Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. I am a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee so it is my pleasure to take a call on these second readings of the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill and the related Electoral Amendment Bill. Where I want to start actually is by reinforcing the Electoral Commission's 2014 report which really highlighted two critical priorities. They were first a need to promote voter participation and second finding ways to meet the changing needs and expectations of voters. The recommendations in these two pieces of legislation actually represent 12 of 28 recommendations from that select committee process and I'd just like to highlight three of those. The first one is about allowing the Electoral Commission to investigate a new approach to counting advance votes including bringing forward the start time for the counting of advance votes from 2 p.m. to 9 a.m. on election day. The whole intention around that recommendation is so that we can produce better results for the public and at the end of the voting process we have results earlier. The second recommendation that has been implemented in the Electoral Amendment Bill is about enabling all submissions regarding objections to proposed electoral boundaries to be made available online instead of the current requirement to produce a summary of all submissions so people will be able to see what has been submitted in terms of the electoral boundary recommendations from the Electoral Commission. I think that is a much more transparent process. The other recommendation I wanted to highlight is that we are going to provide the date from which hoardings can be erected. They are going to be Saturdayised. So there will be a standard day and it will be a Saturday when everybody can expect that hoardings will go up. Again I think that for transparency and to enable the public to then know that we are in an election period and the process has begun that is incredibly valuable. I really want to focus on two submissions. One relates to the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill and the submission I want to focus on is the one that Denis O'Rourke focused on actually. It was from Tom Frewen. He presented to the committee about the purpose and nature of the opening and closing campaign statements which have historically been broadcast on free-to-air TV and radio. He thought that there has been a conflation between that public process and providing an amount of money and that amount of money which has increased is now $3.605 million—so there is a difference between the purpose and nature of the opening and closing statements on free-to-air TV and advertising. There was quite a bit of debate in the select committee about the merit of those propositions—whether election programming is different to election advertisement. There has been a lot of conversation in the House tonight about engaging with modern technology and engaging with voters on all these different platforms but the underlying philosophy of Tom Frewen's argument is that at the moment we have a platform that is free to air and there is a difference between the free-to-air platform and others where there may be barriers because people have to pay for subscriptions to access those and does using the money—because it has become all about the money—to enable more choice for political parties to engage actually undermine the whole essence of democracy in ensuring that everybody has access to information to make informed decisions? He also highlighted for that particular piece of legislation that we gave only 10 days for public submissions and he thought that was inadequate. I think that warrants mention in the House because it was a particular issue that not only he but others pointed out. The other submission that I would like to focus on was from the Law Society. It expressed concerns about the other recommendations that have not been picked up in this bill. There were 28 recommendations. This bill incorporates 12 of those which means that 16 recommendations have not been picked up. So I think there is an expectation particularly for a couple of those recommendations that the Government will be picking those up in time for the 2020 general election. What we were told as a select committee by officials was that we could not include some of them because we did not have the time to implement them for the 2017 general election. One of those recommendations was about the adequacy of provisions for dealing with emergencies such as what happens if there is an earthquake on election day how do people engage how do they vote etc. etc. One of the other recommendations that I particularly want to focus on is the right for the Māori electoral roll option to be granted after every general election. So on 23 September we will have a general election and after that election as Māori voters we should be able to choose whether or not we are on the Māori roll or the general roll for the 2020 general election. At the moment as Māori voters we have choice every 5 years and that then determines the number of Māori seats that we have but one of the recommendations to increase participation for Māori voters was to say well let us provide that electoral option every election cycle—so every 3 years. I do not want to minimise how important these two bills are or how much debate was had in the select committee because we have many challenges I think in ensuring that democracy actually functions and functions to enable the participation of all eligible voters. One of the biggest issues that we had at the last election was on election day—27000 people voted and their votes were not counted. That is another one of the issues that we think is incredibly important. Why should we be disenfranchising New Zealand citizens from exercising their right as a citizen to have a say on election day about (a) who they want to represent them in terms of their constituency vote and (b) who they think should govern the country in terms of which party they support and by default—as Chris Bishop said earlier—who becomes the Prime Minister and leads our country? So I think there are many more challenges and questions to be answered within the context of not only these two particular pieces of legislation but this area in the future. I think it is incredibly important not only for Māori voters but also for young voters. I think the more that we can do to ensure that they engage in the process the better we will be in terms of the mandates that we each have in our communities and also the quality of the engagement that we have in the communities that we are here to serve. Kia ora.