Bridges SimonHon SIMON BRIDGES (National—Tauranga): Mr Chair I appreciate what you said and you're of course right that the substance of what's in the schedule is something that has already been debated. I don't want to address that in any way shape or form but I do want to say to you though that there is actually some real meat in this. It may not be a thick steak but it's a nice thin piece of pastrami. I want to make this just very pedantic point but I'm going to make it because I don't know if I'll get the chance in this House ever again to do it and that's this: we are a constitution with the Queen in New Zealand as our monarch and she pronounces it schedule" not "skedule". I know some of you watch Friends and a variety of other cheap American sitcoms but it is "schedule" in this country. I want to read the clause. It says here: "Insert the Schedule 1 set out in the Schedule of this Act as the first schedule to appear after the last section of the principal Act." The principal Act is the Local Electoral Act and academically and I suppose in a sense constitutionally the electoral laws of our land are—I'm not sure it's politically correct to say this any more—certainly not woke but the poor cousin of our electoral law that governs this place and how you come here. Nevertheless there's an academic body of work. There's guys like Jack Vowles and others who have specialised in this area there was a guy Graham at Auckland University when I was there and my simple point is this: this Local Electoral Act that the schedule is going into is in fact part of our constitution. It is part of our constitution. Our constitution may not be a formal written one like the United States or even Australia but we have one none the less. It is an informal one—and in fact it's written; it's just written in a bunch of different places—and the principal Act is part of New Zealand's constitution. So my simple point to the members is this: by putting this law and the schedule into the principal Act the Local Electoral Act. It is a stain on our constitution because it is an undemocratic law passed undemocratically and it comes to the point that Nick Smith made around the schedule going into the principal Act. I appreciate that there's no one on the other side that is going to like these points but they've just been shown in an academic study. I presume no beef with the National or the Labour parties per se but when the Labour Party passes electoral law it has zero regard for consensus in these matters. Those are my words and it's not quite what—but it's fundamentally what the study says. We come in and we're overly conservative—the Simon Powers the Judith Collins and the Amy Adams. They are very judicious in the way they do it; they weren't on the other side. So to rush this law through in urgency with retrospectivity and offending against a raft of other rule-of-law propositions and to change the schedules and to put this schedule from this law into the primary Act which is without question part of our informal constitution the informal constitution of this law I say—and I don't want to be overly dramatic—is a stain on our democracy and a stain on our constitution. It may only be a scheduling issue but there's rather more to it it seems to me than that. In short I won't take the full time. But Schedule 1 should not be part of the principal Act with the principal Act being part of our constitution."