Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Chair. Some more questions for the Minister and I hope she will take the time to answer some of them. Following up on the matter around electoral law one of the things in the Budget—dates back to the Supplementary Estimates—is the decision that Cabinet came to to increase the Vote Justice appropriation for justice policy advice.Now what was this about? Well in the Budget there was $39 million allocated for policy advice because all Governments have to prioritise what they're going to work on in terms of legislation. As I've said one of the Government's priorities this year—absolute priorities—was repealing the three-strikes legislation because they thought that our main problem was that we were too tough on our worst repeat offenders and therefore we had to shorten the sentences for them which is an odd priority but there you go. They came along earlier this year and decided that electoral funding was a big issue—and they have an external review looking into it but they wanted to get some legislation into the House before the election—and had to go to Cabinet and ask for $3.4 million extra and another $3 million the year after and another million so about $10 million in order to what we on this side consider skew the rules in favour of their particular party which we think is poor form. I'd like the Minister to explain why she thinks that extra $10 million of taxpayers' money should be spent in a way that doesn't have broad widespread support across the House to change electoral laws in a rush before the election.Then on the matter of electoral law I'd also be interested to know what confidence she has in the competence of the policy advisers in the Ministry of Justice that we allocate $39 million for in terms of policy response—and it may be another category that this comes from. But in terms of policy advice over a couple of pieces of legislation in relation to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act review—two local bills introduced to this House one relating to Rotorua and one relating to Christchurch both of which moved away from the principle that we've had for a very long time in this country which is equal voting rights for all New Zealanders. We've had Māori seats introduced but they've been based on a proportional basis on the number of people voting in a particular ward being the same so that every New Zealander's vote has the same weight at an election. Two bills were introduced one on Rotorua which was set to change that so that for those on the Māori roll their votes would have greater weight and lead to more people on the council than everybody else. The Ministry of Justice advice on that was that it breached the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act because it treated people differently on the basis of race and therefore the Government actually did decide to withdraw that.I first want to be reassured that the Government is not going to try to bring that back in some different way but the question I have is that a second bill then came along doing the same thing in a slightly different way in Canterbury moving away from equal voting rights because everyone gets a vote for the 14 councillors but Ngāi Tahu get to appoint two more therefore altering equality for all the votes. But on this occasion the Ministry of Justice said Well yes it does breach the Human Rights Act because it treats people differently on the basis of race but it's OK because the Treaty demands it." So those two different pieces of advice were rather contradictory and hard to fathom—how one was not OK and one was OK. So I'd be interested to get some reassurance from the Minister as to whether she has any confidence that this advice that we're spending $39 million on is any good.Finally another question I have for the Minister relates to the whole question—and she mentioned it in her introductory speech—around victims getting support but I do want to point out that in previous Budgets in Budget 2020 the Government announced with great fanfare a cross-agency initiative including justice around helping victims of non-fatal strangulation. It's seven times more likely to be murdered people who have suffered from non-fatal strangulation. Everybody's very concerned about it. The Government brought in all this extra money in 2020 promised to support 870 cases a year but only 38 victims have been supported to date. This was introduced in Budget 2020 as a matter of great urgency and then this Budget increases that by another $8.2 million. So what confidence if any can the public have that the extra money allocated this year will lead to any better results?"