Williams Arena; Salesa JennyARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. It's a real privilege to speak on the Electoral (Māori Electoral Option) Legislation Bill. This is something which has been for a very long time important for Māori and our country and it has restricted the ability to participate in elections in the way that people from my community would want to. So I want to thank Minister Allan for landing what I consider to be a very carefully balanced approach to solving this problem. But look I also want to thank Nicole McKee who spoke before me for her engagement in this process and the select committee. I really do value that member's contributions around the table in what has been a very cross-partisan discussion. I also want to thank the member Rawiri Waititi for his continued advocacy around what has been an important issue for him and the people he represents and I thank him for the member's bill which he presented on this issue which we have also spoken about.This bill was as I said a finely balanced and carefully thought through way of approaching this problem. It also touches on a number of different pieces of legislation. As a committee member of the Justice Committee that considered this it's been very useful for us to have the full suite of advice on this that you get with a Government bill because it is an omnibus bill which seeks to amend both the Electoral Act 1993 and the Local Electoral Act 2001 and the Bay of Plenty Regional Council (Maori Constituency Empowering) Act. It also may or may not engage the provisions for a 75 percent vote in the House which has caused much discussion around the committee table and so it has been very useful for the Ministers who have been guiding that process and discussions around this House outside of the committee.Without taking a very long call I just want to address you know this worry that has been echoed around the House about how switching rolls might skew the system—it's just not the reality that I have seen. I am very privileged to represent the electorate of Manurewa and in turn my colleague Peeni Henare represents the electorate of Tāmaki Makaurau—those two are overlapping. I live right in the heart of Manurewa but I am a constituent of Peeni Henare. In the time that I've been organising for the Labour Party in Tāmaki Makaurau since I was a 15-year-old I've been out door knocking with people and the main issue that's really hard to get over the line with people is that they are in fact enrolled at all. It takes a great deal of effort to talk to people about their enrolments and to motivate them to exercise their democratic right to participate in our process. And the suggestion that there will be sort of mass skewing of the vote by organising around switching of rolls is simply far from the reality that I've experienced in that time that I have been organising in this space and encouraging people to sign up and have their say.It's also not borne out by the data collected by the Electoral Commission. They found that in the lead up to the 2020 general election 24000 voters wanted to switch and couldn't. That was not an election that was characterised by any sort of tactics required to switch between rolls. It was simply people who got their voting papers and realised that they weren't on the roll that they thought they were and sought to make that change. So being able to empower those 24000 people in the next election to be able to make that important choice for themselves is something I'm really proud of doing.I could talk much more about how this fits into our larger plan. And I want to work with the Opposition members around this House on improving our electoral system as we go forward. I thank the Justice Committee for its part in doing that and I commend this bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call—I call on Sam Uffindell for five minutes.