Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise in support of this bill. It is a bill that comes as part of a suite of measures that will be rolled out in time to modernise and make our local body electoral system more effective and futureproof them—futureproof them for New Zealanders who know that actually democracy has to work at every level not just in here but out there in the regions and in the super-city where I'm from where we're looking forward to the election and we're still I think most Aucklanders getting their heads around that system. So it is timely to say that this engagement has happened and I do thank and commend the Justice Committee for the work that they did. I was heartened to see that they heard submissions from members of the public members of the local government sector and members of the disabilities community who all came to have their voices heard in terms of what might help their communities in accessing their local democracy. So this bill allows local body electoral systems to trial different types of voting systems. One such trial may—and everyone I think who has spoken so far has focused on online voting. That is one kind of trial that we foresee this bill will allow and it is important given we know the accessibility issues that different types of communities have actually. We've talked about youth—they are a very underrepresented group in terms of engagement in every level of our democracy. So that may make our democracy more accessible to those who will benefit from it for the longest period of time ahead in their lives but it may also help people who are in geographically remote areas those with different types of disability as submitters pointed out; it may help those in the aged community actually who may have different types of accessibility issues as well. We've also heard that local body engagement is as low as 22 percent in some areas of New Zealand and that's frightening given so much that comes from engagement at the local level whether that's civic planning whether that's public transport our parks the types of events that we can hold in our communities—which will in turn feed more and more democratic engagement. So it is really really important that we allow for democratisation and modernisation of that system and that has been a long time coming. We also know that demographics that are least engaged in local democracy also include tangata whenua the Pacific community other migrant communities—again a huge concern in Auckland where I'm from: our most diverse civic centre where we have so many local boards working on so many different issues in all the different areas with so many different concerns for their communities and all feeding up to local council which deals with different issues again and the mayoralty race which will be watched this year with great interest. All of these will be able to have processes specially designed and trialled as time goes on by those most affected by them so that they might better engage their communities who will in turn then benefit from the work of the local boards and the councillors and kind of in fact shape their communities and their democracy as we go along. The fact that there is so much rigidity in the way that local government and local electoral bodies are able to engage with their communities and to diversify the way that they allow both voting and engagement has probably fed the lack of engagement so far and has actually crippled our democracy. So we do need to remember that where the Electoral Commission makes recommendations where our submitters ask for a different approach we do need to listen. I'm currently trying to address that in a bill that will hopefully be picked up either by the Government or through the ballot to modernise this system based on the same principle. We need to take politics out of the way we do electoral reform and this bill I'm happy to see has that support from across the House and the approach of the Justice Committee was really heartening to that. So let's see more of that when it comes to electoral reform for New Zealand. Thank you.