O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First will support this bill and with some enthusiasm because New Zealand First wants to enhance democracy whereas the National Government wants to restrict it. National wants to restrict applications to enrol especially on polling day even if the person concerned is entitled to enrol and entitled to vote. It will not accept a special vote as a valid application to enrol. All of that is wrong.The reason why the National Government takes the position it has is it says there are issues about security and there are issues about the integrity of the roll whatever that might mean. Apparently there would not be enough time to check validity but that is not a valid consideration since in fact all that happens with any ordinary application for enrolment is that there is complete reliance on the statutory declaration to say that the facts I give here about name and address and so on are correct". There would be absolutely no difference between that and doing this on election day as part of a special voting process—no difference whatsoever. So that argument does not really work.All this bill actually does when you think about it is allow polling day enrolment—and why not? Why not? Why is that different than any other day? You should be able to enrol as a voter on any day of the week. There is no reason why not. Secondly it uses a special vote application 2B which is also an application for enrolment—again why not? There is exactly the same information contained in both processes—special voting and an application to enrol—so why duplicate it? Why not allow both on one piece of paper to be processed straight away given that it relies entirely on a declaration?Now the speakers opposite have said that one of the reasons why they will not support this is what they call perverse incentive—that is what Paul Foster-Bell said. What he means is that people might wait until election day to enrol instead of doing it before then. Well actually I do not think many people in this country would want the hassle of having to do a special vote on election day if they could have enrolled a long time before that. Almost everybody will want to do that. Paul Foster-Bell is talking utter rubbish and he ought to know it because the rest of the population does.The other reasons given were those given by the last speaker Chris Bishop. He talked about information being required. Nobody needs information to vote. Nobody needs information to enrol. Information is nice but it is not necessary. The right to vote is paramount and much more important than those minor considerations.It is a common-sense matter and a democratic matter to allow enrolment and voting at the same time. There is absolutely no reason why that should not happen and as I have said it is all a matter of correct information that is verified by a statutory declaration not by any process of checking that goes on because that does not really happen anyway. People believe that if they cast a special vote then it will count because they believe they will have applied to be on the electoral roll at the same time. Try to tell anyone in the public why that should not happen—it just does not make sense. This is a common-sense bill and it should be supported for that reason alone.The effect by the way is something that National should want. The effect will be to add thousands of people to the roll who would not otherwise make it—people entitled to enrol and entitled to vote. Why would National want to stop people who are entitled to enrol and entitled to vote? Ask it that question and let us hear a more decent answer rather than the absolute nonsense we have heard so far from the other side of the House."