Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Just a brief call for me on these two cognate bills. I want to take issue as I have done actually throughout the passage of this legislation—I want to take issue with what Mr O'Rourke said. I seem to find myself always speaking after him and I have the pleasure to rebut Mr O'Rourke. I want to talk about his suggestion that we need to amend the criteria by which broadcasting funds are allocated. I actually think there is an a priori question which is why it is that the Government divvies up a pile of money to parties and says: This is the cap you can only spend up to a certain amount of money per party and this is what you have got and that is it." There is actually a principled question about whether all that is a good idea: whether or not you should actually just let parties purchase their own advertising time with their own money and you should let them spend as much as they like. But leaving that aside we have the system in place and the bill does not propose to make any amendments to that. So I guess the next question is how do you divide up the money?Denis O'Rourke: Fairly.CHRIS BISHOP: Fairly says Mr O'Rourke. I agree you do it fairly. That is actually the question though is it not? The question is what is fairness? Because you need some mechanism. I mean one argument is that you just divide up the money equally and you say: "Righty-o New Zealand First gets $500000 the National Party gets $500000 the Greens do ACT gets exactly the same."—that would be one way of doing it. There is an argument that that is a fair way of doing it—that all political parties are entitled to exactly the same amount of money and they just go forward and spend it on whoever they like. There is an argument for that but a lot of people would say that is not fair. It is not fair to give the National Party which currently has 59 MPs exactly the same amount of money as the ACT Party and United Future which have only one MP respectively or indeed the same as the New Zealand First Party which has 12 or 13 MPs.So fairness is in many ways in the eye of the beholder and I actually reckon what we have right now is a pretty fair system. Denis O'Rourke said that we tend to take into account the votes at the last election. We do that; he does not have an issue with that. But he also said that by-elections are irrelevant—those were his exact words. By-elections are not relevant. Well I think he should talk to his leader because I reckon the leader of New Zealand First is going to be strongly of the view that by-election results for example in Northland are strongly relevant. I reckon he would actually disagree with the member on that. Then Mr O'Rourke talked about how opinion polls are irrelevant—that they are no indication of support. Well actually the opinion polls before the last election were broadly correct. They were slightly under on New Zealand First; they were slightly over on other parties. But they were broadly correct. So I put it to the House that we have the balance about right. It is always tricky to work out how you are going to divide up things like this but actually the balance is about right and therefore I reject Mr O'Rourke's characterisation that this is not a fair system."