Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you Madam Speaker for this opportunity to speak on the Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill. The legislation before us does involve a reduction of human rights and as such we must take that aspect seriously. The rights in question are of course those of prisoners specifically those serving a sentence of less than three years to be able to vote in New Zealand elections. At the risk of stating the obvious other rights are also curtailed in the fact of incarceration most obviously freedom of movement and to some extent those such as freedom of speech and so on. So the question for the House in considering the bill is not whether or not it is appropriate to reduce the rights of those who have been incarcerated under the Crimes Act but whether or not such a reduction of rights is appropriate. I submit that to do that we need to consider both the type and nature of the reduction of the rights and of course also the extent to test the reasonableness of what is being proposed.Turning to the first of those: the nature of the right's reduction. The right to vote which sometimes we express as a responsibility to vote for those who are able to do so is of course specifically geared to effecting the election of those who make laws for this country. And so it is that there is an argument around the disregarding of laws already duly made by those already duly elected at previous elections. The disregarding of those laws by those who are now incarcerated reduces the moral claim—if not necessarily the legal claim which we'll get to in a moment—of those who are imprisoned having already opted out at least to some extent of a system whereby they contribute as members of the democracy voting to install into this place people who make laws and then follow those laws. It would be possible to characterise that in relation to the social contract concept that's used in other contexts. I don't pretend that it's a perfect one but it's at least possible to analyse along the lines of mutual obligations—that a citizen obeys the laws of the land and in return has the right to elect those who will continue to make such laws or amend repeal and replace them and so forth.It's worth noting in that context that the laws that a person must have broken to have been imprisoned in the first place are those contained in the Crimes Act. I say that not just because of the seriousness of the nature of the offending but also because the Crimes Act is a codification of law. These are laws that everyone has the ability to know. They are not judge-made laws. They are written as opposed to being merely a matter of convention or being difficult to find by way of existing in different places and so forth. Crimes as well almost by definition and certainly by a matter of good convention are those which are non-retrospective so there should be no one to whom this law would apply in relation to prisoner voting rights who is behind bars by reason of an accident such that they have been incarcerated for something that was not illegal at the time that they did it. The final point about a person being behind bars for an offence that would potentially disqualify them from voting is that by reason of having offended against the Crimes Act they will have been judged along the way to have had the mens rea—that is the mental intent to have committed that crime. So it's not a light matter to send someone to jail in the first place and so it is that the reduction of rights includes not only the freedom of movement but the freedom of speech in the sense that correspondence is limited and so on. This is the context of the reduction of rights that currently exists in relation to prisoners. That's my reflections on the nature of the reduction of rights. As to the extent well the bill sets a bright line at the three-year mark. I suppose the justification would be as Ms Curran has set out that a person would be able to vote in the election that would install a set of lawmakers that would be in power—half of them or slightly more than half the Government of the day—on their release. But it's also the case that we do have elections sometimes at intervals other than three years. We have by-elections. We have elections in a shorter period of three years. We also have the situation where it might be that a person who is serving a term of four years is only disqualified from voting in one general election. It might be that another prisoner incarcerated for four years misses out on just one. And so it is that the cleanliness of the rule as is suggested by Government members so far is at least a technical detail that the select committee should be examining very closely. I am a member of the Justice Committee. There are a number in this Chamber who are as well. I acknowledge the chair the Hon Meka Whaitiri. No doubt these are issues that we will thrash out. But in the meantime for the purpose of the current debate setting out the principles involved in this law I think it is important to note for the record that it is not necessarily the case that there will be one election and one election only for a person who is serving a term of less than three years. Of course we also have the other technical detail about the fact that a person who may be sentenced to more than three years may end up serving less than three years in any case. Looking at some of the other points that have been made across the House I think they are serious points to be taken seriously and considered and worthy of a response. For those of us interested in constitutional aspects the first is the Supreme Court declaration that the disqualification—as it currently exists—places an unreasonable limit on the electoral rights guaranteed under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The reasonableness or otherwise is a judgment call that the Supreme Court has made. Of course reasonableness is famously subject to subjective evaluations notwithstanding that it is intended to be viewed as an objective measure. So it is that I will make the general constitutional point that those who are sitting on the bench and not part of Parliament not duly elected in the way that we 120 privileged members currently do are making a judgment call in relation to the unreasonable limit that they see and from a very different basis from this place. So while I would note the judgment of the court in that particular case I would only place a certain amount of emphasis upon it given that it is our right but also again our responsibility to make such judgment calls for ourselves.It is also worth having a look at the Māori Prisoners' Voting Report of the Waitangi Tribunal as raised by a couple of members previously. The key aspect of that report for me was not only engaging with the disproportionate effect as the tribunal found but actually the non-enrolment of such prisoners at the end of their time. But that is actually something that I think we could consider separately very meaningfully. I'm pleased to say that the Justice Committee in a different item of business—namely the election inquiry that was eventually completed—considered the question of enrolment for those who are in prison and then finish their sentence having done the crime and then done the time as the saying goes. We talked about options such as suspended enrolment or perhaps automatic re-enrolment. Those are a couple of different mechanisms that could usefully be employed even separately from the current bill before us which is to say that we could address those shortfalls identified by the Waitangi Tribunal without passing this legislation. Finally I would like to highlight one other aspect of the proposed law which is just in relation to what I would describe as a possible doctrine of equivalence. I don't think that such a thing exists in the law necessarily at the moment but the theory would be that—a person who is imprisoned for a breach of a law that impacts upon another person so seriously as to remove that other person's rights the victim's rights. So it is for example if a person is murdered then they don't have the ability to continue to vote and while I wouldn't advocate equivalence to be exactly any kind of reciprocity necessarily—an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth etc. leaving everyone blind as the famous cliché goes—I think it's a worthwhile consideration in terms of the overall context of those who have broken the law and those who are affected by it. So on this side of the House we do not support the bill at this the first reading.