Goff Phil: Electoral Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Electoral Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16745. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):I listened in amazement to the speaker Kate Wilkinson—who could not go 3 minutes on this bill the Electoral Amendment Bill out of the 10 minutes allocated—when she said that this was a case of the Opposition playing politics. I will tell you who is playing politics. The party that is playing politics is the party that has removed the EasyVote provisions. That has made it harder for ordinary people to participate in the political system. That is playing politics. The party that fails to follow the Electoral Commission’s advice on removing the coat-tailing provisions that allow that National Party to rort our electoral system for its own self-interest—that is playing politics.The third thing about playing politics is that this bill in the midst of the scandals enveloping Judith Collins over Oravida and John Banks over Kim Dotcom does not do one thing to improve the transparency of money for favours or trying to make our system open transparent and honest. That party is the party that is playing politics with this system.Normally with electoral legislation we try to deal with it in a different way. We deal with it in a different way because it is fundamental to the operation of democracy and we deal with it in a different way because this is an instance where legislators are passing laws in which they have vested interests. That cannot be avoided but what you can do is two things. First you can endeavour to get bipartisanship which this Government has failed to do because every party on this side of the House is opposed to that party rorting legislation. The second thing you can do is you can try to get independent and objective advice on the laws you are passing. That is why we have got the independent Electoral Commission. So one—just one—National speaker should get to their hind legs and say why National ignored comprehensively the advice of the independent Electoral Commission when it comes to the rorting of our system through coat-tailing.I want to deal with each of those three areas now—first of all the EasyVote card. The EasyVote card was recommended by the Justice and Electoral Committee which is chaired by whom? It is chaired by Scott Simpson who just spoke as an apologist for the Minister of Justice Judith Collins and her ripping out and stripping out the EasyVote provisions. Scott Simpson actually chaired the committee that recommended in the first instance that the EasyVote system was good and should be extended. But it is not all Scott Simpson’s fault. He is just a pawn. He does what his Minister tells him.The Minister of Justice in her first reading speech on this very bill said that putting in the EasyVote provisions was an important change in this legislation. That is what Judith Collins said in the first reading debate. Now she has stripped them out and National members have not given a single rational justification for why they are making it harder for people to cast a vote. Scott Simpson talked about fraud but in his committee’s report he said that electoral fraud is dealt with efficiently and is very rare at 0.01 percent. He said that we find the people they lose their vote and if they are compos mentis they are prosecuted for doing it. No excuse at all. Do you know the real excuse?The real reason why National has stripped out the EasyVote provisions is that the National Party has close close connections with the right wing of the Republican Party. It is called the Tea Party. National and the Tea Party are just like this. The Tea Party learnt one thing—the more people who participate in the vote the worse the result is for right-wing conservative organisations.Scott Simpson: Must’ve been an awful caucus.Hon PHIL GOFF: Listen to that again Scott Simpson. The more people who participate the worse the result for the National Party and that is why it has stripped out those provisions. National members are not interested in widespread participation in the electoral system; they are interested in stopping people from voting and allowing only the wealthy and the powerful and those they influence to vote. That is why National has stripped out the EasyVote provisions that were originally put in to this legislation. That frankly is a disgrace.The second thing is National’s failure to adopt the Electoral Commission’s recommendations on coat-tailing. Coat-tailing is what happens when a party does not reach the 5 percent threshold but gets one MP elected in an electoral seat. That allows the party to bring in more members as MPs proportionate to its vote. That is all very well but for one thing. The National Party discovered how it could rort this system. The seat of Epsom is a safe Tory seat. It does not come any safer. And in each of the last three elections the National Party has gifted that seat to the right-wing extreme party in this Parliament the ACT Party so that it can coat-tail other MPs in.I will tell you something. It is not just the Electoral Commission that said that that was a disgrace and that it should not happen. The public in every single public opinion poll has rejected coat-tailing comprehensively yet National persists in allowing it to happen because it legalises the rort in the political system that enables it to cling on to power. That is why it ignored the independent Electoral Commission and frankly that also is a disgrace.The third thing is the lack of transparency over donations. In any political system you have to worry when political parties and politicians get donations particularly big donations from wealthy vested interests. That then distorts the system and the party reflects the interests of the few rather than the interests of the many. We have seen that happen.The National Party operates something called the Waitematā Trust. The Waitematā Trust money-launders millions of dollars into the National Party’s coffers in a way that you cannot tell where that money came from. Do you know what percentage of donations to the National Party are identified by the donor? It is 7 percent. Ninety-three percent of the donors to the National Party are hidden. The National Party knows who they are and that they will return the favour but the public do not know and they cannot scrutinise what the National Party is doing why and for whom. That is a disgrace.There was one occasion on which the National Party was transparent. It did not mean to be. It was the Don Brash email leaks. The whole of the correspondence of the then leader of the National Party was leaked to the media —I think by Bill English actually whom he had deposed—and we saw for the first time what was happening in the National Party.Let me read one tiny extract from a book called The Hollow Men which is authenticated by the emails that were leaked. Listen to this—talking about the National Party—“The party was not only secretive and deceptive about its election finances; some of its activities appear to have breached both the electoral laws and the parliamentary spending rules and it seems to have been party to others’ breaches in election legislation.”The National Party time and again rorts the public because it pretends to represent the average New Zealander but is funded by the most wealthy people in this country and it returns the favour. That is what Oravida is about. That is why the Minister of Justice is in trouble right now in the House today. That is why John Banks from the ACT Party is being prosecuted under the electoral law provisions of this country. There is a lack of transparency—it knows where it got the money from but it does not want the public to know. That is an absolute disgrace.So in summary what we see in this bill is a lack of transparency and no ability to scrutinise what the wealthy and the powerful get in return for their donations. We have a lack of integrity with the removal of the EasyVote card which is designed to increase public participation and make democracy stronger. We see also a failure to adopt a provision that would stop the rorting of our democratic system.We expected so much from this bill. We were prepared to work with the National Party to get good electoral legislation to strengthen democracy. But there is no way that this Labour Party can support what the National Government is doing in this legislation which is not about the good operation of democracy but about rorting the system so that National can increase its grip on power. That is a disgrace.