Ardern JacindaJACINDA ARDERN (Deputy Leader—Labour): I want to start by thanking the Associate Minister of Justice for his guidance in the last phase of this bill and he is absolutely correct that what has been really important in our discussion around electoral laws generally has been to try to build as much consensus as we are able to do because it benefits no one if people do not have confidence in our electoral laws and our accountability structures around our electoral system and so on.There was a unanimous Justice and Electoral Committee report with recommendations based on the inquiry into the 2014 general election but that is not to say there were not areas where we would have preferred to see greater progress. And I do want to talk about those lost opportunities because we would still like to see these things picked up in the next round of reforms because we think they are a blockage to people's participation in our system.If I were to talk about the first of those opportunities—we have a situation where we have a growing number of people who are not engaging with our electoral system whether it is those who enrol but then do not vote or those who do not even choose to enrol. It is though however incumbent on us that we try to remove as many barriers as possible administratively and some might say even when it comes to accessing a ballot box itself. I do not believe we are doing that at the moment.If I were to walk you through for instance Mr Assistant Speaker the process which I know you know all too well for enrolling and voting it becomes very obvious where some of our issues lie. For instance of course you must be on the electoral roll before you can vote and being on the electoral roll itself is compulsory. If however you do not get on the electoral roll roughly 4 weeks before an election you will not be on the printed roll. That means if you go to enrol before election day and it is within that 4-week period and you fill in an enrolment form and send it off to the Electoral Commission when you walk into a voting booth you will not be there on the printed roll in front of them. That means that you are likely to be told to fill in a special vote form. If you do not fill in that special vote form 100 percent accurately in comparison to the enrolment form you have filled in your vote will not be counted. That is however if you manage to get that enrolment form in at least before voting day. If you go into a ballot booth to vote and you are in the advance voting period you can fill in an enrolment form while you are there then fill in a special vote form while you are there and then cast a vote. If when filling in those two forms you do not get them absolutely accurately correct in comparison to each other your vote will not count. One simple thing we could have done and it would have made sense is that if you walk into a booth and it is advance voting and you are not on the roll get people to fill in one form—a special vote form that acts as an enrolment form. There is no room for error in that. There is also no room for me to walk in and say: Look I'm not on the electoral roll but I'm sure I filled in an enrolment form so I won't bother with that; I'll just do a special vote."The reason we know that some of this is happening is that because at the last election guess how many individuals walked into a ballot booth and filled in a form—they ticked they voted they took the time out of their day to go and vote they made the effort but there was something wrong either with their special vote or their enrolment form and they did not count. How many votes?Jono Naylor: You're going to tell us. Come on.JACINDA ARDERN: You know I am going to tell you Mr Naylor. Twenty-seven thousand votes.Jono Naylor: How many?JACINDA ARDERN: Twenty-seven thousand votes were discounted—people were disenfranchised—because there was some administrative issue with either their enrolment or some of the form-filling that led up to their vote. Surely it would be in our best interest to remove some of those issues.So the first thing we tried to propose and we thought we had got the select committee to the right place on was to simply combine an enrolment form and a special vote form—simple. It is so simple. Why would we not agree to that?The second point—it is now possible to walk into a booth and enrol and vote at the same time during an advance voting period and you do not have to sign a form to give a valid reason about being out of town or working in order to do that. That is why roughly 30 percent of New Zealanders are voting early. It is great. We should encourage that. It is participation.However there is some confusion over the fact you can do that right up until the Friday before the election but something magically changes with our system where it somehow becomes inappropriate on the day itself to fill in an enrolment for and a voting form at the same time. What that magical thing is that makes it inappropriate within that 12-hour period is not exactly clear.I say that because we raised it in select committee. Why can you not enrol and vote at the same time on election day? Why not? Because that means that everyone who walked into a booth and was found not to be on the roll could simply fill in an enrolment form and have their say. Surely that should be our joint aspiration? We still I do not think have adequate reasons. There used to be arguments around the integrity of the roll. I think that has diminished over time. We have proven with the advance voting we have done now that it is possible to maintain the integrity of the roll. Our electoral fraud is minuscule in New Zealand—minuscule. In fact the increases that we have seen which are still minor are thought to be down to the longer periods of advance voting that we have now and the confusion that does cause for some voters.One final other additional thought was on the Māori electoral option. It is our view and the view of our Māori caucus in particular that we should have the ability for someone who is on the Māori roll that if they would like to change from either general to Māori or Māori to general they should have that option once within a 3-year period rather than the off-cycle that we have at the moment. At the moment we are looking at doing it in 2020. I think that is an unfortunate delay and we could have resolved it this time round.But what about the things we do agree on—and there were plenty of those in the bill. We did want to give the Electoral Commission the ability to use new methods of providing information to electors in addition to post. It may surprise people that we are that prescriptive in our legislation but we are. We also for instance are quite prescriptive around form-filling. So we agreed on giving the Electoral Commission the ability to go away and say "What is going to be best for voters in terms of making these things comprehensible and giving them that freedom?".Also we agreed on allowing the Electoral Commission where an elector has informed it of a change of residence to a different electorate to allow enrolment that will take effect after 1 calendar month from the moving date. I have had this happen to me. I was so eager when I moved that I filled in a new enrolment form but I had not lived there for a month and so I got a letter back from the Electoral Commission saying "Sorry we can't enrol you. You haven't been there for 4 weeks." There was not the ability to then just simply acknowledge that and from the 1 month period make it kick in. So that would be quite dispiriting I imagine if you got one of those and did not follow through the process. Who knows whether someone would follow up.There are other various things around allowing electoral officials to use online electronic roll look-up allowing the Electoral Commission to look at advance voting counting—all things that do make good common sense and clarifying in particular section 199A of the Electoral Act through new section 199A set out in clause 97 of the Electoral Amendment Bill to cover material first published or actively republished promoted or distributed on election day for 2 preceding days on for instance social media. We had this issue where someone might have put something that usually would have required a promoter's statement—clearly an electoral advertisement—and that actually might just stay in someone's feed on the day itself even though it was not posted outside the law. So we are clarifying what our intent is there to keep pace with the modern electoral environment.On broadcasting it makes sense what we have done with opening and closing broadcasts. It makes sense to say an allocation needs to remain but we need to give flexibility to political parties as to how they use that allocation. All of the parties agreed with that. The idea that people sit down for you know 30-minute spots to watch a long broadcast—Denis O'Rourke: New Zealand First does not agree.JACINDA ARDERN: —it is not consumable it is not the way people consume media it removes flexibility. Excuse me I may not have spoken for every party. Certainly Labour was of the view that we needed to move away from that form and allow multi-platform as well not just screen for those broadcasts because that is where our voting public is.So all in all there are some missed opportunities with this bill. There is more we would have liked to see done. Ultimately our goal should be to ensure that everyone takes up the opportunity to use their democratic voice through our electoral process. It should be incumbent on us to maintain transparent rules and regulations but to do as much as we can to encourage voter engagement. So although we agree with what we have got here today we disagree with what has been removed and the lost opportunity."