Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): It may be that that member Jono Naylor has to come back to the House tonight and apologise for undermining his own Government's commitment to the Open Government Partnership which is to allow participation encourage participation and provide for the engagement of the citizens of this country to enable them to participate in democracy.What he has put up is a case for putting up more barriers—and not just putting up more barriers; he has justified putting up more barriers. They should be disengaged if they cannot be bothered to enrol." he says to this House. Well that goes to the very heart of the utter core differences between the National Government which is anti-democratic and the Labour Party which is fundamentally about all people being able to participate in society and not putting up barriers to people.What about the 40000 homeless people in New Zealand? How are they going to vote on election day? They are going to be disenfranchised from their democratic right to vote if they have to cast a special vote because their details are not right on the electoral roll or they are not on the electoral roll. That is what we are discussing in this House today. This is a democratic bill that Meka Whaitiri has put up. She has put it up to try to correct an utter anti-democratic act by this Government in blocking the enablement of more people in New Zealand to be able to participate in the New Zealand elections. And yet the Government is a signatory to the Open Government Partnership. It is absolutely in black and white that a Government that is a signatory has to provide better means for people to participate in their democracy. So that is why that member needs to come back to the House and apologise before the night is out because he has fundamentally gone against that.For his edification the legislation that was recently passed was the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill and the Electoral Amendment Bill which came out of the Justice and Electoral Committee inquiry into the 2014 election. There were 28 recommendations that came out of that inquiry. This Government has implemented only 12 of them. What it did say though was that it would possibly look at other measures. Well from listening to that member tonight they are off the table. They are off the table. And any other National Government member who gets up to speak on this bill needs to clarify the position of the Government on this. Is the Government going to look at this in the future or is it off the table as that member has said?I want to show you a graph. I am sure the people of New Zealand watching this at home can see the blue parts of this graph. The blue parts of this graph go back to 2005 and the circled bit here is 2014. The graph shows the number of people who were disenfranchised at the last election. On election day there were 27000 people who turned up to vote who were not on the electoral roll who cast a special vote and whose special votes were not counted in the election either because they were not on the electoral roll or their details were different from the details they had previously provided. The estimation is—as you can see—that that graph is going to go up to 35000 people. It may even go up further.This is the party for participation; that is the party for exclusion. This is the party for all of us; that is the party for a few. This is the party for enfranchisement and enablement; that is the party for disenfranchisement. This is the party for streamlining and simplifying and making processes easy; that is the party of confusing and deliberate attempts to disenfranchise a part of the community that it knows is unlikely to vote for it. That is why it is blocking them from having access to democracy."