Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): I would be overstating this bill if I called it small beer". I would describe it as micro-brewing. So insignificant are the provisions in this bill that for the Acting Minister of Local Government Kris Faafoi to just have spoken and described this as a linchpin of the Government's reforms for local government really does show just how feeble a programme this Government has in the important area of local government.Let me begin by taking the House through exactly what the bill does. The law currently allows for the trial of novel voting methods. All this bill does is that you can try novel voting methods in the subset of a council. That is if you wanted to trial internet voting in a local board area in Auckland this bill would allow you to do it. Now how many members of the House really believe that introducing that provision to the law is going to solve all the challenges that apply to local government? But there's more—there's more.This bill is going to allow councils to be able to collect age-related data on voter participation. That's not a bad thing—members on this side of the House support it. Councils should be able to know that there is a such and such participation rate of 20-year-olds and a high level of participation rate for older people. That's information that might help councils. But when members opposite pretend that somehow this is the great breakthrough for improving the decline in local government participation that's occurred over the last 20 years I say to the Government to go back to the drawing board. You are micro-managing in the extreme.Now when the Minister of Local Government introduced this bill she said it was going to be the flagship for introducing internet voting into local government. National has said in its minority view that we have a real caution in that regard. These members opposite were very gung ho about conducting the census all on the internet and we all know how that went. It was a flop and the Minister of Statistics still has questions to answer in that regard. Actually running our voting system is far more important. In the National minority view on this bill we draw attention to the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine in the US that has produced a very comprehensive report on the very real risks of introducing internet voting. National is not saying we're opposed; what we say in this bill is it needs to be done with substantive care.The Justice Committee introduced quite extensive amendments to the Government's original bill because of this caution and these amendments were driven by National members wanting to be absolutely sure that we maintain the integrity of the vote. Nothing is more important in our democracy than making sure that people are not able to hack into the counting systems for votes and that people are not able to pretend they're voting for someone else. And that becomes very difficult to administer when people may be sitting at home on their computer casting a vote and you never know for sure who it is that is actually on that computer voting.The last set of amendments in this bill provide for researchers being able to get some extra information out of our electoral system for them to be able to do research. Again National members support that. But I say again to the Government: anybody who pretends that these very minor changes to the Local Electoral Act and to the Electoral Act 1993 are really kidding themselves if they think this is going to make any substantive difference to the major issues that face our councils.I reflect back on those big bold promises that were made by Minister Nanaia Mahuta when she first became Minister. There was 18 months of work and we end up with this micro-brewing bill that will make diddly squat of difference to anywhere in New Zealand. The reason that I will not take the first call is it's not worth the time of the House. The way the bill has been tidied up makes a reasonable job on some reasonably minor amendments. I challenge the Government to bring some decent local government reform to this House. It is an area where we need improvement and this bill makes such minor differences that it barely cuts the mustard."