Mooney JosephJOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on the Electoral Amendment Bill. The National Party opposes this bill. There is no evidence that the status quo has proven so problematic that a review could not address it. So a review is currently under way. The issue is: why is the Labour Party pushing this through now before that review comes back with any recommendations? Any major change to electoral law should be considered as part of a wider electoral review. The primary issue that has been raised by people concerned about transparency is people splitting donations and keeping it below the threshold and doing multiple donations. This bill does nothing about that. It changes the amount that donations should be—or the public disclosure threshold for donations and contributions to political parties. It changes it from $15000 to $5000. Will that make any difference? The frank answer is no it will not. It will not address that issue that people have expressed concern about.There is a real issue here in terms of something that is commonly called a constitutional convention" and that is if there's to be a change to electoral law the convention is that it should be agreement between all parties in the House. There should be agreement between both sides of the House when there's a change to electoral law so that we don't have the impression or the reality of laws being changed to benefit one party over another so that we maintain a fair playing ground. The concern here is that the Labour Party is pushing through a change to electoral law without having that agreement across the House in effect breaching that constitutional convention.I remember something similar back in 2007 2008 when the Electoral Finance Bill was pushed through by the then Labour Government—again wanting to change the playbook and doing it with the real concern amongst the country that it was doing it to improve its own electoral prospects. That is the real issue. These kinds of changes to electoral law should not be done in a way that is done to potentially favour one side of the House over the other and it should not be done when there's a review under way which is looking at this wider electoral issue. There's a real concern here. There's a piecemeal approach being taken by Labour. One is being taken which they have decided to push ahead given their numbers in the House having won the election last time and doing it without consultation with the other parties.The other concern is that the National Party was happy to release its submissions to the public. There are three other parties which the Ministry of Justice has declined to release to the public and that raises a real concern here. If this is really about transparency why is there not transparency about the submissions that three other political parties have made on this issue? The National Party is quite happy to do so. We're being transparent about our view and our position on this. Why are there three parties that the Ministry of Justice are holding back? That is a real concern.Another issue is the very limited opportunity that the public had to give feedback on the Government's proposals on this electoral reform. The Ministry of Justice called for submissions over the Christmas and New Year period. Now as anyone who spends any time in New Zealand will know that is a time when most people aren't thinking about politics and aren't thinking about the law; they're thinking about where to go on holiday and spend some time with their family. It's quite cynical it would seem that the Ministry of Justice called for those submissions over the Christmas and New Year time period an extremely short time frame with submissions closing on 25 January. Critics could certainly be forgiven for being somewhat cynical about whether the Government really wanted to have public input—a substantive public input—on this change.There is another issue which I heard David Seymour touch on last week and that is the concern by businesses who have Government contracts and/or have other relationships that they don't want to put the Government of the day off side. If there are businesses who have these relationships or they have a policy framework which may affect them—and certainly many political decisions affect businesses right across New Zealand—then there's a concern that if they have to disclose all of these donations they're going to be identified and there are going to be consequences for them. Unfortunately I have heard from businesses that there has been a feeling that the Government will respond negatively to them if they don't feel that they're on the Government's side.So there has been a real withdrawal of confidence in many people I've spoken to unfortunately in the business community about the present Government and that is a concern. It has a chilling effect on the operation of businesses in our country and that is something that we shouldn't encourage and we shouldn't see as acceptable in our system. We should be ensuring that we have a framework in which all people feel that they can have some confidence in. We should not change them without having cross-party commitment to maintain that constitutional convention that anything that affects the electoral system needs to have bipartisan support so that we don't get into a situation where we have parties changing the rules when they have the power. We agree that we have a robust constitutional framework where we compete against each other on an agreed playing field where we have an agreed set of rules that we then play robustly within those rules but we don't try and change the rules to benefit ourselves. That's a really important constitutional convention that New Zealand should maintain and unfortunately this bill does reduce that confidence in that system.There are some other issues in terms of the complexity of the change in this area and the uneven impact on parties' finances. I note that the ministry itself actually recommended against making any changes in that area ahead of the 2023 election. So the question is: why has Labour pushed ahead with this despite that recommendation? It's disappointing that the Government is doing this. If the objective is to ensure political parties can access financial support to play a robust role within the MMP system the question is: how does this improve that? We need to ensure that all political parties can have a robust campaign in an election can put their message forward. Look if this was a real problem you'd ask: why did Labour win with a compelling majority at the last election?Look the National Party the ACT Party the Green Party and the Labour Party were all able to access finance. The Labour Party won. The country decided that their message was the most compelling one in that election. Labour won with a resounding majority. Why do we have to change the electoral finance law now without that bipartisan support? If there is a real issue Labour should be consulting with the other parties and making sure that it's something that's going to be durable something that all parties can agree on and something that maintains that constitutional convention around our electoral law.This bill is unfortunately deeply deeply flawed. It does not address that fundamental issue that submitters were concerned about which is the issue around splitting donations and keeping it below the threshold. All it does is change that threshold from $15000 to $5000 among a few other things. I note it does also include in it the issue of New Zealand citizens who have been living overseas and New Zealand residents during the COVID period and it changes that eligibility period for overseas voters to six years for citizens and four years for permanent residents just for the 2023 election. That in my view of it seems a sensible thing to do because people have been locked out of the country often without the wish to do so because the borders were very strictly controlled obviously for the last two years and people haven't been able to travel back into the country as a consequence.That however is not the most substantive part of this bill which is quite a significant one. It does go back in my mind to that 2017-2018 period when the Labour Government decided that they were worried about losing the next election and they decided to change the electoral finance rules and brought in the Electoral Finance Act and it didn't work out particularly well for them. So it was a terrible piece of legislation. This has echoes of that unfortunately. Labour are trying to screw the scrum in their favour. It's not a good thing to do and I would ask them to reflect on that and maintain that constitutional convention which is really important: that we don't change electoral law without bipartisan support across the House. In conclusion unsurprisingly the National Party does not commend this bill to the House."