Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. I just make the point for people who may be listening that this is a bill that's amending 15 different laws at once. That's quite extraordinary. That's why you might actually expect Ministers to show up.Hon James Shaw: It happens all the time—they're called omnibus bills.DAVID SEYMOUR: And James Shaw from the Green Party says Oh no it happens all the time." Well that shows the Green Party's commitment to democratic lawmaking and accountability to the people. It's sometimes helpful—Hon James Shaw: Have you never met an omnibus bill before?DAVID SEYMOUR: I sometimes—and he says "Have you never met an omnibus bill before?" He joys in rapidly and unaccountably passing laws. He thinks it's a good thing. Sometimes it's helpful to be able to read these off-the-ball comments by people like James Shaw into the Hansard.But I was just saying in relation to clause 3 and particularly following up on the comments of Chris Bishop relating to the Local Electoral Act section and the subsequent deletion or proposed deletion under the amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 78 and people can see there that what we've got is a piece of zebra legislation. It's got so many stripes on it where they've struck out every word because they're deleting everything they said. There are horses in striped pyjamas running across the page there's so many stripes—it's a zebra amendment. They're deleting everything that was there before and it raises the question that—and there's Megan Woods she's chortling away. She loves a good zebra and she knows that there's something very wrong with this legislation.The question that needs to be asked here is—and Chris Bishop asked it—why did the Government think it appropriate to reserve itself the power to indefinitely put back local government elections? Why in the first instance did it think that was necessary? And why has it now said that it doesn't want to be able to delay indefinitely local government elections at a whim? Why? And the answer to that Chris Hipkins the Minister for COVID-19 Response just gave well he said that because the Government thought before that COVID would be much worse. Well that's the most extraordinary admission. It sounds as though what he was trying to say is actually that he thought maybe New Zealand would be locked down well into next year. We don't have any local body elections scheduled until well into next year—next October if I remember correctly. Is that really what the Government thought? And he says now everything's better we're transitioning out. And I don't know if what he's trying to say is that the Government's abandonment of the elimination strategy means that because we're no longer using lockdowns and an approach of trying to achieve zero COVID in a Delta environment he thinks well everything else is going to be going on maybe local body elections can too. But if that's what the Minister's saying—that he seriously thought until a month ago that he was going to lockdown all of New Zealand for a year and therefore we wouldn't be able to have local body elections and might need to delay them next October—that is the most extraordinary admission.But here's another question: even if that were the case I don't think the answer holds water even if that extraordinary admission was true because what the Minister appears to be saying is that it would be impossible to have an election to have democracy under any kind of COVID alert level restrictions. Now remember this is the same Minister who routinely gets up in the House and says that it's quite possible to have a Parliament hosted over Zoom. He thinks it's possible to have a Parliament over Zoom but he doesn't think it's possible to have a postal ballot a local body election—that can't take place over Zoom. And you have to wonder why that is. Maybe he's worried about the mail processing the postage but this is the same Minister that even under alert level 3 and even under alert level 4 conditions—the conditions that he seems to think might have gone all the way through to October—he's trying to say that we couldn't have had a postal ballot. But look at what alert level 4 allows. You can order all manner of things. You can order beer to be delivered at your apartment. So what he's saying is that he thought it would be OK that alert level 4 or 3 were going to go through to next October and that you'd still be able to order beer to your apartment but you wouldn't be able to vote by post for your local council. None of that holds water and I think we really need to get to the truth of why the Government wanted to do this and why it now doesn't."