Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well that's two minutes and 27 seconds of my life that I'll never get back but it really felt like 30. It was the political equivalent of having your wisdom teeth pulled without anaesthetic. If that's the best the first lead-off speaker for the Labour Party could do they're all obviously wanting to head out the door and they think they're a bit too busy and important to be debating the meaningful electoral law changes that this Government is putting up.One of the things that has underpinned our parliamentary system over 180-odd years is the fact that electoral law reform has generally had two very important characteristics: (a) it is carefully thought through after consultation and (b) it's largely bipartisan. Not always—we don't always agree. What we have at the moment is a very piecemeal approach to electoral law reform. This is the second—well this is the first bill but we had an announcement earlier this week on donations transparency and now we're doing Māori electoral roll changes. We've got a number of other things in the pipeline. This was done after what I would describe as targeted consultation and it was interesting to know who the targets of that consultation were. The donations policy changes that the Government wants to put through: targeted policy changes. We have a Justice Committee review of elections every year. We apparently have a much larger review of electoral law going on right now and what surprises me is that we're not actually taking a more measured approach to the connection between all of the changes that the Government wants to do. It's being drip-fed out one by one by one and that is poor policy. It's not bipartisan. It's not with the level of consultation that I think these sorts of reforms should have. Yes certain Māori stakeholders and academics have been consulted according to the departmental disclosure statement but I think this is a bit more important and requires a broader stakeholder engagement process than that and I hope we get that through the select committee process. As my colleague and friend Mr Penk has said while we oppose this bill at first reading that will not detract from our contribution to a really important and meaningful conversation that should take place about actually whether this is even necessary. Of course the Māori electorates have had quite an interesting history. They've been around for 155 years but when the legislation was first passed to give effect to them it was only meant to last for five years. It was extended for another five years and then made permanent in the 1870s and throughout the remaining period of time there have been a number of reflections and challenges to whether the Māori electorates even needed to exist. There have been several reviews. Stuart Smith: MMP.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: The most significant one—that's right Mr Smith—of them was in 1986 with the royal commission into alternative electoral voting systems which recommended a number of choices that the public basically made through a referendum and MMP came out on top. Now when the royal commission made its recommendations it recommended that the case for having Māori electorates no longer existed. Of course we were in a very different country in the 1860s and we certainly didn't have universal franchise. Women could not vote until 1893 men that did not own property—and not even any property; there had to be a minimum amount of property as I recall—were not able to vote either and of course because of the way Māori land was held in common te ture whenua Māori it was a very very significant barrier to Māori participating in our democratic process and so it was right for that time. But as the royal commission pointed out in 1986 its time had passed. What's interesting about the introduction and deliberation on the bill that gave effect to our mixed member proportional system was that when it was introduced it did propose the elimination of the Māori electorates and both the National Party and the Labour Party supported that. But in the face of very strong opposition from Māori in the country that was dispensed with before the final Act was passed. Now the National Party has a view that it had then but we certainly support the position that was taken by the previous National Government that that is a matter for Māori to deal with and of course because of our proportional system—and we all know here that what determines Government and our representation is the party vote—the influence of the electorates is perhaps less so than it once was under first past the post. Now the Minister talked about constraints on the freedom to move and said that this was unjustified and unfair. I don't agree with that. I think the question that we need to consider is that either this is such an important and material issue that a widespread move of Māori from one roll to another would have a disproportionate and a distortionary effect on electoral boundaries—in which case there are representation risks with this bill—or it is so minor and inconsequential that the case for this bill has not been made and actually my submission is that it's the latter. This is not a material issue and if one looks at the practice over the last 25 years when Māori have had the option to move from one roll to the other there's a very intensive four-month period where the taxpayer funds a significant advertising and marketing campaign to encourage Māori to understand what their options are and to make informed choices. In 1997 the net movement on to the Māori roll was 2664. Hon Member: Wow! Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Oh sorry that was the gross movement. The net movement was that there were far more Māori—two to one—who actually went from the general roll to the Māori roll but half of that number went from the Māori roll to the general roll and that was 25 years ago. That was probably the zenith of the movement and the exercise of this discretion. Four years ago when the last option to move was taken the net effect on the Māori roll was 1200—1200. So we have somewhere in the region of half a million people who identify as Māori and a net movement in that whole campaign was 1200 on to the Māori roll and actually because of the number of younger Māori there was actually a bigger impact of 4000 going on to the general roll which I think is quite interesting in terms of what our young are doing. So 25 years ago 54 percent of Māori were on the Māori roll and 46 percent were on the general roll and 25 years later it's 52 percent on the Māori roll and 47.5 percent on the general roll. So for all of the campaigning and for all of the case being made that this is about unfairness and unjustified restrictions on the movement of Māori Māori are voting literally to either stay or to go on to the general roll. They have that ability. So my strong view is that this is a solution looking for a problem. This is not the most material issue facing Māori right now. It's certainly not the most material issue in terms of electoral law. If one wanted to look at the list of things that could be considered one could go to Golriz Ghahraman's member's bill which I think we will be debating in a few short weeks. It is a pot-pourri of options for how we change electoral law in this country many of them I don't agree with and a couple of them have actually been picked up by the Government already since the bill was drafted. But what I would say is that there seems to be a Golriz Ghahraman approach to electoral law reform by the Government which is this pot-pourri of Let's put a bill in here on Māori and let's put a bill in there on donations transparency." Actually this requires a much more considered carefully thought through and consultative process to carefully change our electoral laws and preferably with bipartisan support. That hasn't happened in this case but in any event the very case for these changes has not been made."