Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): For those who think this is a somewhat dry subject and unimportant we should reflect on the fact that the election of George W Bush in his first election when he beat the Democratic Party candidate Al Gore was effectively an outcome of improper purging of the rolls in Florida. What happened in Florida in that election was that the Republicans who did not want people who they thought were more likely to vote Democrat to be able to vote went through the electoral rolls and they struck out people who had the same name as people who were in prison. In the process they struck out a lot of Bill Smiths who were not criminals and were not in prison and who had not been imprisoned and they struck out the wrong people. The effect of it was that those people lost the right to vote because they were not on the electoral roll and that could have been the difference in the electoral college in Florida which was the difference in the electoral outcome that foisted upon the world George W Bush who was not a force for good. He was a force for overall the world going backwards including in the likes of Iraq and with continuing effects in Syria. So electoral rolls are incredibly important. Around the world you always see the swing about a central point depending on whether you have a right-wing Government or a left-wing Government because a lot of the people who are less likely to be correctly on the roll who are more likely to have insecurity of accommodation and therefore be moving around are more likely to be left-leaning voters than right-leaning voters. Therefore there is an electoral advantage in having a narrow roll for the right and an electoral disadvantage for the left if you have got a narrow roll. We have seen that I think in the last few years. I am not saying that this National Government is as bad as the Republican Party was in Florida but it still does things that curb the ability of us to have as fulsome a roll as we should have in New Zealand to enable people who have got as much right as me to participate in the political process to do so. They have as much right as any of us here yet they are prevented because they are not on the roll. How could we fix this in New Zealand? There are a lot of Scandinavian countries that now use the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) system. Virtually everyone in New Zealand has an IRD number. You have got to have an IRD number if you have got a student loan. You have got to have an IRD number if you are on a benefit. You have got to have an IRD number if you are a superannuitant. You have got to have an IRD number if you are in employment. Virtually everyone in New Zealand has an IRD number. Why can we not use IRD numbers as being a legitimate representation of your ability to vote? Some Scandinavian countries put a year of birth next to everyone's IRD number. So my IRD number would be the same but it would have 1960 in it which makes it a little bit harder for someone who is 16 or someone who is 80 to impersonate me. It actually is a good way that you could move against—Hon Member: Would they?Hon DAVID PARKER: I leave a fair range in the middle there as a consequence of the hole in the top of my head which did not use to be there. I think that we need to move to a system that would save money because at the moment we have all of these people being paid money to try to maintain our electoral roll separate from the IRD system which could be more cost effectively done if we utilised the IRD system. I think it is terrible that so many people in New Zealand are disenfranchised from being able to vote. Not only are those people disenfranchised; theoretically they are in breach of the law because they are meant to be on the electoral roll. I want to mention another thing that is not fixed by this legislation. Taylor v Attorney-General is the first decision ever of the New Zealand High Court to give a litigant a declaration for legislation that is in place being in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It was an appalling piece of legislation passed through this House following Paul Quinn a National Party member bringing forward a member's bill. What it did was that it changed the rule on people who were on short criminal sentences and their ability to vote. It has always been widely accepted in New Zealand including on this side of the House that if you are in prison for a long period of time like 3 years you lose your right to vote. But the Government shortened it to any period of imprisonment and created injustices again by doing that according to the High Court. This is because if you get a 1-year sentence and it happens to be between two elections you can still vote in each election but you cannot if it is over the period of an election. If you get a non-custodial sentence instead of imprisonment—which would be more likely to happen to someone who is better off in society than someone who is itinerant who might not be able to satisfy the court that they should have home detention because they have got no home to stay in—then the person who gets home detention can vote but the person who has been guilty of just the same seriousness of offence cannot vote. The High Court for the first time in New Zealand's history criticised the law passed in New Zealand. It gave a declaration that that law was non-compliant with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. This piece of legislation could fix it but it does not. That is wrong in principle.I want to turn to two other issues. Jacinda Arden has already made the point that if you can enrol close to the election and you can also issue a special vote close to the election why can you not do both through the same form in an early voting booth? It is a very simple idea. It is a very simple idea that would enable more people to vote and I would have thought that that is something the National Government would support. There are some other good things in this legislation. I agree with the practical remedies advanced in terms of the practical changes being made in allowing advance votes to be counted earlier in the day on voting day but not before voting day—I think that is appropriate. I like the way that we are giving flexibility to the format of forms rather than prescribing the forms. We are just prescribing the content rather than the way in which they are set out. I agree with Minister Adams that ballot papers are very very sensitive because the way in which a ballot paper can be set out could affect the outcome of an election and I do not think that anyone in this Parliament would want Parliament to give away the right to control what ballot papers look like because that could be politicised more easily if that was the case. Can I return to the point that I made at the start. I think we should be able to use IRD numbers. Together with a declaration that someone is either a permanent resident or a citizen at the time they vote that should be enough to enable a person to vote. Thank you.