Smith Murray: Electoral Matters Bill — In Committee 
Smith Murray: Electoral Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17266] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 I want to speak to my amendment to this part. I will refer firstly to the report back from the Justice and Electoral Committee which states: “The United Future and ACT members consider that there should be a discretion given to the Electoral Commission to pay accounts after the 50-working day period.” We stated: “Circumstances could arise where accounts might not be received by the Electoral Commission through no fault of the broadcaster political party or Electoral Commission. In that situation the current provision would result in the broadcaster being left out of pocket with no legal ability to recover their debt.” 
I will give an example. We envisage that if we go to the full term the election will be held next September. The 50-working-days rule means that accounts have to be in and paid by the middle of December about a week before Christmas. I can imagine that the Maori Party for example—which is likely to get $75000 worth of funding based on last term’s allocation—may decide to spend all its funding on Maori radio. It may wait for the invoices to come in and they may trickle in in October with perhaps an outstanding one that does not arrive till November. In that case $75000 worth of debt would be sat on. Then because of Christmas looming and the busyness of that time the person in the Maori Party who is responsible for sending the account to the Electoral Commission may overlook doing so until December suddenly realise that time is short and rush it off to the Electoral Commission where the account arrives 1 day beyond the time. Under clause 18 of the bill the Electoral Commission has absolutely no discretion to pay the account and the broadcasters would be left out of pocket to the tune of $75000 with no ability to recover it. Maybe an account is sent to the Electoral Commission and somehow gets lost in the post and it is not the Maori Party’s fault that it is not paid. Whatever happens we would be in a situation where because this bill provides a straitjacket to the Electoral Commission with no flexibility whatsoever we would have $75000 worth of debt to several Maori radio stations that could not be recovered. That could be the death knell for those radio stations. 
Fifty working days is a reasonable time—10 weeks in fact—to get the accounts in. But in circumstances such as those I have described it may be that whether it is 5 working days or 100 working days deficiencies mean that it simply does not happen through no fault of the broadcaster and yet the broadcaster is heavily penalised by being unable to recover the money. That could easily be remedied by the amendment I propose which would give the Electoral Commission the ability to determine at its discretion that given all the circumstances the account ought to be paid. If the commission still had the money in its pocket—if it had not handed it back to the Crown—then it could make the payment albeit that the account had arrived a day or even a month late. That discretion is I think a prudent thing for the Government and Parliament to grant because at the end of the day the consequences of non-payment could be serious. The amendment really provides no harm to anybody at all. It seems to me that when we give those sorts of authorities to Government organisations we ought to build in whenever we can some degree of flexibility and discretion to take account of exceptional circumstances where something like the situation I have described may happen. 
Why make 50 working days mandatory? Nobody has put up any reason why the Electoral Commission should be bound to a fixed date like that and should have no discretion. There has really been no argument on that—and no argument from the Minister except to say that the select committee had decided that that should not happen so therefore he would go along with it. In the select committee we did not consider that issue for any length of time. Those who did support the clause simply felt that 50 working days was all that we needed to give. But I think this is bad law as it stands. Although the simple amendment to give discretion costs nobody anything it may save the Government a huge amount of money and embarrassment if a broadcaster were to go under simply because the Government had ignored this modest request. I commend the amendment to the Minister and encourage him to look again at the possibility of putting it into the legislation because I think it is a very a small change and would really do no harm. 
I do want to correct a comment that I made in my speech at the second reading stage when I said that New Zealand First only wanted itself National and Labour to be represented on the committee. I acknowledge that it wanted itself Labour and National to be represented and one representative of all the other parties. I do not think that improves the situation much but I do want to set the record right in so far as I did misrepresent New Zealand First’s position. Obviously if New Zealand First can get that while it is the third-biggest party that would be wonderful for it.