Smith Nick; Rurawhe AdrianHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): National's position on the contentious issue of prisoner voting has been known for a very long time. We have a simple view and it is that if someone has offended against the laws of the land to the point where a judge has sentenced them to prison they should neither be able to stand for this Parliament nor should they be able to vote in a general election.That's not an unusual position. That is the position in the United Kingdom. That is the position in the majority of liberal democratic countries around the world. It is a position that we have argued for more than a decade. It is the position that has been part of the law of the land of New Zealand for more than 80 percent of our country's history. And it is a total shambles that a law that got the assent of the Governor-General only yesterday is now having to be amended today and no amount of bluster and rudeness and personal attacks will take away from the Minister of Justice who took a bill through a third reading of this Parliament knowing—Simeon Brown: He voted for it!Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —and voted for it—it was bad and contradictory law.Let me firstly deal with the issue of why National opposes prisoners voting. The average number of offences that are committed by a person that is sentenced to prison in New Zealand is 24 convictions. The sort of notion that's presented by the Government—that these are people that have made one little mistake in their life—our corrections law makes plain that the only people that go to prison are those where the judge believes that all other options have been extended and will not work. And secondly it's a very practical issue. I've been privileged to be Minister of Corrections and I have talked to many corrections officers and they would say it is impracticable to run an election in a prison. The nature of prisons is that we limit people's freedom of association; we limit their access to information. We can't have political candidates of all persuasions going through our prisons and campaigning for votes—it's not practicable. And equally on this side of the House we think it is a theoretical nonsense for prisoners to be able to stand for Parliament. Parliament is a serious full-time job. It's something we have to do with a great deal of energy and effort and the idea that someone who's serving a sentence in prison is able to stand for Parliament is a nonsense.Now the Government argues that somehow the mess that has required this bill is somehow the responsibility of the National Party. Let me go through exactly what did happen at the committee stage. The Green Party introduced a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) not just to give those who had served a sentence of less than three years the vote but to give all prisoners the vote. National does not support that position; we voted against that Supplementary Order Paper. At Part 2 of the bill the Green Party had an SOP that removed six clauses in the Government's bill. We don't support the bill; so we voted for the Green Party SOP to gut Mr Little's bill. Now somehow Mr Little argues that us voting against his clauses was somehow unprincipled—that somehow it's the responsibility of the National Party because there's a row going on between Labour and their Government support party the Greens and they can't vote together; somehow we on this side of the House should vote for provisions with which we do not agree to patch up a mess of a coalition.Now I've seen some amazing speeches in my day but let me make something very plain to the Government: it is not the Opposition's job to vote for bills or clauses with which we disagree to patch up the chaos in the three-party coalition that makes up the Government. But here's the more extraordinary part: here's the Parliament in urgency fixing a bill that was botched in urgency. What we did at the third reading of the bill is we said to the Government Your bill does not make sense. Your bill—because parts of Mr Little's bill have been lost—creates a legal nonsense." We said "It's going to make prison officers behave illegally and so what we should do is refer the bill back to a select committee and fix it." We sought leave of the House for the bill to go back to the Justice Committee so that the fiasco that had been created in the controversy and disagreement between the Labour and Green parties could be fixed. And did the Government admit there was a mistake at third reading? Did the Government allow the bill to be referred back to the select committee? They simply bulldozed on under urgency and rammed it through the House.There is a rule in this Parliament that says that you do not have the third reading of a bill immediately after the committee stage. That is there for good reason. That is there so that then a Government or Parliament can reflect on a bill after the committee stage ensure that the way in which the various bill has come together is sensible. The Government chose to overrule that good process ram the bill through under urgency and it is solely their responsibility that we now have a nonsense bill on our law book.But let's just reflect on the process that this bill has been through. The issue of prisoner voting has not suddenly come up in 2020. If anybody looks at Labour's election policy in 2017 they said it was an issue then. Why did they not introduce a bill in 2017? Or 2018? Or 2019? Why is it that the Government only at the last moment in the beginning of this year bring a bill and then shorten the process and try to rush it through the Parliament? And it was worse than that. The Parliament was adjourned with the greatest national emergency that our country has seen in a generation and when the Parliament was adjourned the Leader of the House said the only legislation that would be progressed during the suspension of the Parliament would be that which was vital to addressing the COVID-19 emergency—that's what we heard in this House. Then why was it that they insisted that the prisoner voting legislation continue to be rammed through the Parliament while the nation was in an emergency? Can a member opposite explain this to me?New Zealanders are facing the greatest curtailment of their freedoms in a hundred years. They're not allowed to leave their home they're not allowed to freely associate they're not allowed to protest they're not allowed to do so many things and what does the Government say the priority is? The priority is getting prisoners the vote. That was an insulting process. We even had the Minister in charge of this bill writing to the Justice Committee urging us to rush it through and saying to the committee—letter from the Minister to the select committee saying—"We are not going to be able to provide the normal standard of advice to the committee on this bill." Little wonder then that we ended up with the hashed shambolic bill that we now have.Here is the correct position: we have a shambles in our electoral laws. We have a shambles at the border. We have a shambles in KiwiBuild. We have a shambles with light rail. And if any piece of legislation was going to highlight the incompetence of this Government it's that for the very first time that I've seen in 30 years a law that was only passed last week and received Royal assent yesterday is facing amendment today. And no matter how much spin no matter how much nastiness oozes from the Government benches it is the parties of Labour New Zealand First and the Greens that voted for a shambles of a bill at its third reading. I'm proud that National voted against that bill. It was a mess and this mess simply illustrates the extent to which the Labour Party will play tricks with the electoral law to try and score a few more hundred—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): The member's time has expired."