Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise in support of this bill and as the previous speaker who's just resumed his seat Chris Bishop has pointed out we now do have a question for the referendum. It is an exciting day in lots of ways for electoral reform in this House as the next bill that we'll be hearing is of course on foreign donations. So it is nice to see this House dealing with some of these electoral and democracy issues although I think the public were they to listen to the speeches of the Opposition this afternoon or read over them as the different readings of this bill came through would be really confused to find that this bill is actually about the mechanics of the way referendums come through to the New Zealand public. There are different ways that that can happen and you know people keep talking about the constitutional norms and constitutional law. I've studied constitutional law I've practised constitutional law and there isn't a constitutional breach here. There are different ways for referendums to come through which is why this bill is here. It's about the mechanics; it's not about one referendum. It is really interesting to hear the previous speaker keep talking about the question. The Minister has said repeatedly in this House that this is about any referendums that come through the 2020 election and since the first reading of this bill we've actually had one more added. How absurd would it have been if this bill had a question in it and we couldn't add more to it. What a blunt tool legislation would be for that kind of thing. Then we keep hearing—we do keep hearing—about this lack of ability for the Opposition to feed into the cannabis referendum question and framework and substance and that they've had no opportunity. Well they have actually and they've refused to engage.How much disdain would you have to have for this House and for our democracy to be invited to join a cross-party group to actually hash out these questions to actually talk about what this referendum may look like and to refuse—to repeatedly refuse. So it is a lie to say that there's been no attempt to engage with the Opposition because we know and there's been a lengthy record of this that every other party in this House is engaged in the cross-party group and trying to look at what the substance of that referendum will look like.DEPUTY SPEAKER: That accusation cannot be made in this House.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: So that has happened.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I just remind the member that that is an unparliamentary statement in this House. She might like to rephrase it.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: I'll move on Madam Speaker if that's—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well it will be in your Hansard. You might just want to correct the word.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Oh I see. So the Opposition has had an opportunity and it is inaccurate were the public to assume that there has been no opportunity for all parties in this House to engage with this subject matter.The next thing is that there will be an opportunity for this bill to go to a parliamentary oversight committee and that committee is chaired by a National Party member. That's the Regulations Review Committee. So the public will be engaged at that level. The public will come forward and make submissions and members on that committee will also be able to engage at that level. So there's the other opportunity.I think members of the public will be surprised to know that this bill is actually a mechanical bill if they've actually heard the speeches in this House and thought that it was solely focused on the cannabis referendum at that point and in fact that they do have an opportunity to submit. Of course then once the question goes out to the public it becomes a broader democracy question and it becomes about the public's choice. So we're not in fact imposing anything on the public; it is all about allowing the public to decide—in this case in the case of the cannabis referendum—whether or not it is time to adopt a new approach to the way that we deal with drugs.The war on drugs has failed so to speak and we're going to put it finally to the New Zealand public to say whether or not we would like a health-focused approach an approach that actually treats addiction as a thing that we can come together on and we can treat and move away from the approach of political parties where the tough-on-crime rhetoric has brought us down a path we are now so far down that our prison system is filled our healthcare system is not equipped to deal with what we might see as an addiction problem and people are being stigmatised to a point where they can't seek help. So that's something to celebrate.But the other thing to celebrate in this bill and today in the House under other pieces of legislation is that this deals with the issue of unfair interference with our democracy. This bill does set limits on the amounts of donations that can be made in terms of the referendums that the bill may apply to. We are proud as the Green Party to have pushed hard to implement actual spending limits because we do think that big money should come out of our democracy that we shouldn't have interference and that we shouldn't have our democracy up for sale effectively on the open market. So this bill does a little bit of that.It also requires that advertisers be registered or promoters be registered. We know that globally this has been a problem. The anonymity of those who with bigger wallets than the ordinary voter—when they do take a stake in democracy it has been a problem. We do think that it's important for New Zealand's democracy that there is a sense of transparency and implementation of that transparency in law and this bill takes us closer to that.I do have obviously a wish that eventually we will see limits placed on all political donations and that transparency mechanisms are implemented in relation to all political donations and that's why I do have a strengthening democracy bill in the House. So this bill moves us closer to that to a Green Party position on both fairness and openness of our democracy and today we can celebrate that together. I commend this bill to the House.