Goff Phil: Electoral Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Electoral Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13426. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Well what a bizarre speech that was from Scott Simpson. The Government the great nanny State National Party is going to stop somebody from having a black and white ribbon or a green ribbon or a red ribbon or even a blue ribbon on their car because it will frighten the electors. It will frighten the electors Scott Simpson said. That is so absurd a statement that it should be just a joke but actually it is not a joke. This Government is going to interfere in election day activities that have been going for 150 years with people allowed to wear proudly on their lapel a rosette to say which party they are supporting. Mr Simpson says that that will frighten the voters. Well apparently it will not terribly frighten the voters because this bill the Electoral Amendment Bill—Scott Simpson: It’ll intimidate them in South Auckland.Hon PHIL GOFF: “Intimidate” he says. This bill actually allows you to wear a rosette in the polling booth. If you are ascrutineer you can wear a rosette. If there was anywhere that the elector was going to be intimidated you might think that it would be in the polling booth. No it is OK to wear it in the polling booth but by God do not wear it out in the streets because the dogs will run off yapping the cats will flee and the people will hide behind their doors. That is bizarre that is absurd and I have never heard so much nonsense spoken in this House before on a matter that is actually very serious. This is an Electoral Amendment Bill. It should be seeking consensus. It is really important in a democracy that on the fundamentals of process and voting there is widespread agreement around the House. Yet for petty reasons which Mr Simpson can do no better than describe as being intimidating of the voters the National Party and solely the National Party wants to impose its will on the people in this House and the country stopping a practice that has done no harm for 150 years. It is 150 years Mr Simpson. You said that that was the period of unbroken democracy in New Zealand and yes we should be proud of that.But I have got to say that when I go out on election day—and even when it is not an election day—and I knock on a door it is really important that I am wearing something on my lapel that identifies me to the person who opens the door. They know who I am and they know why I am there. I am not there to persuade them how to vote on election day; I do not talk politics on election day—you cannot and properly you cannot. But you can go along and say: “Have you voted?”. But before I turn up on somebody’sdoorstep I want to be able to be identified to that person as to whom I represent and there is no harm absolutely no harm in that Mr Simpson. You have failed utterly to make the case out for a piece of absurdity in this bill and I hope that you are a little bit more open-minded about it when you chair the select committee that looks at it.I want to say that by and large Labour will be supporting this bill to go to the Justice and Electoral Committee. It is important that it goes there. It makes relatively minor changes and those minor changes are I think designed to be quite helpful as the bill sets out. It is really important that you have changes that will improve services to voters candidates and parties and the bill tries to do that in a range of small but technical ways. It is about improving efficiency by allowing greater use of technology. Yes most people particularly younger people are doing things online. Let them do things online to the maximum extent. Do not do away with the paper-based enrolment system because some people like my father would be absolutely appalled if he had to open a computer and try to enter something on it. But those efficiency aspects are fine. Improving the integrity of the election process I think is something that is really important as well. And there is simplifying and clarifying the law making the law more internally more consistent. So those are the sorts of things that are common-sense things that have arisen out of the investigation into the 2011 general election and that you would expect to have in there.Using full online enrolment with electronic identity verification—yes that is good. A greater use ofEasyVote cards—I think that when all of us have taken people to the polls etc. their having theirEasyVote card means that they can go in it simplifies the process and it makes it easier.Tim Macindoe: You don’t take people to the polls.Hon PHIL GOFF: I do it quite frequently. Most recently I have got to say I did so in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and by God they were pleased to see me when I turned up at the door and said I was from the Labour Party. I do not think the National Party stood in that by-election. It apparently did not have the courage of its convictions. Those things are quite good but if you are frightened of ribbons then I guess you would be frightened to go into Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and confront real people there.But I have got to say that as well as the absurdity of banning ribbons and banning rosettes the thing that is really disappointing about this legislation is what the Government has not put in it. The Electoral Commission is an independent body and quite properly the Electoral Commission was told to do an analysis of the voting system if MMP was passed by the electorate and find ways to improve it. Well the electorate did pass the MMP system. I personally voted for it. I think it is much fairer. But there were worries and as I went around my electorate the worry that people most often raised with me was the coat-tailing system whereby if you win an electorate and you get 3 percent of the votes then you carry 3 percent of the other MPs in with you. The National Party is quite smart on some things—it lacks common sense generally—but it was smart in saying “We know how to rort the system. Nobody much likes the ACT Party. They’ll never get over the 5 percent threshold. But if we give them our most blue blue-ribbon seat”—Hon Members: Ribbons?Hon PHIL GOFF: Ribbons—oh my God they are illegal now I forgot. It said: “If we give them the chance to get in on a blue-ribbon seat like Epsom then we’ll get all these MPs that the country doesn’t really want—the electoral system by and large would not have in Parliament—but we can smuggle them in on the coat-tails of a man of no less integrity than John Banks.”What I looked at when I looked at the Electoral Commission was that it did not just recommend that that be abolished; it strongly recommended that it be abolished. TheChief Electoral Officer is a man who has been there for a long time by the name of RobertPeden. RobertPeden said that coat-tailing was “the biggest single concern” that people showed about the MMP system. So here is another example of a National Government trying to rort the system a National Government absolutely arrogant about what people wanted and did not want and a National Government that has ignored the views of the vast majority of New Zealanders who said they did not want a rort in the system that allows MPs to be coat-tailed into Parliament. They saw the cup of tea between Mr Key and Mr Banks and they did not like what they saw.What is more not only is it a rort to the system seen by the Electoral Commission which is independent as being a rort but also it is a system that is inherently unfair. Let us take the 2008 election. The ACT Party that year gained 3.65 percent of the vote. It would not normally have got any member of Parliament at 3.65 percent but it stood not Mr Banks but Mr Hide—or Dr Jekyll one or the other—in Epsom and the National Party gave the seat of Epsom to the ACT Party. The result was that it ended up in this House with five seats—five seats with 3.65 percent of the vote. New Zealand First on the other hand actually narrowly missed out on getting elected that year. It did not get to the 5 percent threshold; it got 4.07 percent of the vote. But it did not rort a deal with the National Party to get a seat and with more than 4 percent of the vote it got no MPs and the ACT Party with 3.65 percent of the vote got five MPs. I want the next Government speaker who stands up to take the call to tell me how that system is fair to tell this House why the Chief Electoral Officer is wrong in saying that New Zealanders do not want that. And we do not want it—it is not fair it is not right. We talk about having a non-corrupt system. That is as close to corruption as we get when the National Party ignores the wishes of the people and did not include that in this legislation.