Donald Rod: Electoral Matters Bill — In Committee 
Donald Rod: Electoral Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17257] 
ROD DONALD (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 This bill is a shadow of what it should have been and the Government knows that. This bill should be addressing substantive matters such as State funding of political parties and some of the matters raised by Mr Shirley such as a proper donations disclosure regime so that we could have “look through” laws that expose what the Free Enterprise Trust gets up to in relation to the National Party. Notwithstanding those concerns however the bill does make some progress. One point of progress and a bit of a late running point is the Supplementary Order Paper that I notice 92 members of this Chamber supported. Ironically only the National Party appears to oppose it and I guess that is because its biggest fear is that its support will stay below 25 percent in this Parliament. 
 It is obvious that if National members had any confidence in themselves they would expect to win more than 25 percent of the vote at the next election and therefore would be able to block any regulations that they did not like under the amendments in the Supplementary Order Paper relating to election hoardings. But National members have already given up the chase not only to win the election but also to even get above a quarter of the vote. Quite clearly their concerns are totally unfounded in relation to the hoardings. The rules are very tight and I am pleased that the Minister was willing to accommodate many of our suggestions that we made to make them so particularly the one about the rules having to be in relation to the purposes of traffic safety and for no other reason. It is good to see that some other parties got some clear restrictions in place too. 
There were extensive negotiations with parties over this Supplementary Order Paper and therefore I find it extraordinary that the National Party seems to be on its bike about this one especially when there was a request to standardise hoardings after the inquiry into the 1996 election and that was repeated after the 1999 election and again after the 2002 election. So it is good to see that Labour has finally fixed that problem notwithstanding the fact that National members today do not seem to be singing from the same song sheet as the National members on the select committee. 
It is even better to see that the Government is finally dealing with the bureaucratic problems of the Broadcasting Act and I will come back to that when we get to Part 2. Suffice it to say that it has been a long and sorry saga. 
The other long and sorry saga that this bill fixes is that it confirms that members of Parliament who were born outside New Zealand or who have entitlement by reason of their parents’ birthplace are allowed to become a citizens of their home countries without having to leave our Parliament and that they are entitled to renew a passport of that country without having to leave our Parliament. I think that is very sensible very reasonable very fair and very consistent because as we all know during the debate over “Harry’s law” a previous Parliament amended the law to allow a member to become a dual citizen as a result of marriage without losing his or her seat. So it is entirely consistent that we have now enshrined permanently in this bill the new rules around dual citizenship. 
The only people who should be losing their seats as a result of this legislation are the National and Labour representatives on the Electoral Commission—and they are National and Labour representatives. It is absolute bunkum to claim that they represent the Government parties and the Opposition parties. Those two people are there to represent two parties and two parties only and it was good to see that that point was agreed to at the select committee when I put forward a minority report—or should I say it was good to see that ACT and United Future agreed with me. New Zealand First came back to say it wanted its own seat on the Electoral Commission and never mind the rest of us. 
But the point I want to make is that the potential for abuse from what Dr Smith was going on about is nothing compared with the undue influence that National and Labour representatives have over the allocation of broadcasting funding and broadcasting time during the election campaign which is why I put forward an amendment today and I look forward to the support of all parties in this House to get rid of the National and Labour people on the Electoral Commission. It is totally inconsistent in a modern democracy with more than two parties in this Parliament to have only two of those parties allowed to determine the allocation of election funding and broadcasting time. That should cease. It is ironic that we have an amendment today to stop those two parties being on the commission for the purposes of offences against the Broadcasting Act but they get to dish out the lolly. It is time that that law was changed. It is time that all parties in this Parliament got up to speed and got rid of the offensive provisions in the Electoral Act that give the two-party club extra power.