Strange JamieJAMIE STRANGE (Labour): Madam Assistant Speaker thank you for the opportunity to make a contribution. Peace and harmony have broken out at 10 to six on a Thursday afternoon.Simeon Brown: Quarter to 6.JAMIE STRANGE: Wonderful—wonderful. Quarter to 6. This bill as we've heard addresses a few key issues and I'm looking forward to touching on those. So the first one is around requiring local authorities to make various reports about dog control matters publicly available. The second one is about placing a duty on the chief executive of local councils to facilitate and foster representative and substantial electoral participation rather than the council's electoral office. There are a few others as well that I'll touch on but I'm just going to focus particularly on those first two. Before I get into the aspect around the dog control matters as a member of the Governance and Administration Committee I'd like to acknowledge our chair Brett Hudson. He does a wonderful job and our deputy chair Ginny Anderson does as well and also Paul Eagle and others who may or may not be in the House tonight.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Don't refer to members not in the House.JAMIE STRANGE: My apologies Madam Assistant Speaker. So moving on to the first point there: the Dog Control Act. So basically what the bill does is it requires councils and local authorities to make public their dog-related complaints and prosecutions taken. So at the moment if there's a prosecution or if there's an issue around something to do with the dog the council record it they log it but they don't have to make it public. The key reason this is in here is because there is a lot of public interest in dog issues—issues around loose dogs unregistered dogs and dog safety. I live over the road from a dog park and we regularly see people walking dogs. Generally we don't see many issues; however there are certain issues. The Opposition members are helping me out with a few dog anecdotes—thank you.Hon Andrew Little: They bark at every passing car.JAMIE STRANGE: Indeed they do that. The key point here is that there is public interest—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Fun times on a Thursday afternoon.JAMIE STRANGE: —in dog issues. I would like to acknowledge Ian McKelvie's member's bill which addresses some of the unintended consequences around dog control. He's done some good work on that and this bill links in with that as well. So at the risk of letting the dogs out I'll move on to point No. 2. Point No. 2 is around fostering participation in local elections and—Hon David Bennett: Oh go back to the dogs. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): All right all right—OK. JAMIE STRANGE: —this is very important. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Let's settle now shall we. Thank you and let—JAMIE STRANGE: Ten minutes to go—come on team.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Please Mr Strange carry on. JAMIE STRANGE: There are a number of reasons why people don't vote in elections. Some people feel like their vote won't count others are simply disengaged from the process and others say Politics doesn't affect me." There's a disproportionate amount of young people who don't vote and it concerns me and I know it concerns members of this House. The Hamilton City Council in their local body elections recently had a 40 percent turnout—which is very low—compared to a central government election which is 80 percent and we're working on improving that of course as well. Now what this bill does is it puts the onus and responsibility on the chief executive officer of council rather than on the elected members. Now why is that? The key point is that if you leave it to elected members to improve voter participation there can be biases involved whereas a CEO is impartial. Let me give you an example. Some councillors would benefit from a low turnout. Other councillors would—[Interruption] ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): OK OK—we've got 10 minutes. Can we just try and get through the next 10 minutes? Please can we just come to order. If you can't hold it in then can you perhaps take it out into the lobby. Please Mr Strange will you continue. [Interruption] Yeah we've had enough now thank you. JAMIE STRANGE: Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. So building on the point around participation in local body elections only 40 percent of Hamiltonians voted in the recent local body elections which is something that concerns me greatly. If we leave it to the elected members to decide whether to increase participation then there can often be a bias there. However the bill puts the onus on the CEO which is fantastic because the CEO is impartial. So one of the CEO's responsibilities will be to increase voter turnout. Let me give an example. If we leave it to the councillors there could be biases involved. For example some councillors will benefit from low turnout. Others would benefit from high turnout. So those councillors who benefit from low turnout would be incentivised to keep the turnout low others who benefit from high turnout would be incentivised to have it high and depending on the make-up of the council situations will ensue. So the CEO who is impartial has been given the mandate to increase participation. Now one of the ways the CEO may or may not choose to do this is through online voting. There's been a lot of talk about online voting over many years particularly among young people. A lot of people think that this will increase voter turnout. I think that it probably will. I'm not sure it's a silver bullet but I believe it will make a difference. So if we've got a council who are predominantly made up of elected members who benefit from low voter turnout are they going to move to online voting? Probably not. However the CEO who is impartial has been given the mandate and so he may well go "Online voting I believe will improve turnout." and hence move on that. Another key aspect around increasing turnout is diversity of councils. Many of the councils around New Zealand don't have a lot of diversity. I'm talking about ethnic diversity and I'm talking about youth—there are not a lot of young people on councils. So the higher turnout will increase diversity and diversity makes the councils more representative of society. I stood for council myself in 2013. Unfortunately I missed out and I ended up here but I still have aspiration. So when I was standing for council the turnout was very low. As a young person I believe I would have benefited from a higher turnout. We heard a number of submissions on this bill. [Interruption] ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Settle. JAMIE STRANGE: We heard a number of submissions and I'm just going to touch on a couple of those submissions particularly as they relate to voter turnout. So we heard from an organisation—good friends of mine: Federated Farmers. I regularly engage with the Waikato president of Federated Farmers—excellent excellent excellent man. Federated Farmers in their submission stated here: "It is well known that interest in local authority elections overall is in decline." So Federated Farmers made this point very strongly. They said "This trend in our view represents a growing disconnection between local authorities and their communities and a decline in mutual trust." So Federated Farmers support this bill in order to increase voter turnout and I think that that aspect there will have widespread agreeance right across the country. Next one: Local Government New Zealand. They also talked about this aspect. They said "Electoral officers themselves do not currently have [the] capacity to undertake the type of work involved in promoting participation. Neither will they be able to fulfil that duty if a local authority fails to provide adequate funding." Hence Local Government New Zealand "recommends that the 'duty' is placed on the council itself" and in this case the CEO. So we had submitters certainly in support of this.I'll touch on one more point in my final minute here and that's about public notices. It has been touched on before by a number of speakers. I'd just like to add to their contributions by mentioning a submission—excellent submission—from Auckland Council around public notices. I won't read it because it is reasonably long but the Auckland Council highlight the importance of public notices being made online. At the moment as we've heard tonight they can be in newspapers. We heard from Simeon Brown previously that newspapers are not always delivered. Someone may have a "No circulars" sign you know to stop circulars coming but that in turn stops newspapers coming. We have that example in our street for example. So society is moving to an online platform and it's important that Government keep up with that. I appreciate the opportunity to share my views on this bill and commend it to the House."