Lee DeniseDENISE LEE (National—Maungakiekie): Thank you Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to take a call here tonight. I'd like to speak to my Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 60 which seeks after new section 55D(d) to insert new section 55D(e) which reads state whether the party for which the member was elected to has a board of directors and if so that after consideration of the conduct of the member they have agreed by majority decision"—that is the board of directors—"that written notice should be given by the parliamentary leader under section 55A(3)(b)."What this SOP does is ensure that the removal of a member from a parliamentary political party is not solely at the discretion of the party leader and wider caucus and that the governing body of the respective party agrees with this removal. Why would this be important to insert? If we glance around the committee tonight we can see who does and who doesn't have a governing board. We know that the National Party does. We know that the Labour Party has a governing body and a council. The Greens have some sort of executive arrangement—to be honest I'm not exactly sure what the Greens have. The ACT Party has a president. We know for sure that New Zealand First has a board of directors. How do we know this? I'll refer to how we know this at the end of my few short words.What do boards of directors do? They establish policies for corporate management and oversight of an organisation they collectively direct companies' affairs and they oversee the activity of an organisation. I'll repeat that again: they oversee the activities of an organisation. So what they do is very much hold to account and with scrutiny any sort of rash leadership decisions that come out of management. They look towards sound and rational and reasoned decision-making on behalf of the entity which they oversee. What we see and what we very much hold to on this side of the House is that there is another serious level of scrutiny needed in this particular bill. We don't agree with it but if by chance this thing gets through where is at least another serious level of scrutiny?Winston Peters constantly referred back to—this is me referring back to my earlier comments about who here in the committee tonight has a board and who doesn't—his board when we were attempting to put together a Government here in New Zealand post the election. Now we all know—and if you cast your minds back to almost exactly a year ago—post - 23 September he constantly referred to his need to refer back to his own board of directors. In fact one might cynically say he used it as a scapegoat when it was convenient. He held up the most important decision in this country—the make-up of New Zealand's Government—by using the line that he needed to keep referring back to his board.What we have here in New Zealand is a coalition that is so unwieldy at times that one does need to refer back to again the principles of sound rational and reasoned decision-making. In our books a board of directors can cover that base. Winston Peters didn't show one skerrick of consistency back then if you fast-forward to today. We had international journalists referring to—here's a headline—"New Zealand election result 'held hostage' by anonymous board of minor party". So that is an absolute demonstration that should we insert a new paragraph in new section 55D that requires a board of directors to undertake another level of scrutiny. That would be something that would be worth Parliament's time and more than that something that's worth the public's time and more than that something that would be right for both the public and for Parliament.I'd like to add one last thing—this is not an SOP but perhaps if we also added "approval by Young Nats or Young Greens or Young Labour" I wonder where that would go."