O'Rourke Denis: Electoral Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Electoral Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16742. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First):What is the most important part of this bill the Electoral Amendment Bill? It does a lot of good things and I supported most of them at the Justice and Electoral Committee but the most important part is in fact the part that is not there at all. We in New Zealand First are now opposing this bill not because of what it says and not because of what is in it but because of what it leaves out. The bill omits the need to end the coat-tailing provisions in the Electoral Act. It is high time that simply winning an electorate seat should not result in coat-tailing for whatever low percentage of the party vote currently enables a tiny and inconsequential party such as ACT or United Future to bring additional members into Parliament. This is a back-door method of getting around the 5 percent threshold for list seat representation. Polling shows that the great majority of people find this to be unacceptable and they want it changed. There should be only one threshold for list seats and that is 5 percent or more of the list vote irrespective of whether a party gets an electorate seat or not.We know of course why this is not being addressed and that is because the National Party desperately needs the likes of the one-seat wonders such as ACT and United Future each with an electorate seat plus any additional seats they may be able to bring in through coat-tailing. It is the only way that National will have any hope of keeping the Treasury benches in September. The Government knows that neither ACT nor United Future has any hope at all of achieving 5 percent of the list vote so Mr Key and his party will ensure that the several additional seats that National will need at the election in September will be achieved by National gifting an electorate seat to these tiny and otherwise irrelevant parties and then hoping for as many coat-tailing seats as possible.This Government is prepared to gerrymander the system and to do whatever is necessary to get enough seats in this way. So National obviously has no genuine respect for democracy in New Zealand—by failing to make the changes needed in this bill to bring an end to the hugely unpopular coat-tailing provisions. These provisions are making a mockery of the MMP system which has otherwise worked well in New Zealand. The Government’s claims that there was no consensus for the changes needed are utterly vacuous because it knows and we all know that no genuine attempt was made to achieve any consensus.Now John Key is further attempting to compromise the MMP system by claiming as an excuse for an early election that a period of up to 6 or 8 weeks is needed for negotiations to form a new MMP Government. He attempts to blame Winston Peters for this but the truth is that the last time Winston Peters was involved in such negotiations the actual period was less than 2 weeks in which New Zealand First was involved for just 3 days. So the Prime Minister is simply not telling the truth about this or alternatively he just does not know which seems a more likely explanation.Another thing that he and his Government are not telling the truth about on electoral-related matters is the constitutional review. This was a deal done after the last election to get the Māori Party into a coalition. The review then actually happened over the last 2 years but despite lip service being paid to consultation very few people actually knew that it was happening. But the most interesting thing is that the review panel has made absolutely no substantive recommendations. All it seems to say is that the conversation should continue—a conversation with practically nobody because the vast majority of the public did not even know that it was happening. Why is it that the report says only that the conversation should continue? It is clearly because the real decisions about the New Zealand constitution will be left until after this year’s election. What will happen then will depend on National getting the minor party seats it needs especially those of course of the Māori Party. Its price will be to push through the constitutional changes then which few people want including the incorporation of the so-called principles of the Treaty of Waitangi aimed at giving privileges to some that the rest of us will not have.So there is a secret agenda here and it is the gerrymandering of the electoral provisions concerning coat-tailing—which are not changed as they should be by the amendments in this bill—that makes all that possible and indeed likely. I see this bill as just the beginning of National’s gerrymandering. National will do whatever it takes to keep the Treasury benches and it takes the compromising of the electoral system to do it in the ways that I have described. For those reasons this bill cannot be supported not because of what is in it—there is nothing too much wrong with that—but especially because of what is not in it.The select committee’s and the officials’ recommendations about the changes needed to the broadcasting rules which I addressed in detail in previous speeches are not addressed at all in the bill as it has finally emerged. But most important the question of the coat-tailing provisions allowing list seats to arise from a party getting as few as only one electorate seat is also not addressed at all. It is bizarre that in an MMP system the winning of an electorate seat should result in the coat-tailing of list seats. The two things are not connected. The concept in our electoral system is to have either electorate seats or list seats. These two things should not be connected. One should not give rise to the acquiring of the other. That is fundamentally wrong. It has got to be changed. The people of New Zealand want it changed. This Government has seen to it that it will not change for only its own narrow political interests. If the people of this country see through it they will see to it that this Government does not get re-elected at the next election and they should particularly make sure that seats like Ōhāriu and Epsom are not used for the gerrymandering machinations of the National Party. That also is fundamentally wrong and it is time the people of those electorates put it right.The omissions in this bill totally compromise the integrity of the Electoral Act. The bill does not meet public expectations and it does not meet the demands of the public interest. This bill should not pass.