Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): National opposes this bill on principle. We oppose it in respect of its impracticalness. We also oppose it in terms of the appalling parliamentary process that the Government has used again today in urgency in ramming this legislation through. We come from a very practical perspective in respect of what happens when someone goes to prison which is that they lose freedoms. They lose the right to go wherever they wish the right of association and the right of being able to receive information. It is absolutely proper—as in the case of the UK and as in the case of most democracies—for people while they are serving their sentences in prison not to be able to vote. It is part of the punishment for breaching the laws that make for a civilised society. Members opposite have argued—and the Labour Party came to the select committee and said that even people like the murderer in Christchurch should be able to cast a vote—that it is their basic freedom and human right. Well we disagree. That individual who killed 51 people has removed the right of others to vote. But it's not just appalling offenders of that sort. At the select committee we heard evidence that to go to prison in New Zealand you actually have to be pretty bad. The number of offences that a person needs to commit to end up behind bars averages 24 convictions. This sort of soft line from Labour that someone's committed some minor offence and they end up in prison and they remove their democratic rights is a gross misrepresentation of the position. Our law and our judges send people to prison only when they have multiply and on many occasions broken the law of this land and members opposite are so focused on the rights of the prisoner and the offender that they forget every time about the rights of the victims. We heard from victim after victim at the select committee of people who have taken lives who will now get to vote in the 19 September election but their victims will not get to vote and that caused offence. I remember from my period as Minister of Corrections about how impractical it actually is for people to be able to vote in prison. Members opposite need to explain: are you going to be able to have candidates' meetings in prison and are prisoners then going to be able to claim they have a right to free access to information and get on the net? Many of those prisoners may have in fact committed porn offences and other such offending. The reality and what I found as Minister of Corrections is there is almost a universal view from our prisoner managers that actually there are all sorts of practical problems with trying to have prisoners fully participate in our elections. There is far more to elections than just filling out the form. It's about engaging with the public and it's about learning what the policies and the issues are and that is not compatible with prison. I also want to talk about the absolutely appalling process around this bill. I take offence at Minister Little saying that I was not prepared to spend 13 days under lockdown working on this bill—Kieran McAnulty: It's true. Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —because I didn't want to work. The member says that that's true. Well I want to tell the member what I was doing in lockdown. I've been a constituency member of Parliament for my community for 30 years and I have never been as busy working from 7 in the morning to 10 at night dealing with hundreds of constituency cases life-and-death issues—issues like people with COVID-19 who are not able to get personal protective equipment for the carers of them people who couldn't get tested when they should have been tested and people that needed access to foods that were essential to their life. Madam Speaker you say that it might not be relevant to the topic but I tell you it is relevant to the debate and the process that's occurred with this bill because it was wrong that when New Zealanders were in lockdown and when members of Parliament were legally confined to staying in their homes the Government's priority was rushing into law the right for prisoners to vote. What a warped—what a warped—sense of priorities and it's worse than that. The Justice Committee delayed its consideration of the sexual violence legislation and this is about the rights of rape victims to get a fair trial. Well that wasn't a priority nor was the bill about protecting first responders: ambulance officers police and others that work on the front line. Oh no members opposite said We're going to defer that bill—that's not important." but when it comes to the rights of prisoners to vote this was something that the select committee had to do under urgency and it rammed it through this Parliament during the period of lockdown. In other words at the very time when 5 million law-abiding citizens were being required to stay in their home—effectively under house arrest—the top priority for the Government was our criminal offenders being able to get a right to vote and let's not pretend that there is any great principle in Labour's position on this. They simply see it as a cheap easy way to change the rules to make their re-election on 19 September a little bit easier. This is a cheap dirty way for them to score several thousand votes more. I make no bones about the fact that members on this side of the House prioritise the rights of victims ahead of the rights of those that criminally offend as compared with members opposite who always put the rights of criminals ahead of those that are victims of crime. Now when this bill entered its first reading I raised the issues about clause 8 of this bill and the unpublished roll. Let's remind ourselves what this bill says. It says that if you are a prisoner—a criminal—you have an automatic right to go on to the unpublished roll but if you're a victim of crime and if you're a law-abiding citizen you have to apply and you have to meet statutory criteria. When I pointed that out at first reading the Minister of Justice said that I had it all wrong. He did his best to ridicule me and challenge what I had said. Actually at the select committee the officials accepted that what we said was absolutely correct as did a number of legal experts. I say to Government members and I say to the Green Party what is possibly in your head that somehow you think that people who commit crimes should have greater legal rights than those who are law-abiding or who are victims of crime? That is morally repugnant and that part of the bill—Matt King: Unbelievable. Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —is just plain wrong. As my colleague said it is just plain unbelievable. The last point that I want to make is that this issue of whether prisoners are allowed to vote or not has been debated many many times over in this Parliament. I think it was the Kirk Government—prior to the 1970s it had always been that if you were in prison you couldn't vote. That Labour Government a bit like this one thought they could get some easy votes by changing the law prior to the 1975 election. It didn't work. They got biffed out and the law was reversed and it's gone back and forward. But why is Parliament doing this law under urgency? This isn't a new issue. This issue was debated in 2008. We've had four electoral reforms in the interim. Why is it that just a few months out from the election under urgency the Government is ramming through this electoral law? The last bit with which I have got huge difficulty is this. National in its nine years in Government with every Government electoral bill took the view that we would not advance law changes on simple majorities and without consultation with parties opposite. It is not right that the governing parties rig the laws for the next election to make their re-election easier. We observed that principle we consulted and we actually changed a number of bills to ensure we had that. This is simply the Government again trying to distort the laws to make it easier for their re-election. It's a bad process it's badly principled and we will oppose it every step of the way."