Adams Paul: Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Adams Paul: Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:620;Page:15492] 
PAUL ADAMS (United Future) 
: 
 United Future also opposes this bill. Many of our members also agree that the single transferable vote (STV) system can be good in certain situations but definitely not in this situation. 
The main reason we oppose the bill is that the school trustees themselves do not support it. There are 13500 trustees throughout New Zealand and every 3 years over 2500 new trustees are appointed. According to the School Trustees Association not one school to date has asked that its board be elected by STV rather than first past the post. As Jim Peters has said the School Trustees Association has confirmed that the Green members did not even take the time to consult it to see whether it was open to or even required this type of—[ 
Interruption 
] According to our sources the Green members did not do so; Rod Donald interrupts and says that the Greens did but our sources say that they did not. Our attitude is that if something is not broken we should not try to fix it. Let things that are running well run well. 
STV is lauded as a system that would help to elect minority candidates on to school boards but is there any evidence that the current system does not achieve that? It is not a pure first-past-the-post system in which the focus is on finding one winning candidate and voters have only one vote. The correct description for the current electoral system for boards of trustees is a block vote because multiple officers are elected and electors have the same number of votes as the number of vacancies. Voters give their preferred candidates one vote each and the candidates with the highest number of votes win. Because block voting allows for multiple votes in a way that first past the post for constituency seats in a general election does not it does not discriminate against minority candidates in the same way. In most cases the outcome would be similar to that of an STV election. Once again I say that if it is not broken why fix it? 
The other aspect is that running an STV election is more complicated as we have heard. If it is more complicated it is more time consuming and it is more costly. Therefore why should the school boards have to face extra time constraints and extra costs for their elections? Under this bill those schools choosing to adopt STV would be responsible for educating eligible voters and training returning officers—all extra demands on resources that boards could better spend on our children’s education. 
However I am glad that this bill is being dealt with today. I have noticed that the Greens have kept delaying their members’ bills recently with the result that we get to members’ day and there is very little legislation to debate. I do not know whether that is part of a cunning master plan to hold back all of their bills until election year but the effect has been to bung up the system and to deny members from parties like ours—I have a wonderful member’s bill on the drinking age—the chance to have our bills balloted and debated. Given the Greens’ supposed concern for democratic rights as expressed in their intentions regarding this bill I find those tactics very questionable indeed. United Future will not be supporting this bill.