Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. It's good to have yet another opportunity to speak to the Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2). At this the third and final reading I thought it might be helpful to provide a bit of a summary of what we've heard over the last 24 hours—in fact less than 24 hours in terms of actually the debate happening—to explain first of all and separate the process from the substance of the bill. The fact of the bill existing and the fact of it being something that would be subject to urgency was unexpected unexplained and unnecessary. We've talked a lot in previous stages and I won't reiterate all those points but in the spirit of a third reading debate where it's helpful to place on record the way that things have played out over the course of the debate albeit the short course of the debate as a matter of record we wish to say on this side of the House that we don't understand or agree with the idea that such urgency was needed in the context of a select committee process—the Justice Committee—that is taking place and will report back any year now. So one of the interesting points that was made in the debate I think was about the quantum of what this bill is actually looking to achieve. The analysis by the Hon Gerry Brownlee was that essentially it's a $16 problem. The maths behind that was something along the lines of the average overseas donation being $66. Here we've got a bill that reduces down to $50 the amount that can be kept—so the difference of course is $16. So we're really going to a lot of effort outside of a process that would inevitably have reformed this area anyway to stop $16 worth of donations per time from an overseas person.That's about the amount of a block of cheese—Tasty cheese; the only real kind of course—and it's sort of ironic that the phrase I associate with the making of cheese is that good things take time. I think the same could be said of legislative processes. The old adage was that the two things that you should never see being made are sausages and laws. Well I think a block of cheese would be an appropriate way to describe the problem that the Government's intending to solve in relation to this bill.I should be really clear that on this side of the House we do think that there is a problem. We do think that in relation to overseas donations there is a need for reform. You'll be aware and others will be aware that we are supporting the bill. It is worth supporting because it does at least something in the right direction albeit that we've disagreed as to process and also some of the particulars about the way that it could actually achieve its aim much better.So I'll just pass to those thoughts now about the way that the particular law will operate and a few missed opportunities along the way. Inevitably it will be the case that we've missed opportunities as a Parliament specifically because of the process having been so rushed. So I'll sort of refer to those in passing as a general theme of the procedural shortfalls but really I'm just focussing on a couple of particular things that we could have made somewhat better including by way of an amendment that was actually put forward and voted down. Dr Smith has talked about that already and I'll just do so briefly.So the first point on the substance of the bill is just that the limited time has limited our opportunity to ensure that the scope is everything that it could be. In relation to local government the bill says specifically—explicitly—that it doesn't apply to local elections. Well it's good to have that clarity except that it is a missed opportunity because many people have been thinking about electoral law reform both within this Parliament and within that even tighter still the Justice Committee and others who have been talking in the general sphere of public life have been identifying a real gap in our statute book whereby we've got a Local Electoral Act on the one hand—and Electoral Act by implication relating to non-local matters; central government essentially—that are not aligned even in very basic key areas that you'd expect.So it is that we've still got after today after all the heat and light of this process under urgency a regime in New Zealand whereby local government candidates or parties—you know we might call tickets but roughly speaking we've got actors in the local government space standing for election able to receive donations of any amount I think of any provenance whatsoever and we've not taken the opportunity to limit it in any way. Actually ideally we'd be aligning the two—that is the electoral and the local electoral legislation—in that way. It would have been an easy matter from a drafting point of view. On this side of the House we proved it even in the short period of time that we had available by preparing an amendment. We never got the chance to actually table that but at least some on this side of the House—and I think the Hon Tim Macindoe was one of them—did at least speak to that distinction that meaningless distinction or a distinction that shouldn't be meaningful I should say between the local and the central space.He made such points about the lack of scrutiny in the local government space as compared with this place here in Parliament. I sort of motion up in the direction of the press gallery symbolically because we've got them physically here but we've also got a lot of attention to the affairs of this House. I look down the barrel of the camera of Parliament TV and note that we are scrutinised here in decision making as decision makers in a way that local government is not and probably never will be. So in terms of a donations regime—which is after all at the heart of this bill—from overseas or anonymous sources surely it makes sense to have no less scrutiny and no less restriction in relation to donations made to local government election candidates. That's before we even go on to the question of the fact that local government elected officials can make very powerful decisions very valuable decisions in the context of resource consent matters and so forth.My next point is really regarding the scope of the bill—not only which big picture big ticket items are captured as I've already discussed but actually even within the bill itself and even in the provisions that are being changed. We've missed an opportunity where we're talking about overseas persons and donations that are made to parties or candidates but what we haven't actually changed unfortunately is a scenario where we have trusts foundations—yes and companies. That could have been an amendment too. That could have been made by any member of the House including the Green Party whereby we say Well it's not good enough simply to be incorporated in New Zealand or to have a head office here in the case of a company carrying on business here maybe but completely foreign-owned not owned by New Zealanders."That seems as though the intent of the bill which nominally was to reduce the prospect of undue foreign interference—we've really missed the trick on that one collectively. On the National Party side of things we can say at least that we tried and we had an amendment in there. The Minister said that he thought it strange that the amendment didn't go as far as he might have expected. Well that's fine. We could have amended that further or he could have amended our amendment to his original and we could have got there in the end—opportunity missed again.My final comment or two regards a couple of the discussions that have been had about the way that the electoral law will be applied. The Minister made a suggestion about the way that he could say—in fact he has been saying to the Electoral Commission—that if a donation is just a bit over $50 which is the threshold then you don't need to look too hard but if it's a lot more than the $50 threshold then a lot of scrutiny should be applied. On a common-sense basis that sort of sounds pretty reasonable but it's not in the law.Then the argument evolves from the Minister to say something like "Well it would be common that the Electoral Commission could give guidance about the way that the law is applied so you don't need everything written in the law but you might reasonably expect that the Electoral Commission could give some guidance about that." Well that's fine but what we have had in the last 24 hours is the Minister giving that guidance to the Electoral Commission who in turn will be applying it to all political parties including the Minister's own including you know Her Majesty's loyal Opposition and any other players that might be around at the time of the next election and so on. That seems a strange way to approach lawmaking where a thorough job is not done. We sort of appear to be filling in the gaps on the basis of how Minister Little feels it should play out when these matters come to a head.We also had a brief but extraordinary contribution from Winston Peters not so much a speech as him telling us what the voices in his head are telling him. So we sort of don't need to dwell on that much further. Just to say: a worthwhile aim of the bill; pity about the process but we'll support it none the less."