Ardern JacindaJACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I welcome the opening remarks of the Minister of Justice because of course I would absolutely agree that the process that we have undertaken as a Parliament is a robust way to bring to this House any electoral law amendments that ultimately we would want cross-party consensus on. It is a little bit of an about-face this process because thankfully driving the changes that we have is a report by the Justice and Electoral Committee which has already considered what might need to be changed. We have already had submissions around that and out of that have come some recommendations. Those recommendations have been drafted into a bill and that will then allow submissions again to come forward from the public. It is a robust procedure and I think that that is appreciated by all sides of the House. Having said that what has been captured by this bill is by no means every element that was considered by the select committee—particularly by some members of the select committee—to be of great importance. I want to touch on some of the missing elements from this bill because they feel equally important to us on this side of the House. The first that I would mention simply falls under the heading of this: how do we make it easier for members of the public to participate in the act of voting in New Zealand? We know because we work in this area that it is a two-stage process. It requires first accurate enrolment—preferably before the published roll but certainly before election day itself. That in itself has caused problems as 10 percent of the population—roughly 330000 voters and that has doubled in recent times—who are eligible to vote do not even undertake the act of enrolling. Some of that may be deliberate—a choice to opt out of the process—but some of it could simply be a lack of understanding around what is required in order to vote. Many people could naturally assume that you vote by showing up to a polling booth and casting a vote. We know that that is part of the problem because there were a number of people who did undertake enough effort at least to participate in the act of voting by going to a voting booth and either on polling day or beforehand casting a vote but did so inaccurately. When I say inaccurately" I mean that they did not enrol or that they put down inaccurate information or that there was a difference between their special vote form and their enrolment form—some administrative error meant that 27000 people cast a vote that did not count in the last election. In some cases that would be as many votes as would be cast in an entire electorate—27000 votes discounted because of an error. That error might be that someone went in and cast their vote thinking that they were on the electoral roll but were not. We know that there are ways to mitigate against that risk. If as a voter I go into a polling place and I go in there early to vote in the advance voting period—it is not election day—and they cannot find me on the roll I can take a risk and say "Oh I'm pretty sure I'm on the roll I am just going to cast a vote anyway." If I am not it will not count. What they could do then is give me a special vote form and an enrolment form and I have to fill out the two. If I fill out anything there and there is inaccuracy between the two forms or if I say that I am definitely on the roll and they give me just one form—there is so much room for error. We could combine the two forms and say: "If you are having to fill in a special vote form let us make that count as an enrolment form. Let us just have the one—remove the risk." It would be a simple administrative change that could change the outcome for thousands of voters who currently have had their vote not count—and they know it because after the election they get sent an enrolment form that says: "You cast a vote and it did not count. Can you please enrol?". That does not encourage participating in democracy. The Electoral Commission came to us the select committee and it said: "We think we can do this—in fact we think we should do this. Let's combine these two forms." I still do not understand why Government members voted against that—I still do not understand that. I want the opportunity again in the select committee for that to be discussed. I can absolutely guarantee now for this House that Labour will be putting in a Supplementary Order Paper on this matter. I would much prefer that we have consensus on this question so it would be good if we could use this process to tease out why it was that the Government had discomfort with this change. Taking it one step further we had one other element that the Government had even less comfort with. You can enrol all the way through the advance voting period and in fact you can do it in a polling station. If I go in and I am found not to be on the roll I can fill in an enrolment form and I can vote at the same time. That is great but there is one day you cannot and it is the day that most voters turn out to vote and it is election day. It is becoming increasingly arbitrary to say that you cannot enrol on that day—increasingly arbitrary. When we tested out in the select committee why it was that we still have that partitioned off distinct day we could not vote it was identified that actually we could probably maintain the integrity of the voting system and allow enrolment on the day that you vote on election day. Again we had real concerns that we could potentially be turning away people who are willing and ready to vote because of that administrative quirk in our system. That seems completely unnecessary. We are very lucky in New Zealand that our voter fraud is low and that the integrity in our system is high. From memory I want to say we had 150 duplicate votes and the Electoral Commission could not even narrow down how much of that was simply people who for instance are not aware that they have filled in a ballot paper—a special vote for instance in a residential facility—and then have filled in a second. Actually a lot of incidents are probably people who are—I did not want to say senile but we do not know and in some cases it could simply be that. The numbers are so low—the numbers are so low—that actually there will be cases of that. Why is it that we have a fear around opening up the ability to enrol and vote on the same day—to enrol and vote on the same day?Jacqui Dean: Who was that?JACINDA ARDERN: I say to the chairperson that I know he meant no offence by that statement but we do go into every place where someone is eligible to ensure that they do have the opportunity to vote. Those are two issues we had great concern with. The other thing I do just want to add is about civic education—we discuss it every time but let us actually do something about it this time. It should be compulsory in the senior years of students in our schools not only to enrol to vote but to learn about the electoral system and the political system in New Zealand. It is not enough that we do it in social studies. It is not enough that we do it in junior school when it does not feel as relevant to a younger person. Why is this not embedded within our compulsory subjects in New Zealand—not an elective and not a choice that is made by a school but a subject every single student should be learning? It is absolutely critical. I want to touch very briefly on what is included in the bill. The Minister did that a little bit too. Many of the changes I would say very broadly are captured by the idea of giving the Electoral Commission where there should be flexibility greater flexibility a right to have clear plain English on voting forms—excuse me not on ballots because we have kept them distinct and legislated but on guidance and other non-statutory forms—to make sure that they have the ability to ensure they are doing everything they can to make their processes accessible so that they do not have to communicate just via post. We have also done some really common-sense things like allowing the Electoral Commission to use online electronic roll look-up in voting places so we are not just reliant on the printed roll. We will have real-time data on enrolment so that 6 weeks prior to the election if someone is enrolled they will have that real-time information if it is available. That is important. Because of such an increase in advance voting now we had a discussion around where electioneering should not take place around an advance polling place and roughly we thought: "Look people should not be harassed. They should be free to walk into a polling place without being harassed and without being confronted." So creating a 10-metre boundary around polling places is important but we accept that for instance in an inner-city polling booth like in the area that I work across sometimes there are hoardings in quite close proximity. There always have been. That is because we have more polling places in accessible areas so let us not be extreme. Let us be practical and give a bit of flexibility for the Electoral Commission to reduce that if it is impractical for a voting place—that particular boundary. We are Saturdayising when hoardings can go up. That has been a bugbear for a while. We are saying look an MP's signage on their office is obviously not an election advertisement—let us be clear about that. We are trying to be practical and pragmatic but I would challenge the committee: we need to make sure we are doing everything in our power within reason to make sure voting and enrolment are accessible and we have not quite got there yet."