Street Maryan: Electoral Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Electoral Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16720. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour):I rise to speak in this third reading of the Electoral Amendment Bill which is a bill that should have enjoyed the support of every party in this House. This is electoral law reform. This is the modernisation of our electoral legislation. This should have enjoyed all the support of the House. We used to have in New Zealand a proud reputation around our electoral systems and the maintenance of them. The convention that all parties or at least the vast majority of parties would support changes to legislation was one that had not been broken until now—until now. This is a shame because we ought to have been able to get up and say yes we support this bill because some of the silly things that were originally in it were taken out such as the prohibitions on streamers ribbons balloons and rosettes on election day. That was a silly provision and that quite rightly bit the dust.What we now have here is a potential improvement lost—an improvement that could have put into the legislation the enrolment confirmation card. We could have had that provision surrounding the EasyVote card put into the legislation and cemented in there so that nobody could touch it—not the National Party not the Labour Party; nobody could touch it. It could have stayed there and it would have had the support of the House. However it transpired in the course of the consideration of this bill—which I have to say was considered by quite a different composition of the Justice and Electoral Committee from the one that had previously considered the review of the last election. So there have been some changes of personnel. But in the meantime the Minister brought to the House a piece of legislation that had in it provisions for the EasyVote card to be written in. So the EasyVote card instead of just being an administrative piece of apparatus could actually have been part of the legislation.The importance of the EasyVote card is that it allows people to come without any hindrance without any obstruction without any barrier to present their vote in a polling booth. They can hand over their EasyVote card and say “This is who I am.”—or not say it. They can just hand over their EasyVote card and simply demonstrate that this is who they are because they received it in the mail according to the process. Where we have had in the past the one or two infringements of that practice—where the EasyVote card has been abused—that has been found. That has been caught out. There is not any evidence of large-scale fraud with the EasyVote card.So now in this legislation we have barriers being put up. We have a provision now that says that people must go up and they must say their name. It does not matter if the polling clerk cannot understand cannot spell it has never heard it before does not recognise the ethnicity of the person coming to vote or if as in the case of one person I know who contacted me yesterday the person cannot speak. They have to say their name and present some other evidence that they are who they say they are or provide a way of finding their name on the electoral roll and then that must be verified.What this does is to put barriers in the way of people voting. Everything else in this legislation we could have supported but why did the Minister not wish to reinstate in the bill the passages that the select committee chose to delete? On reflection some of us thought that was not such a good idea. Why did the Minister not choose to reinstate those provisions? They were there in her original. They were in her original bill. The select committee took them out. Some of us reflected on that thought that was not a good idea heard the cries of people around us who said “Hold on a minute—that’s not right.” and came back to the Committee with Supplementary Order Papers that would have reinstated those very clauses that had been struck out which were the Minister’s originally. We could have had a harmonious presentation at this third reading of the bill and great support across the House for this bill. But for some reason the Minister could not see fit to reinstate clauses that she had drafted and had included in the original draft of the legislation.We remain concerned on this side of the House that there is now in this bill a disadvantage to people—a disadvantage and an additional barrier that the EasyVote card would have disposed of quickly. For that reason the Labour Party will not be supporting this bill at the third reading. We wish we could. We should be able to. It was not beyond—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.Debate interrupted.