Sepuloni Carmel: New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5583. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I want to start with the title of the bill and then I will go through to the commencement clause. But firstly I want to make the point that this bill should be renamed the “Tricky New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill”. The reason I say that is—and much discussion has been had about this—that the order in which the questions have been asked in the two referendums is back to front. The first question that New Zealanders should have been asked is “Do you want to change the flag?” but instead the first referendum that is being done is presenting New Zealanders with a range of options when they have not even had the option to say whether or not they want to change the flag.This referendum is back to front and it is back to front because the Government has done that deliberately. It has its own agenda. It wants to change the flag. Government members do not really care whether New Zealanders want to change the flag; they want to change the flag. So to mitigate the chances of New Zealanders in the first referendum saying they do not want to change the flag—like 70 percent of them did during a New Zealand Herald poll—the Government twisted it round turned it upside down and provided only the option to choose between the current New Zealand flag and an alternative in the second referendum. It is back to front and it is tricky—tricky like the National Government.I also want to say that the other name this bill could have that would be appropriate is the “John Key’s Vanity Project Bill”. Let us be honest. This bill is not about New Zealand it is not about progress and it is not about being progressive. It is about John Key and the National Government wanting to have some sort of legacy when their term is over—and it will be over. And because those members have achieved nothing else for New Zealand—nothing else—they are clutching at straws and they are asking what they can do. All they can think of is forcing New Zealand to change the flag so that in 20 years’ time if they were in the position where it worked then they could say: “We were responsible for changing the flag. We were responsible for changing the flag.” So that is an alternative title—“John Key’s Vanity Project Bill”.I want to talk to the commencement side of this. What we have here in clause 2(3) is: “If in the second flag referendum the current New Zealand Flag gains a greater number of votes than the alternative flag design then sections 69 70 and 71 do not commence.” So those sections would not commence at all. What I want to point out is that because of the back to front way in which these referendums are being done we will have wasted millions of dollars in having public meetings that people did not turn up to and in collecting designs from people and putting them out there in the first referendum because of the fact that it says here: “If in the second flag referendum the current New Zealand Flag gains a greater number of votes than the alternative flag design then sections 69 70 and 71 do not commence.” How many millions of dollars will we have wasted at that point?I guarantee that there will be at least twice as many people participating in that second referendum as there will be in the first. There are so many New Zealanders out there who have already indicated not only that they do not necessarily want to change the flag but also some are saying that this is not the time to change the flag. Many are saying that given the pressures that this country is under under that National Government given the bad job that the National Government is doing and given the other priorities that we have as a country why would we waste $26 million on two referendums about a flag?Hon Nicky Wagner: Because we believe in democracy.CARMEL SEPULONI: Many New Zealanders are saying—it is about democracy Nicky Wagner said. She said that it is about democracy. If it was really about democracy then the Government would have got the referendum round the right way and first asked New Zealanders: “Do you want to change the flag?”. But Nicky Wagner knows as well as we know that this is not about democracy; this is about the National Government and John Key and their vanity project. Nicky Wagner knows that.Let us go back to alternative titles for the bill. Let us go back to alternative titles that really suit the mood of New Zealanders and the way they are feeling about this bill. We could call this the “Money That Could Be Better Spent Elsewhere Bill”. Actually where could we spend $26 million—some worthwhile places that $26 million could go to? Perhaps it could go to the child poverty issue that we are facing as a country which the Government has done nothing to address. Perhaps it could go to the housing crisis that the Government—