Dalziel Lianne: Electoral Referendum Bill — First Reading 
Dalziel Lianne: Electoral Referendum Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10405] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 Labour will support the Electoral Referendum Bill being referred to the Electoral Legislation Committee. Obviously some additional work needs to be done on the bill but I acknowledge the Minister of Justice for having the discussions that he has had not only with our party but with all parties in the House. 
I think that the Minister’s approach has been a worthwhile one as he 
has identified one of the concerns that I originally raised. 
I was concerned about the unfairness of the original proposal which did not acknowledge the many many New Zealanders who want to stay with MMP but who do not like some of the practices that have been allowed to develop under it. The opportunity to review some aspects of MMP should the decision be made to stick with it will enable those issues to be addressed. I think that that is a major response. The Government has proposed what I have described as a second track post the ballot on whether we wish to stay with MMP. If MMP survives that decision—if it is the No. 1 choice on the ballot paper at the forthcoming general election—then voters will have the opportunity to look at the content of the MMP provisions themselves. 
I want to comment on how good it is that that second track is in the bill. My preference was to fix the MMP system first. I have always been of the view that certain elements of the MMP system should be reviewed after a period of time because a lot of people made the original decision to change to MMP because they were very angry with two Governments: a National Government and a Labour Government. It was a case of a plague on both your houses. Voters chose the option that neither of the leaders of the National Party and the Labour Party at the time wanted at all. Both the National leader the then Prime Minister the Rt Hon Jim Bolger and the Leader of the Opposition the Rt Hon Helen Clark were very opposed to the MMP option and both were strong advocates for first past the post. I think that that is what is good about the debate about issues like electoral reform: because of the checks and balances in our system it is the people who decide the way that they vote their representatives into Parliament. I was giving a speech in Parliament yesterday on another matter that was not quite as positive as this one but I made the point that there is not just a right to vote; there is a duty for citizens to participate in our democratic process. I believe that this referendum process is one that truly brings to the fore the fact that voters will decide that it is their electoral system—it is our electoral system—and it is something that will be determined by way of a referendum. 
I have made no secret of my position on how I will vote. I will be voting to retain MMP just as I voted for MMP originally. Not every political party had a uniform view on this issue and that was because it was down to the people to decide. I am a strong supporter of MMP. I am a supporter of MMP because it is the only system of proportional representation that is on the ballot paper—the only one. I think people will have to remember that and I hope as part of the education campaign to be undertaken that people are given a very clear explanation that even if the other electoral systems look like or sound like proportional representation in actual fact they are not. None of the other systems provide a proportional result in the way that MMP does. 
I hope that the people of New Zealand will consider very carefully the scope of the matters that have been set out in the bill for review and will make submissions to the select committee because they are not the same. There are different issues within the scope of this review that I think people should think about very carefully. 
The first one is the threshold for list seats; the requirement that in order for parties to be eligible for any list seats they have to achieve either 5 percent of the total vote or a candidate has to be elected to an electorate seat. I know that there is a lot of disquiet about that and I will use the example of two political parties—one that is in Parliament at the moment and one that is not. Rodney Hide representing the ACT Party won the seat of Epsom and was able to bring in the balance of the 3.7 percent of the vote that his party had won and New Zealand First with 4.2 percent of the party vote failed to win an electorate seat and was unable to be represented in Parliament at all. 
The question of the 5 percent threshold and whether a single candidate winning an electorate seat is sufficient to be a threshold in itself should be the subject of debate. I was on the select committee that considered that issue and I know that it was a trade-off. The proposal of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System was to have a 4 percent threshold and the select committee decided to lift it to a 5 percent threshold. The trade-off was that one electorate seat would enable a party to bring in a smaller number than the 5 percent threshold allowed; it would not have to meet that threshold. In retrospect I personally do not think it should have been a trade-off and I personally do not agree with the coat-tails provision as I now describe it because it is simply not fair on a party that is very close to reaching the threshold but is unable to get any representation in Parliament whereas the other party is overrepresented relative to the proportion of the vote that it was able to attract. 
The overhang issue does not cause me any particular bother at all. It sits at two at the moment and it has sat at one. I am not uncomfortable with the concept of an overhang. It does not produce proportionality—I suppose it offends against the principle of proportionality—but it is quite a good way of ensuring that parties that win constituency seats are able to take up those seats in Parliament without losing that entitlement and without over-increasing the size of Parliament. 
I have a really strong view about dual candidacy and it is not the view that is implied by this bill. I think people ought to be able to stand for an electorate seat and stand for a list seat as well. The reason is that the list is the mechanism by which we fill the number of seats that are left over as it were by the proportionality that is applied to the number of party votes that parties win and the number of electorate seats that they win. To say that a person who stands in a safe National seat should not be allowed to come into Parliament because he or she was not able to win that seat as a Labour candidate is an absolute nonsense. It would deprive this House of Paul Quinn and Aaron Gilmore. It would not be fair on Parliament if we were deprived of either of those two individuals. I could go on. 
I hope that during the select committee hearing we have a lot of discussion about the scope of the review because there are other things that I think should be in the scope of the review that are not. There is another issue about the size of seats. I do not think that we need this fixation on an equal number of list seats versus constituency seats and I think we could do something a little better there as well. 
The final thing I want to talk about is advertising. I think it is slightly rich of the Minister to pretend that New Zealand is the same environment that it was in the last decade. We did not know about the work of the Exclusive Brethren until the 2005 general election campaign. What we saw then was the effect of unparalleled spending in order to sway the vote against the Labour Party and against the Green Party in particular. Although we ended up knowing who ran that campaign to have no campaign expenditure limits is a breach of democracy and Labour will fight that every step of the way.