is giving qualified support to this bill because it certainly takes some steps to improve the law and increase the transparency of local elections and candidates’ disclosure recording and reporting of donations. But we will be looking to achieve some significant changes at the Justice and Electoral Committee to strengthen the bill particularly so that it better regulates electoral financing. 
The provisions in my colleague Denise Roche’s member’s bill which is currently in the ballot are wider in scope and would be a very good guide to some of the changes that the Green Party is seeking. They put a cap of $5000 on donations by any person or group. The bill puts a ban on overseas donations. It would regulate third-party spending and it would establish a pecuniary interest register for members of local authorities—those things that we do not see in this bill. 
But there are some useful changes in this bill and one of those is ensuring that donations are clearly considered an electoral expense. It is also a good change that anyone who works with a candidate and knows the identity of a donor who gives more than $1500 must declare the identity of that donor to the candidate. This should certainly help Mr Banks with his memory lapses. The bill also creates a disincentive against anonymous donations because where a purported anonymous campaign donation to a candidate exceeds $1500 the excess has to be given to the local authority’s electoral officer. Another improvement in the bill is that the return of the donations has to have more detail in it it does increase the disclosure reporting and recording obligations and it introduces some penalties for non-compliance—all good things. 
The bill also makes some wider changes which I would like to comment on briefly and that is to change the balance between fair and effective representation and to increase the criteria where the local authority can adjust the boundaries of wards or constituencies and not have to comply with the 10 percent plus or minus rule—the fair representation rule. This is so that there is more of an emphasis on fair representation. Two circumstances where that could occur are where there would be communities of interest that would be separated or where two very different communities would be joined in the same ward. Those changes were certainly recommended by the Local Government Commission in its 2008 review of the Local Electoral Act 2001. The commission in its review thought that it was very important to ensure that the representation arrangements in local government were configured so that the ward and constituency boundaries went along the lines of recognising communities of interest and that electors were therefore able to identify with the area concerned and that that could assist voter participation in elections. 
The commission also thought that this flexibility was needed to promote fair representation so that the boundaries would ensure that there was convenient access to local authority services and that it would avoid grouping communities that had little in common. It is puzzling that on the one hand the Government in this bill is promoting fair representation yet its proposals in the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill its push to super-sized councils around New Zealand and its belief that big is better cut right across this whole principle of local government being about local democracy and local councils representing local communities which the Local Government Commission thought was important in its review of the local electoral legislation. It is the amalgamation provisions in the Local Government Amendment Bill that will make it so much easier to push through super-sized councils regardless of whether communities that are adjacent to each other want to be lumped together because they are going to be denied the right to have a poll on those amalgamation proposals— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: Order! The member is far outside the scope of the bill. This is about— 
EUGENIE SAGE 
: I will come back Mr Speaker. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: Yes. Do so. 
EUGENIE SAGE 
: The Green Party also has concerns about the new powers in clause 21 because that would allow the Minister of Local Government through an Order in Council to adjourn elections. The current Local Electoral Act allows the electoral officer to adjourn the close of voting for up to 14 days in certain situations such as a natural disaster but the new bill allows the postponing of the whole election for up to 6 weeks and that can be rolled over. Given that this Government has postponed elections for Environment Canterbury until 2016 we are not confident that the Minister will not abuse this power and will not use it to postpone elections. So given that this Government does not trust Cantabrians to elect councillors to the regional council who can provide “stable effective and efficient” government because it has a one-eyed focus on maximising irrigation on the Canterbury Plains what confidence is there the Government will not use the provisions in this bill to postpone elections in other circumstances? So we will be supporting the bill but we want to see it strengthened at the select committee and we have reservations about some of the provisions in it.