Guy NathanHon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): This Electoral Amendment Bill is a very interesting bill and it reminded me about how I started my week down at Canterbury University at their O-Week. All the political parties were there and that was democracy in action. I was engaging with a lot of these students as all the political parties were there represented and what I found really interesting was that the Electoral Commission was there and they were enrolling people. They had a steady flow of people that were coming into their tents and enrolling.I was heartened to see the Electoral Commission there because that was the appropriate place for them to be represented and all of these thousands of students that I witnessed coming through the Hub it's called at Canterbury University engaging with political parties engaging with the Electoral Commission popping into the Cannabis Society there and talking about the referendum that's coming up—I just thought well there's ample opportunity for these 19000 people that chose to try and enrol and vote on election day in 2017 to actually enrol prior to E-Day. And as Chris Penk rightly put out and he did the arithmetic on a bit of an average admittedly but I thought the stats were quite compelling voters have 1095 days on average between elections to get themselves enrolled. Isn't that ample opportunity for New Zealanders who want to partake in our democracy to get their personal lives in order to go and enrol?Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: What's the problem though?Hon NATHAN GUY: Well the problem is really twofold and Nick Smith did a fantastic job of outlining that this afternoon: that actually there was a massive review after the 2017 election and this bill wasn't part of that. We've heard examples where Andrew Little put out a press release and said Oh we're going to do this Electoral Amendment Bill reform." But he didn't mention the fact that actually it's going to take another 10 days as a result of this for the Government to be formed and that's called the writ. So when you consider that—Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Nothing new there.Hon NATHAN GUY: Yes there is a caretaker Government in place but New Zealanders want to get on and get their lives back to some form of normality and know who the hell the Government is going to be and yet what we hear on the other side of the House on the Government side is that they think that it's no problem—it's no problem to have an extra 10 days to create all this uncertainty. Because typically what happens in an election campaign houses don't get sold people get nervous about tax rates and spending reduces. So what we hear from the other side of the Government is they are prepared to allow that uncertainty to run on for another 10 days.What is important in this bill that we are supporting: there are some good practical changes and I just want to go through some of those now. Allowing supermarket voting because there was a concern in the past that you couldn't have a polling place in a supermarket because the supermarket also sells alcohol. So that has now been sorted through this process. That's important because we know there's a huge amount of activity that goes on in a supermarket—typically in shopping malls. Having polling places in those busy areas makes good practical logical sense—tick. Easier for the Defence Force to vote: yes. It's practical makes sense tick. Then of course there's quite a section in the bill that talks about—it could be a natural event a disaster it could be a terrorist attack there's numerous examples in here in the bill whereby the Electoral Commission can make a decision to postpone the election or indeed the particular polling place."