Appointments — Representation Commission

I move, That, pursuant to section 28(2)(e) of the Electoral Act 1993, this House nominate Hon Roger Morrison Sowry, of Paraparaumu, to represent the Government, and Hon Peter Colin Hodgson, of Port Chalmers, to represent the Opposition, to be appointed as members of the Representation Commission.

Further, I move, That, pursuant to section 28(3)(b) of the Electoral Act 1993, for the purposes of determining the boundaries of the Maori electoral districts, this House nominate Daniel Takutaimoana Te Kanawa, of Hamilton, to represent the Government, and Whetūmārama Weratā, of Lower Hutt, to represent the Opposition, to be appointed as members of the Representation Commission.

The Representation Commission is the body charged under the Electoral Act 1993 with determining the number of electoral districts in New Zealand and fixing the boundaries for those electorates. Section 28(2)(e) of the Electoral Act requires two persons to be nominated as members of the commission. These persons are appointed by the Governor-General by Order in Council on the nomination of the House of Representatives to represent the Government and the parliamentary Opposition respectively. Section 28(3)(b) of the Electoral Act requires that for the purposes of determining the boundaries of the Māori electoral districts, two additional persons are to be appointed as members of the commission. These persons are appointed by the Governor-General by Order in Council on the nomination of the House of Representatives to represent the Government and the parliamentary Opposition.

Mr Roger Sowry has been nominated to represent the Government. He was a member of Parliament from 1990 to 2005. He was chief whip from 1994 to 1996, and he chaired the Health Committee from 1993 to 1996. Following the 1996 election, he was appointed to Cabinet as the Minister of Social Welfare, a position he held for 3 years. He also served as Associate Minister of Health from 1996 to 1998, and was Leader of the House from 1998 to 1999. He retired from Parliament in 2005 and took up a position of chief executive of Arthritis New Zealand. In 2008 he joined the Government relations consultancy firm Saunders Unsworth.

Mr Pete Hodgson has been nominated to represent the Opposition parties represented in the House. Mr Hodgson retired from Parliament in 2011, after 21 years as the member of Parliament for Dunedin North. At various times within that period, he held the ministerial portfolios of economic development, tertiary education, research, science and technology, health, transport, commerce, land information, statistics, energy, and fisheries and forestry. He is currently an associate at Tuia Group, and is the chairperson of the Australian and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching.

Mr Daniel Te Kanawa has been nominated to represent the Government for the purposes of determining the boundaries of the Māori electoral districts. He is the chief executive of Te Tuhono Māori Affiliation Service and has been a trustee of the Ngāti Maniapoto Marae Pact Trust, representing the Ōpārure Marae, since 1981. He is also a current trustee of the Ngāti Maniapoto Māori Trust Board and the Pūniu Land Trust. Mr Te Kanawa holds a New Zealand Certificate in Draughting (Civil Engineering). His tribal affiliations are Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Kinohaku, Ngāti Rōrā, Ngāti Uekaha, Ngāti Paretekawa, and Ngāti Apakura.

Mrs Whetū Weretā has been nominated to represent the Opposition parties represented in the House for the purposes of determining the boundaries of the Māori electoral districts. Mrs Weretā has served four previous terms on the Representation Commission. She has been a consultant since 1995 and has a background in research. Mrs Weretā was a member of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System that recommended New Zealand adopt mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP, for elections. In 1994 she was appointed to the four-person Māori Committee to the Law Commission, which was set up to review, reform, and develop the law of New Zealand. Mrs Weretā has served four previous terms on the commission. She belongs to the Ngāi Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui iwi.

On behalf of the Labour Opposition, I would like to support the motions that the Hon Judith Collins has moved in the House, to support the nominations, as outlined by her, for the Representation Commission. The Hon Roger Sowry and the Hon Pete Hodgson have something in common with each other: they were both elected to Parliament the same year that I was, in 1990. In fact, my former colleague Pete Hodgson was previously one of the last remaining members of the “Backbench Seven”, which, of course, I am now the last remaining member of. I will be leaving Parliament in the next 3 weeks, after my valedictory, when I will be retiring from Parliament altogether.

It is actually quite nice to be able to stand in this House, in one of the few remaining contributions that I will be making, to congratulate both Roger Sowry and Pete Hodgson on their appointment to the commission and to express my confidence in their ability to undertake what is a very important role. Of course, it is made more important in my home town of Christchurch because of the significant movements in population. That will impact on the boundaries, but it may not impact, actually, on the number of seats in this House as it might otherwise do, because, of course, it is the total population of the South Island, not just those as represented in the cluster of seats that sit around Christchurch. I know of my own experience of running into former constituents and them starting off a conversation by saying: “Thank you so much for how much help your office has given us, as we have resolved all of our issues with the Earthquake Commission and the insurance.” Then I go on to say: “Oh, that’s fine. Where are you settled now?”. They say Rolleston, which is in the Selwyn electorate, and—

Hon Ruth Dyson: Rangiora.

Hon LIANNE DALZIEL: —and Rangiora, which is in the Waimakariri electorate, and, in actual fact, is in two different council boundaries as well, so that is going to have an impact on a certain rating base that I might have an interest in at some stage in the near future.

The work—and I am not making light of the work—is really, really important, because establishing boundaries is not just about looking for those natural boundaries or strong boundaries like streets, rivers, and things that separate communities, but it is actually looking for the separation between what are collective communities of interest. Our own councils will be going through that process through our own version of a representation review that we will undertake in the next 3 years ourselves. I certainly am very pleased to be able to support Roger Sowry, who I also enjoyed spending time on select committees with, and I know that he will add his weight of knowledge and experience to this role, along with Pete Hodgson.

I acknowledge too the need to have separate appointees to the Representation Commission to look at the Māori electoral districts and speak in favour of the nomination of Daniel Te Kanawa, of Hamilton, and Whetū Weretā, of Lower Hutt, as members of the Representation Commission. I certainly wish them well in their deliberations. It will be very interesting when the first results of the census become available and we get those actual numbers, which will be the basis for establishing what those new boundaries will be.

As we have heard, the task facing the Representation Commission, which is to confirm the names and boundaries of the electorates, is a very important one for our democracy because it will determine exactly which electorates are available for candidates to stand for in the 2014 general election and, indeed, for the next 5 years or until the next census is held. Perhaps more important, in doing so it will determine whether the lines that are drawn around the electorates—which will always, to a certain extent, be arbitrary lines—are drawn around natural constituencies and communities of interest or whether they artificially bisect those natural groupings. It is very important that the Representation Commission is adequately informed and experienced to go about this task sensitively and carefully; otherwise, the result could well be unfavourable.

The task facing the Representation Commission is particularly important, as we have heard, because this will be the first time the boundaries have been reviewed since the devastating Canterbury earthquakes. It is likely that this will result in significant boundary change in Christchurch. As my colleague the Hon Lianne Dalziel has said, communities have changed markedly in Christchurch since the quakes, so it will be vital that the current distribution of communities of interest in Christchurch is understood and taken into account by the commission while it makes its decisions. And with this in mind it is somewhat concerning to the Green Party that none of the nominees are residents of Christchurch who could bring that most important local knowledge and perspective to the deliberations. We must therefore simply hope that the commission procures this important local perspective and advice from elsewhere.

This particular commission also faces an important task because of the delay of the census following the quakes, which has pushed the time line for determining the names and boundaries of the electorates out further than would ideally have been desirable. We know that the commission is expected to release the draft boundary changes in November of this year, but they will not be confirmed until April of next year, which is only 6 months or so before the likely date of the next election. So it does not leave a lot of time for parties to do their selection processes. It is very important that the commission works in a timely manner and communicates early with the public and with political parties about the likely changes, so that these can be planned for.

Having noted, therefore, the importance of the task that they face, the Green Party expects that the candidates put forward in these motions, Roger Sowry, Pete Hodgson, Daniel Te Kanawa, and Whetūmārama Weretā, will take the task seriously and go about it diligently. They certainly appear to be experienced and well qualified for the task. However, the Green Party will be opposing these motions, as we have done in the past, not because of any objection to these particular nominees but because of the outdated model that sits behind their appointment. It is a very first-past-the-post model, which requires appointees to represent the Government or the Opposition. It is a very two party - orientated model and it does not take into account the realities of our multiparty MMP system. We have eight parties and one independent member represented in the 50th Parliament, all of whom are key stakeholders in any decision about this matter—about the number, nature, and boundaries of the electorates they will contest. It is an outmoded model for the political appointees to the commission to come only from the two so-called major parties. Parliament has changed and become more representative since the introduction of MMP, and we in the Green Party consider that a body called the Representation Commission should, at the very least, in itself be representative. Thank you.

Nothing that I wish to say on behalf of New Zealand First is going to be, I hope, interpreted as a reflection on the current nominations, but the public of this country must have confidence that the procedures by which the Representation Commission is put together are fully representative. Two decades after, or 20 years after, a referendum in this country to decide that we would move to a new political system called MMP, you have got some people in this House who think we are still there, under the first-past-the-post system. Twenty years on, they have not learnt a thing. I know some of them look like they have been here for two decades or more, but the fact is their thinking—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Look in the mirror.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh really? Ha, ha! Listen, grandad, I would not shout to somebody, if I were you, to look in the mirror. That is not a very smart thing to say, at all—not if your name is Nick Smith, anyway. But back to my points. I have been unfairly detoured here. The fact is that two decades on we have a Minister of Justice, who is a member of the Law Society, who walks into this House and says: “I’ve got a great idea. We’ve got a nomination and so has the Labour Party, and that’s it.”—“We have a nomination and so has the Labour Party, and that’s it.” All the rest of the other parties do not matter at all.

It gets even worse. I can recall when New Zealand First had all of the Māori seats—not just some of them; all of them—and the National Party nominated the person to go as the Māori representative on the commission. Do you remember that? You have got to be pretty arrogant when one party has got all the Māori seats and you have got none, and yet you put up your own friendly Māori on the Electoral Commission.

Here we are, in September 2013, and the Minister of Justice, who has painted herself as a new-age and modern lady, comes in with this dusted-off model from the last century. I know it is like her ideology, but it is a dusty old, off-the-back-of-the-van model that is not democratic at all. We want to know why it is that the Government has not had the decency to ask other parties for their views. At least the Labour Party had the decency to say: “We’ve got our own nominees. What do you think?”. I mean, it is not total consultation, is it? But at least it is a start—at least it is a start. Those members even wrote to us, but not the National Party—the born to rulers; those who think that they have got a right to rule but do not know what noblesse oblige means. They have got no understanding of culture and taste and history. They are still back doing it.

So I say to the Minister, why not now withdraw this, start the process over again, and properly consult all the political parties in this country? Imagine that it is 7.30 on election night, and you are strung out to dry because some other party holds the political power and the balance of the future. Imagine, then, what you would think. Well, I know what those members would do. They would be all cosy, saying: “Can we help? What would you like to know? Can we help? Do you want to be consulted?”. Oh yes, there would be an outflow of friendship and cooperation, the likes of which you see only when they realise how desperate their position is.

Denis O’Rourke: They’re going to get desperate.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Well, doing this is just putting off the inevitable. It just means that other parties find it an absolute affront, when this could be a mutual choice of people. So, rather than have a “Judith-mander”, why do we not have some democracy?