Parker David: Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Parker David: Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10622] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 Labour supports this bill the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill. I will address the issue that the Minister John Carter has just spoken on which is the issue as to the structure of this new organisation. Listeners will have heard from the Minister that this new entity called the Electoral Commission takes over functions that were previously the functions of the Chief Electoral Officer and the Electoral Commission. Those two offices are merged into this one. The question that the Justice and Electoral Committee had to grapple with as the Government had to grapple with is what the proper form of that entity should be. 
That is an important question. The administration of elections in a democracy has to be seen to be impartial. We have to maintain confidence in the impartiality of election processes in order to maintain confidence of the people in democracy. There is the old saying that “The only thing worse than democracy is the alternatives” which is another way of saying that democracy is incredibly important—incredibly important. If we look at the countries that have got the most problems in the world we see that by and large they do not have the benefit of democracy. They do not have the checks and balances that come with democracy. If Governments make a mistake in our system and they get it too far wrong the people have the right to vote them out. They get a new Government and those problems are fixed—or some of those problems are fixed; there is no such thing as perfection. 
The choices that we effectively had for the entity that was being formed were an independent Crown entity which is a Crown entity but it sits independent of the executive in the way that it administers itself. The other choice of the final two choices was an Officer of Parliament. Officers of Parliament currently include the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the Auditor-General to name but two. There are also the Ombudsmen. 
The submissions that we had in favour of the Officer of Parliament model were very well considered. They were very fulsome. They came from some eminent specialists in this area. Professor Andrew Geddis was one of them. The New Zealand Law Society’s submissions supported that outcome as well as did various other submitters. They pointed out that if it was an officer of Parliament the organisation would be accountable to Parliament rather than accountable to the executive. They thought that that was better than an independent Crown entity which has some responsibilities back to the Minister. There was some strength in that argument. As a committee we were quite attracted to the argument for a while. 
We sought further advice on the issue but in the end we were persuaded in large part by the advice by Dave McGee QC a long-serving Clerk of this House before he retired from that role and became an Ombudsman. He made a number of points as to why the Officer of Parliament group was inappropriate and those are detailed in the select committee report. They include some theoretical concerns about the involvement of the Speaker in terms of officers of Parliament and that the Speaker ought not to be put in positions that would be inappropriate. He also pointed out that there are quite a number of administrative functions that this new entity has that are inconsistent with the normal model for officers of Parliament. For those and other reasons that he detailed he was strongly of the view that we would be wrong to create an Officer of Parliament in part because he thought that it would undermine the conventions that have already developed on the use of the Officer of Parliament model and where it is appropriate. 
Of course in New Zealand we do not have a written constitution. The conventions of this Parliament and the conventions of the various institutions of both Government and the courts are important parts of the actual constitution that we have in New Zealand. The convention on the appointment of officers of Parliament is another important convention that we ought to not lightly undermine. Dave McGee’s advice was that to create this entity as an Officer of Parliament would undermine the conventions that have developed. 
For those reasons the committee was persuaded that the proper model was the independent Crown entity model. But we did agree on an additional protection that was not found in the original version of the bill that came to the select committee. That concerned how we appoint members of that new Electoral Commission. The provision in the bill as it came to the select committee was that they would be appointed by the Minister. We thought that that was wrong. We thought that the Minister could be and would be seen to be potentially conflicted and might prefer the interests of his or her own party over the interests of the independence of the people who are appointed to those roles. 
For that reason the committee recommended and the Government has agreed that the members of the independent Crown entity ought to be appointed by the Governor-General at the recommendation of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is representative of more than just the Government; the Opposition parties are also represented. There will be strong incentives on the House of Representatives to make recommendations that are not biased in favour of the interests of any one party. We think that that is a good balance to have reached. 
We had another submission from Mr Geddis that I feel that I should record. He thought that the Electoral Commission should be one person rather than three. He thought that in practice during elections decisions are required quickly of the Electoral Commission and that that was one of the problems we had with the prior model— implementing fast decisions for the benefit of participants in the election clarifying areas of uncertainty during the electoral process. He thought that that would be best handled by one commissioner rather than three commissioners. 
One of the submitters we heard from was Mr Henry. I forget whether he is a former Chief Electoral Officer or a former Electoral Commissioner. I think he is a former Chief Electoral Officer but someone can correct me if I have got that wrong. In any event he submitted to us that in reality the day-to-day decisions on what should be done in respect of advertisements donation rules and all those sorts of things will be delegated to the executive of this new organisation rather than be at the commission level and that in the rare event where decisions are required from the commission rather than falling within the delegation of people working for the commission it was quite proper that the three commissioners be called together and meet on the issue. He did not think it would so frequent an occurrence as to be impractical or unduly expensive. For those reasons we stuck with the status quo of three representatives. 
I want to refer to one other issue and it is what this bill does not fix up and that is a glaring omission in our electoral laws to have proper transparency around donations. This was an area where the Government has refused to be part of a consensus. It says there is no consensus but the only reason there is not a consensus is that the Government will not agree to one. If it were to agree on reasonable rules around transparency we would have them. But the reality in New Zealand is that we do not have transparency around donations to electoral parties. 
At the last election we knew the source of less than 10 percent of the funds used by parties in elections and that is not good enough. We need transparency around donations in order to maintain public confidence in our electoral processes. If we do not we can never escape the imputation that there is policy for purchase. We do not know what influence has been bought by donors. Donating to political parties is a perfectly proper and worthy thing to do but it ought to be transparent. There is no shame in making a donation. There should be no shame in transparency of donations so that we can maintain public confidence in our electoral processes. I think it is a great shame that the Government has not addressed that issue.