Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you Madam Speaker. Just reflecting on a couple of contributions being concerned—or not concerned—about the transfer of power and negotiations that might take place following an election of course the safe thing to do is to party vote National so that it's a very straightforward equation after that. If enough people do that we can spare ourselves all of this. Just in case that should be construed as an election advertisement I'd like to say that this message is authorised by Chris Penk and if I've got that right the ticker along the bottom of the Parliament TV thing will have my name about here. [Indicates bottom of screen] So I'll say authorised by this—of 365 Main Road Huapai.Anyway the Electoral Amendment Bill has been discussed at some length in the last few days and at even greater length at the Justice Committee of which I was privileged to be a member and I use the word privileged" a bit loosely but it's Friday afternoon.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thursday.CHRIS PENK: It will be tomorrow. Well it's the last day of the Playschool week Madam Speaker. I'll start again—I'll start again.Hon David Bennett: He's only a new member and he's on a three-day week!CHRIS PENK: Ha ha! That's right. Well actually it's funny—I'm being given grief about three-day weeks but it's funny you should say that Mr Bennett because I'm actually going to be speaking about a number of days. I've made a few calculations and it's relevant to the question of how many opportunities a person has to get on to the electoral roll and being denied one day in a three-year cycle from doing so.So let's hope that my mathematics are better than my ability to read a calendar and I'll say that in a three-year period—roughly speaking we have three years between elections obviously; it can vary a bit but let's take an average. There are 365 days a year. There are three years. We'll add one for a leap year; we'll round it up. Three out of every four years that sort of seems reasonable to me. So that's 1095 days in which one has the opportunity to enrol and only one day in which one does not.So 99.1 percent of the time one is able to get oneself on to the electoral roll and less than 0.1 percent of the time one is not and this is the nut that's being cracked by the bill here today. So at least in statistical terms and I think more generally than that as well it's looking for a problem that is not particularly needing to be solved but one that the Government is sort of looking to go after in any case.Actually if you think about it as well given that one only needs to enrol once given that if one has enrolled in a previous three-year cycle by the time the next election day comes around if one is already enrolled then one doesn't need to do it again then that means that given the average age of a New Zealander according to no less an authority than the first webpage on the Google results list—the average age of a New Zealander is 37 years. They can't enrol before they're 18 so that gives an average period of time of 19 years in which to get enrolled. Three hundred and sixty-five days in each of those years except we'll add five leap years of one day extra each. So by my calculation—if I can encourage you to wake up it will be worth it I can assure you—6940 days the average voter has had the opportunity to enrol minus the 12 days in those—Hon Member: How are you going with this Greg?Hon Member: Can you keep up Greg?CHRIS PENK: —19 years. Mr O'Connor's got out the back of a fag packet to write all this down. Anyway the long and short of it to cut a long story short—as a friend of mine would say after doing anything but—there are many opportunities that one has to get on the electoral roll. One day every three years that one is not able to do so because one is in fact doing something else very important in our democracy namely voting seems to me not an unreasonable thing.Other aspects of the bill have been canvassed pretty thoroughly. I would summarise the bill as good bad and ugly. I've given you the bad bit and that's just my speech—no that's sort of the unnecessariness of the statistical breakdown really the amount of opportunity that one has to get on the electoral roll versus what's now been added.The good bits have also been covered a little bit and I'll just touch on those briefly namely the broadening of an ability to vote in different places that are currently subject to a blanket prohibition—licensed premises and so on—but with sensible restrictions on the way that would take place. The movement of ballot boxes but again in a pretty sensible thorough way that's been canvassed. So that's the good. The bad I've already covered.The ugly I suppose is really just around that process with the Justice Committee inquiry taking so long—about a year I think. That was before my time on the select committee but a very long time even to get under way which has left us squeezed for time as we now are such that we are legislating this in election year which is unfortunate. So that brings my debate on the matter to an end and like the rest of us on this side of the House unable to support it notwithstanding the good elements that are within it."