Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this shambles. You know there was a great Chancellor called Otto von Bismarck who said that people who love public policy or legislation and love sausages have one thing in common: neither of them should watch what they love being made. That's very much the case here tonight. This is the biggest legislative screw-up by this Government under urgency for oh about four weeks since we accidentally passed the wrong law and unwittingly legislated a $2.5 billion business loan scheme because the Government couldn't put the right bill on the Table.So now we have a situation where prisoners are going to be enrolled regardless of how long they are sentenced. But it's not clear whether being enrolled will actually allow them to vote or whether by enrolling them to vote means the prison warden will have actually committed a crime. You think about the difficulty of that. The prison wardens are supposed to look after the people that are committing the crime but this Government is making the prison wardens criminals in themselves. This is the kind of mess that that we're getting into with this kind of lawmaking. You know Sir Geoffrey Palmer once said that New Zealand is the fastest lawmaker in the West and this Government seems to have done a line of smack and decided to go even faster. I think that's a real problem because actually this is quite a serious issue. Before I discovered what had transpired earlier in the evening—because I'm a busy leader of a small but growing political party—I was coming down to record the ACT Party's thoughts about this very serious matter.First of all we have a major problem in this country with recidivism. We don't send more people to jail; we send the same people around and around and around. You know half the people that get out of jail are back within four years—a disgrace. We have the fourth largest imprisonment rate in the OECD behind countries like Czechoslovakia and Mexico and the United States. We need to do a lot better. We actually need to do a lot better with policies like ACT's that if you learn to read in prison and you get educated we'll reduce your sentence. That's the kind of smart thing we need to do. But this Government's trying to tell us that letting prisoners vote is going to substantially help to rehabilitate them. There's no evidence for that. That's the first area where it falls down.The second area where we have a problem is this vexed issue of human rights because notwithstanding the omnishambles of legislation tonight the intent of the bill is that you have this human right of voting if you have been sentenced for three years or less. Well if the Government had the courage of its convictions it would say human rights are indivisible and every prisoner should have the right to vote. Rapists and murderers are still human and should be able to vote. But oh no no; it's only people on sentences of less than three years. So it's not even principled by its own standard. It actually says that those people are less than human because they don't deserve human rights. Then Jo Luxton the member for a place called List" which is apparently near Rangitata said that the Government is playing—playing—with prisoners. Well what's playing with prisoners is this law that says you're going to be enrolled by the warden but you can't actually vote. That's playing with them. So it fails on a human rights basis.We actually to be serious take away part of the bundle of rights New Zealanders have when we imprison them—freedom of association freedom of movement. Very important rights in the Bill of Rights are withdrawn. On the other hand the right to vote—well I like many people in this House have lived overseas. I lived in Canada for five years. I couldn't vote there. Why would you want to? Because there's no ACT Party in Canada to vote for. But I didn't feel that I'd lost all my rights. I don't think it's a serious human rights issue. That's why the ACT Party is opposing this bill aside from the fact that it's an absolute shambles.I'd also say that this Government's priorities—the fact it's been willing to put so much capital into this non - human rights issue—tells us that this Government is not thinking hard about the real needs of New Zealanders. If I had some more time I'd give some better examples of what they should be thinking about. But for now the ACT Party opposes this shambles."