Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you—thank you Mr Speaker. Just in time. I was sitting in my parliamentary office and I saw that we were up to speech nine on this bill—the Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill (No 2)—and I have to confess I had impure thoughts. I thought that perhaps the people of the Parliamentary Service had actually been so negligent that they had actually put up a bill that we debated last week on the ticker tape at the bottom of the TV. I thought Surely the good people of the Parliamentary Service would not make such an elementary mistake as to put up last week's bill as being debated this week?" I thought "What could possibly have gone wrong? Surely it's not possible that Parliament is debating the same bill this week that it debated last week? It can't have been. Surely no one would make a mistake that silly in this Parliament?"So I ran down to the House to find out what was going on. I asked my good friend Andrew Falloon from Rangitata a good local MP he is "Andrew Falloon what is happening. Why are we debating the same bill that we had last week for registration of prisoners to vote? This can't be right." Then I said "Andrew Falloon is this like that time just a few weeks ago when we accidentally passed the wrong bill in Parliament? Because this Government it makes make some terrible mistakes some very simple mistakes and sometimes they actually put the wrong piece of paper on the Table and accidentally pass the wrong legislation and I think that might have happened here." Well actually that's what happened. For the people sitting at home watching—and I recognise that I'm kind of contributing to the problem here but it needs to be said—their taxes are being wasted running this Parliament to have a bill passed that was passed last week.Why are we passing it again this week? Because when they passed it last week they made such a tactical error in the way the Government tries to pass its legislation that they accidentally made a piece of legislation that said that if a prisoner has been in prison for more than three years or sentenced to more than three years they have to be registered to vote. The prison warden has to register them to vote but they can't actually pass a vote—they can't actually vote. So they're registered and the warden has to register them but they can't actually vote. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Surely the clever people in Parliament who earn upwards of $162000 a year less the pay cut that it took them three months to organise surely those good people that represent us in Wellington especially the ones in the Government wouldn't make such a silly mistake as to accidentally pass the wrong part of a law? You see last time they passed a whole wrong law and this time they just passed part of a wrong law which—maybe that's progress for this Labour Government. Who knows? Maybe they're just making smaller and smaller mistakes towards the election until they reach perfection and off in the infinite time horizon.But the difficulty is and the courts would have had to work this out it may have made prison wardens criminals. The problem with that is that prison wardens are there in order to ensure that criminals are kept locked up. But then if the Government makes the prison warden a criminal what's going on in our jails? They'd have to lock themselves up. Then the next person who was hired to be a prison warden every time there was an election they would break the law and they'd become a criminal too. So you'd have to get a new prison warden and eventually everybody would be locked in jail because of the logic of this stupid law. So we're here having a full legislative process to fix this ridiculously amateur-hour mistake made by the Government and I just wanted to stand up and make the New Zealand people aware that that's the kind of competence they are dealing with from this Labour Government. I oppose this silly fix up. Thank you Madam Speaker."