Lees-Galloway Iain: Electoral Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Electoral Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16314. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It has been interesting listening to the debate so far this evening on the Electoral Amendment Bill. I think there are a number of interesting democratic principles at stake here. The first is actually to dowith our own democratic processes in the House not really electoral processes which is that we need to have a robust and thorough process for making legislation. I have heard—I think the Minister of Justice implied it and also the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee implied it—that because certain conversations were had at the select committee that should be the end of the discussion and that MPs who were on the select committee should be the only ones who have the privilege of discussing this legislation and that any agreements that were reached at that committee should be the end of it.Well if that was the case then we would not bother with the second reading or the Committee stage or the third reading of a bill; we would just finish at the select committee and that would be it done and dusted. But that is not the way we do it and the reason is that sometimes fresh eyes can alert us to issues that perhaps were not picked up on at an earlier stage. That is why we have the ability to make amendments at the Committee stage—we want to be able to continually consider the legislation that is in front of us. That is what has happened in this case.At the first reading we had a bill that was going to put into legislation the enrolment confirmation card. That was something that we thought was a positive move because it meant there was certainty around the enrolment confirmation card. That is something that has been available for the last few elections but there is nothing in legislation that says it is a requirement to have the enrolment confirmation card. So from the outside perspective of someone who was not on the committee that requirement seemed like a positive step. For whatever reason the select committee decided to remove it.With the removal of the legislative requirement for the enrolment confirmation card combined with this new idea of requiring verbal confirmation there is the possibility that the card not being available and someone having to make a verbal confirmation of their name could mean that you get a situation that will inevitably block some people from our democratic process. One group of people that has been briefly mentioned in the debate this evening is new migrants for whom English is a second language.We know that new migrants are vastly overrepresented in the group of people who do not participate at election time. One of the reasons for that is a simple language barrier. They do not feel confident enough in their ability to speak English and be able to go to the polling booth and successfully complete all the processes there. If you add to that the fact that they have to make a verbal confirmation that is just one more barrier. It is not—as the Minister implied in a rather silly fashion I thought—that a person may not be able to pronounce their own name. Of course they are going to be able to pronounce their own name but the person whom they are having to say their name to may not understand the pronunciation. They may not understand how that name is spelt in the mother language of that person. They may not be able to find it easily on the electoral roll and may then deny them the opportunity to vote in that election.That is the kind of circumstance that we are concerned about. I do not think it is intentional by this Government. I do not think it is intentional but it is one of those unintended consequences that put barriers up to people voting. We have seen this in other countries in the world where perhaps it has been a little bit more intentional that changes made to electoral law in the name of reducing voter fraud have in fact been a device for denying people particularly people at the margins of society the ability to participate in electoral processes.I am not making the case that the National Government has done this on purpose; I just think this is an unintended consequence. We have an opportunity with the Supplementary Order Papers. We have got a range of options any one of which we could pick up. Some are certainly better than others but we could pick up any of theoptions that members have provided and improve this law. We would be making electoral law that makes it easier to vote.At the last election we had the lowest voter turnout in something like a century. That should be concerning to all of us but for some reason it seems to be more concerning to members on this side of the House than it is to members on that side of the House. Maybe that is because they assume that the people who are least likely to participate in our elections are the people who are also least likely to vote for them. That is probably why there is more concern about it on this side of the House than there is on the other.But I think there is another reason why people did not participate in the last election and that is a certain level of cynicism about the way Parliament goes about creating electoral law. If they were cynical before the last election they will be even more cynical after it because as members have mentioned earlier in the debate there is something enormous missing from this legislation and that is the abolishment of the one-seat threshold better known out there in the public as the coat-tailing provisions.Scott Simpson: Abolition.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Abolition? Fair enough. What they know is that they want to get rid of it Mr Simpson. They do not care how we say it in Parliament at 10 to 10 in the evening. They want us to get rid of it. The public have been absolutely clear and in fact the Government was absolutely clear. It said that we were going to have a referendum on MMP and if the public chooses to keep MMP we will then have a review and we will look at some of those peripheral issues.Although there was a range of issues that we could be looking at and the review of the Electoral Commission came back with 10 recommendations the one that the public has been absolutely clear on is the getting rid of the coat-tailing. The Minister fair enough wrote to all the political parties and asked us for our views. We responded and at that point the Minister said that there was no consensus. How could there have been a consensus? There was absolutely no opportunity for political parties to get around the table and talk about what we were prepared to negotiate on.There are things in those 10 recommendations that we in the Labour Party do not like but we are prepared to sit down and talk about them and see whether we can come to a consensus. I know that there are things that the Labour Party supports that New Zealand First does not like. I know there are aspects of it that the Greens do not like. But everybody on this side of the House wants the opportunity to sit around the table and see whether we can reach a consensus. Why has that not happened? Quite simply because National and their mates in United Future and in the ACT Party who are so reliant on the coat-tailing provisions have put their own interests ahead of what the New Zealand public want. That is one of the reasons why New Zealanders are becoming so cynical about our political processes.Those on the right might be happy that they are turning people off voting. They might be happy. They might think that that serves their own self-interests. But over on this side of the House we believe in democracy. We believe in the right of people to have their say and the people have overwhelmingly had their say on this issue—get rid of the coat-tailing. There was no reason to have it in the first place. It resembles a mechanism in Germany for parties that have strong regional representation to find their way into Parliament. We do not have regional diversity of party representation in this country. We are a small nation. We do not have little enclaves where particular parties are strong.What has happened of course is that something that was brought in for worthy purposes has been absolutely abused by the parties of the right. There is no reason for it. We would lose nothing by getting rid of it but what we have by having it in our electoral law is an opportunity for parties to rort the system. It is time for it to go andluckily although it is not included in this legislation we will soon have an opportunity. I have written to all members.