Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise for the second time this afternoon to say that this is a historic day in our Parliament. It was a historic moment an hour or so ago when we for the first time ever debated a higher court's finding of inconsistency in legislation with our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. And it was on this very issue: the discrimination faced by 16- and 17-year-olds in our nation where they are banned from exercising their fundamental right to vote. The court found that discrimination was not justified and I do commend the Minister the Hon Kieran McAnulty for trying to alleviate immediately that breach in some ways through this bill.Democracy is a fundamental human right. I've said this before but I will say it again: it's one of the ones that really underpins the whole system. Without a voice in the way that all of our rights all of our interests are governed arguably we can't truly have a fulfilment of any of those rights. It's also important to notice as the court found and I think any declaration of inconsistency does that our rights are universal and inalienable. We hear again and again—we've heard it today in this House—that young people should wait; young people lack the experience the expertise; they should be doing other things. They should be making tea for the ACT Party while they campaign! Or they should be gaining the life experience that you need to exercise your fundamental rights—whatever else they've been told to do before they get their right to vote. That is a slippery slope.None of us in this House has been elected because we first ticked a box of requisite experience or expertise. Eighteen-year-olds don't need to show a certain level of expertise or experience and I want us to notice that being young in New Zealand today is expertise. None of us know what it's like for a 16- or 17-year-old today in Aotearoa trying to access the mental health system dealing with public transport dealing with schools dealing with the justice system. Our decisions in this House are informed by all of our life experience and expertise. They are stronger because we take into account that range of experience of challenge or privilege and that is what democracy seeks to bring to all our decision making. That is what young people have fought for.We've got a pretty strong democracy. We celebrate New Zealand as the first nation to give women suffrage. And I do want us to remember that the same arguments were raised against women's suffrage: women lacked expertise; women could busy themselves doing something else that would benefit democracy. In the end it was only when we could truly vote that Governments and Parliaments became accountable to us as women. Our experiences in all of those systems came to the fore. That is how we update and strengthen our democracy: to notice where there are gaps to listen to report writers the Electoral Commission the Supreme Court the experts the select committees and those who are most impacted. That's the problem statement that this bill seeks to fix. Not one of us would stand for a delay on our fundamental rights not least to vote for two years after a Government or a Parliament was put on notice that they were breaching that fundamental right.We've said all of this already but I'm going to count through it again: 16-year-olds can leave school they can have sex they can drive cars and yes they can work and pay tax without representation. That's inconsistent with a lot of values on this side of the House. But for the Green Party this is about democracy. We fought for MMP we fought for disabled persons' engagement in democracy for Māori and we stand and have always stood against discrimination against 16- and 17-year-olds from the moment it became clear. I could not be more proud to stand with every young person who has led this movement. It has been them who have led it and we know that they're ready because we heard from them by the tens of thousands outside this House when they came to tell us that we need to take action on the climate crisis. We hear from them all the time in our select committees on mental health on education on the roads and the systems that let's face it are going to impact their lives the longest. So I could not be more proud to have stood with this movement for so long.I want to say that as much as we've been celebrating this bill I know that until 2028 is too long to wait. It's not OK that the Government is putting off implementing this and giving those young people their right to vote for so long. It's a clerical change. It would be amazing to the life force of school-age kids right now to be able to engage properly with the next local body election in 2025—to get to enrol while they're together in school before they disperse go off to uni get jobs have kids maybe. And what we know what we absolutely know from those reports from the Electoral Commission from the Justice Committee from all the experts is that the engagement of people in democracy goes up and becomes a lifetime habit if they enrol and vote in the first election in which they become eligible. That evidence—that data—is really clear and the data is really clear coming from overseas jurisdictions who have extended the right to vote to 16- and 17-year-olds. It's not that new a concept. They've been doing it for a decade elsewhere in the world. And we know that if local body elections have lower voter turnout and if young people have lower voter turnout in our general elections one way of actually fixing that of creating voters of all ages for generations to come is to engage young people by providing them their right to vote while they're still at school. We know that. So we're ignoring a moral legal and practical imperative to change the law before 2028.Gen Z deserves to get their right to vote now and in fact all young people in New Zealand deserve to have their right to vote in general elections and in local elections. That's their right. I understand that right now this is all we can do. But I do implore parties across the House to take party politics out of democracy to read those expert reports to read and engage with the submissions of young people of experts of the Children's Commissioner and say actually—and this is what I'm really excited about with this bill—decisions of those local institutions will be stronger; they will be more enduring more sustainable and solve many more of the problems that face their localities and that that is what should happen here. With the voices of young people; with accountability of lawmakers at every level to everyone who has a right to vote; with engagement being built into our elections; with those young people who've called on us to give them their right to vote; but more than that with every young person while they're still at school—that's what democracy is about and that's why I'm so so so proud of us today of the whole movement and to have stood with you with the Green movement together for so long.