Webb DuncanDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Madam Speaker. Look I give credit to Mr James Shaw; that was a thoughtful speech. Not one I entirely agree with but it did highlight the importance of this piece of legislation. The fact of the matter is that this is a piece of legislation which touches on our electoral and therefore constitutional framework and it's not something that we should be changing with the changing winds and tides of electoral fortune. Certainly we've got it on our statute book and whilst there may come a time when we look at it in further detail as part of our overall electoral framework now is not the time. We've got a lot to do in this Government. We've got a Budget coming we've got an economy to strengthen and we've got the people of New Zealand to look after and this kind of thing is simply a distraction.Calls from the Opposition that sort of stand on high principle talk about the Bill of Rights that was put in place in 1688 as William of Orange took over from the Stuart monarchs when there were rotten boroughs and royalists and Roundheads; it's a different world.Now we in New Zealand are here to decide our own constitutional and electoral future and the fact of the matter is—and Mr Bishop dismissed it out of hand but it's a really really important point. It's how we express our voting system to all of New Zealand. It's pretty simple: the party who gets the most votes gets the most seats and to not have this Act to not have this piece of legislation would do away with that principle. To suggest that a member can of their own volition upset the proportionality of Parliament is to put in the hands of an individual the destiny of our nation and that's wrong.Maureen Pugh: Destiny of a nation!Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Well you may scoff Maureen Pugh but the fact of the matter is we have to plan in this House for all eventualities and whilst the Labour Party has been conferred a generous mandate we know that there have been many Parliaments where one or two people could sway the entire House. To put that in the hands of someone who has been put into Parliament by their party on the very basis of their party allegiance to say that that person can cross the floor ignore entirely the will of the voters on a whim is to make a constitutional tear in the fabric of this nation and the right place for that to be decided is in exactly the way this bill has set it out.Because you know what there are some things that it is right to legislate about and there are some things that it is the role of this House to determine and there are some things that it is the role of the political party to determine and that's exactly the balance that this bill has struck. We know that Parliament has an absolute prerogative to determine its own procedure so to eject someone from the House is absolutely the role of the Speaker and never should that kind of conduct and that kind of decision making be examined outside of this House. That is an ancient privilege of this House and long shall it remain. But who is a member of this House? Who is qualified to come and take the oath at this table? That is very much a question for legislation and that is part of what this bill does. It says a person who has been put on a party list by a political party and by dint of the number of votes that that party gets is qualified to come and stand at that table and take the Oath of Allegiance as a member of this House. If they then turn their back on the very party that qualified them to stand there then it is quite appropriate for that party—in the right circumstances if it decides it's the right thing to do—to take that privilege away from them. It is the place of this House which has exclusive cognisance over its own procedures to take note of what the party leader says and that the party leader has followed the right procedures has gone to that member and said These are the consequences of your actions not only your historical actions but also the actions in the future—that if you continue to behave in the way you have the party will see you as disrupting the proportionality of the House and the consequences of that are that you can be removed at your peril."There may be some members—in fact we have seen one in the last term who has chosen to take that risk. Jami-Lee Ross spoke out against the National Party on a number of matters and he did it with energy to say the least. To suggest that there was some kind of chilling effect—simply not there. We know that there will be members who will balance up as Dr Smith said what they see as their loyalty to their electorate and to this nation with their loyalty to their party. The suggestion that members will look to their position and abandon their ethics is disrespectful and utterly underestimates all of the members of this House who are quite capable of making their own decisions and making their own hard decisions. So I simply do not accept that a person who commits in the way we all do to the future of New Zealand will be dissuaded by some kind of shadow of a threat of removal from office from a clear path of their convictions. We're here because of our convictions. Why would we not leave because of our convictions if that was the appropriate course of action?So ultimately this is a busy Government. We're not going to be distracted by the changing tides of electoral fortune to fundamentally change the direction of our electoral and constitutional system.David Seymour: He's fundamentally changed his position on the bill.Dr DUNCAN WEBB: I can hear some yapping but I can't understand it. What really is—who is that? And of course members of the ACT Party are really going to be most at risk here because if you think about it what a diverse bunch they are. What holds them together other than the weakness of the National Party? Now they may well be the new Opposition but they've certainly got a little bit of learning to do. You don't learn unity from the other side of the House; you learn it from this side of the House.So the fact of the matter is that this is a bill which is modern. It recognises the genuine and important place of proportionality. It doesn't look back to first-past-the-post thinking. It doesn't look back to the Stuarts and the Plantagenets for our constitutional theory. It is a bill which absolutely places the right weight on the balance to be struck between this legislature the courts and the political framework of our political party system which is of increasing importance in our constitutional framework. And for those reasons I commend this bill to the House."