Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to stand to inform the House the Greens will be supporting this bill and doing so quite willingly. We think it is a useful addition to our electoral law. It will achieve some good outcomes. It is disappointing that the National Government has seen fit not to even allow this to go to a select committee. I have to say that when our friend Mr Foster-Bell uses an absurd argument to oppose the bill it suggests that even with National's second speaker it is scratching the bottom of the barrel to find a reason to oppose the legislation. The notion that everybody will suddenly not bother to register to vote but will just all turn up 3 million - odd of us without having registered—I do not think that is a very profound or a very sound objection to the legislation. Similarly Mr Naylor in his contribution seemed to imply that if someone is not on the roll does not bother to get on the roll then somehow they are not deserving of a vote. I think that is a very slippery slope indeed. What is next? Shall we have some sort of a qualifying exam before we allow people to vote? That has been done in some countries in the past and it is a very unfortunate proposition I think.This National Government is almost becoming a bit of a serial offender in terms of disenfranchising people or apparently being unwilling to maximise the number of people who can vote. We know that this year there will be in excess of 10000 people who will not be able to vote simply because they are in prison and that is a direct result of a very unfortunate member's bill passed in the last term of Government by a National member. We know that that blanket banning of prison inmates from voting is inconsistent with our own New Zealand Bill of Rights Act unjustifiably so. We know that because the High Court has said so and more recently the Court of Appeal has said so and I hope the National Government will think long and hard on that. When our Court of Appeal agrees that a particular legislative provision around voting is inconsistent with our own New Zealand Bill of Rights Act it should think long and hard about reversing that legislation.But to return to this bill I believe the purpose of this bill is twofold. The issue around special voting I think is genuinely confusing to some people. The Electoral Commission's report implied that some people actually think that turning up on the day and doing a special vote does also enrol them. Unfortunately that is not true but it would be good if it were true. There will certainly be a very small number of people who might simply not bother to enrol on that basis but I think that number would be vanishingly small. The cost of validating their votes after the election day would be minimal in terms of the value of actually having people participate in the electoral process.The other major point of course is to increase turnout. Turnout fluctuates from election to election but the trend in recent decades has certainly been going downward. In only one election in the last several decades—in fact since 2004 only once have we got above the 80 percent barrier where in previous decades New Zealanders turned out to vote in much larger numbers. It is a somewhat worrying trend. Anything we can do to encourage and enable voting has to be a good thing if you believe in participatory democracy. If you look at all the OECD countries the countries we commonly compare ourselves with in terms of voting turnout we are about halfway down the list. Our friends across the Tasman rate very highly with something often in excess of 90 percent turning out to vote. It would be a good thing if we could get closer to emulating that. Anything we can do to increase turnout to engage more people in voting and to make it easier for people to considering voting a good habit—something they should do and will continue to do—I think would be a useful thing to do and this bill does facilitate that at least a little bit.I came across an interesting piece of information along the way of reading about some of this. New Zealand at one time had a Second Ballot Act at the beginning of last century. This meant that in electoral contests candidates had to get an absolute majority. If nobody got that in the first round of voting there was a run-off between the top two. It occurred to me that it actually might have some legs some value to reconsider something like that. For the moment though limiting ourselves to this the Greens are happy to support this legislation.