Groser Tim: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Groser Tim: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:644;Page:13578] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 Mr Chair— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: We are debating a very narrow part. 
TIM GROSER 
: I also want to speak to the indexation provisions and I think given the interventions of my colleagues I do not need to go through the technical side of them. I do not think I need to repeat the very interesting questions that my colleague Dr Lockwood Smith put to the Minister as to why Labour has gone in such a piecemeal fashion towards what is clearly a sensible position. But I really want to use this quite technical subject as a way of drawing out a couple of underlying themes about the whole bill. 
In the first place the purpose behind the National Party in the name of Mr Finlayson putting forward the indexation provision in Part 2B is clearly all about trying to impart precision to an area of the law that is central to the political process. And that strikes at the very heart of the reasons why we have so many difficulties with this bill because having precision fundamentally matters when it comes to the legal process. We believe that New Zealanders do not want to see the electoral contest which should be an open contest set out between the major parties and the smaller parties on traditional grounds settled through the court system. Indeed the lack of precision on all this takes my memory back to what became the New Zealand public’s opinion of the America’s Cup in the late 1980s. People around my age will remember that it stopped being a race held on the water then and became a race conducted through the legal process. That is why we put precision into this provision. 
The second point is that when I heard Dr Cullen the Deputy Prime Minister say this afternoon that he noted with amusement that “the Opposition keeps saying the law is badly drafted then opposes every amendment to it.” I thought that he was clearly confused about the situation because that is factually incorrect. But he is in very good company of course with other senior Ministers of the Government in being confused about the process. In a sense that also showed I thought the deeply partisan approach that has bedevilled this bill and that lay at the heart of our deep misgivings about this departure from the traditional multipartisan approach to electoral issues. I would make the assumption that although this provision was as my colleague Mr Finlayson says skirted through in the Justice and Electoral Committee my instinct would be that the vast majority of members would realise that the lack of indexation was clearly a nonsense. To have an amount set out in 1993 for heaven’s sake—that is almost 15 years ago—and to make no adjustment to it made no sense from anybody’s point of view. 
Had this whole bill started from the premise that we could have a multipartisan sensible conversation amongst the senior politicians of the parties I think we would have very quickly found a lot of agreement including on the very issue that we are addressing here in clause 117E relating to indexation. So the whole political philosophy the whole starting point for this bill is illustrated by that essentially technical provision which is strictly neutral in terms of its political impacts on all parties and which I would suspect as I said every member of the House if given a truth drug would say was utterly sensible. Why would we want to have amounts set out 15 years ago? Heavens alive in terms of compound interest everyone knows that a number that accumulates only at 2 percent doubles every 30 years. We have had 15 years of that figure— 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: 35 years. 
TIM GROSER 
: Yes 35. I suspect it could be even more than that. If no adjustment is made to the figure the real value of people’s ability to go out and campaign will be further reduced. We no longer live in an era in which we campaign on a soapbox. It actually does cost money using modern technology and using the sophisticated processes that our electorates expect us to use to conduct an effective campaign. 
I would have thought it was pretty elementary that the failure to make any adjustment for price movements over a 15-year period was in nobody’s interest to maintain. But precisely because of the mindset that has poisoned this whole bill from the start we have never had an honest discussion on this issue.