Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2)

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I move, That the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time. In transferring the functions of the Chief Registrar of Electors to the Electoral Commission, this bill implements the final stage of a two-stage reform to amalgamate the electoral agencies. The first stage transferred the functions of the Chief Electoral Officer and the former Electoral Commission into a new Electoral Commission on 1 October last year. This second stage is designed to come into effect on 1 July 2012.

Previously, electoral administration was carried out by three separate agencies. Several reviews have identified benefits in having one agency that has overarching responsibility for electoral administration. The fragmentation of electoral agencies also arose as an issue during initial cross-party consultation on the reform of electoral finance. The Government decided to deal with the reform of electoral agencies separately from electoral finance reform, to enable the first stage to be completed in advance of the new finance rules. This amalgamation will allow for more consistent and coherent oversight of electoral administration, and will create a one-stop shop for all electoral matters.

The bill also implements the Government’s response to three recommendations made by the Justice and Electoral Committee’s inquiry into the 2008 general election. First, it allows an elector’s immigration status to be checked at the time of application, rather than after enrolment; second, paper enrolment records may be destroyed once secure electronic images are stored; and, third, information on applicants for new and renewed New Zealand passports will be provided to the Chief Registrar of Electors for enrolment purposes. Together, these improvements will bring administrative benefits and enhance the integrity of the electoral roll.

Finally, the bill allows electors who are already enrolled to update their enrolment details using the internet, without needing to return a signed enrolment form. It is the first stage in a process that will eventually allow full online enrolment.

I take this opportunity to thank the Justice and Electoral Committee for its work on this bill. The bill was unanimously reported back by the committee, which is consistent with the Government’s approach of achieving broad support for electoral reform. New Zealand enjoys a fair, transparent, and effective electoral system, and this bill seeks to enhance these features. The bill will improve the efficiency of electoral administration, and enhance public confidence in our elections. I commend the bill to the House.

The Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2) is a very good bill that enjoys the support of the Labour Opposition. I join the Minister of Agriculture in commending the bill to the House.

I agree with the two previous speakers in respect of the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2). I thank the Minister of Agriculture for his acknowledgment of the work of the Justice and Electoral Committee, which has had a very full workload over the nearly 3 years that its members have been working together. It is a committee in which the members have worked very collegially together. It is interesting to note that when we complete the Alcohol Reform Bill, which we should within a couple of weeks, there will be nothing left on the Order Paper for the Justice and Electoral Committee to consider. I am pleased to note that in the course of the consideration of the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2) members of the committee have worked particularly well together and have seen the need for the reforms.

The aims of the amendments made through the course of this bill are to improve and simplify enrolment processes, maximise enrolment, and achieve cost efficiencies. The people recognise that we are a Government interested in gaining the best bang for the taxpayers’ buck, and we recognise the privilege of living in a democratic country. Encouraging people to vote and to take part in this democratic process is something we should all be promoting, and I am pleased that across the House we are doing that through the support we have for this bill.

The changes under this bill to the enrolment system will improve the accuracy of the roll and encourage enrolment, and thereby improve the validity of the vote. Some people, unfortunately, live in countries where the outcome of elections is significantly challenged, because the elections are corrupt. In this country we do not see those things, we do not witness them, so it is important to us that we preserve the integrity of our voting system and the enrolment system, and that we maximise participation, as we have previously said.

This bill will see the Electoral Commission become a one-stop shop for all electoral matters. It is the completion of the folding together of the three different entities involved in the electoral process into one commission. It is pointless to have to go to different agencies for advice in respect of different matters when they could be housed under the one roof. Voters will be able to update their enrolment details online, and this is the first step in a process that will eventually allow people to enrol via the internet.

Over the course of the submissions made and reports given, we saw the willingness of people to participate online nowadays, as we do for so many other things through the day-to-day living we enjoy in this wonderful country, under this magnificent Government. All submitters were promoting it. They wanted to be able to enrol with their details and change their addresses online, and eventually, of course, they will want to be able to vote online. I look forward to the day when they will be able to do that. When the committee was considering, for instance, its report on the last local body elections held just last October, it made a point in its recommendations to the Government that there be a trial of internet voting for the next local body election, if that is at all possible. Using the internet will make it as easy as possible for people to participate in elections, while ensuring that the integrity of the electoral system is maintained.

The key message of the bill is that it will ensure that the new Electoral Commission is a simple, effective, and pragmatic approach, and it will enhance the electoral system we all enjoy in this country, which has led us to serve our communities in this way as members of Parliament, and to enjoy the privileges of being MPs in this House. I commend the bill to the House.

I will take a brief call for a couple of purposes. First of all, I reiterate the support members on this side of the House have for the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2). It is important that we get right the administrative arrangements around our electoral system, and the fact that we have been consulted in a very open way by the Minister of Justice is greatly appreciated on this side of the House.

The only thing I asked the Minister to do in the context of the Committee stage was to confirm that the Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union had supported the addition of Supplementary Order Paper 262, which resolved an issue around adjoining electorates in respect of the appointment of registrars in relation to a particular court case that is still in progress, as I understand it. We had that reassurance from the Minister, and that was a good thing.

The other thing I will say is about Cantabrians and their right to enrol, and where they enrol for this particular election coming up, because it is an issue. There are a number of people who will, obviously, be moving before the general election occurs, and they need to understand where they should enrol, so I thought I could use a brief moment in this debate to make it very clear where people are to enrol. The first thing is to define what people understand to be their home. The Registrar of Electors is asking people in Canterbury to consider which of two statements applies to them. The first is: “I am temporarily staying somewhere other than my home—but I hope to move back home one day.” For those who live in the red zone, I think that hope will never be realised, and, therefore, if people have moved, they have to change their registration. The second—and I think it really confirms it—is: “I am unable to move back to my home and have moved permanently somewhere else.” Basically, the advice under that statement says that people need to re-enrol to vote at their new address after they have lived there for a month, even if they will be moving to another address in the future.

I wanted to put that on the record because a lot of people have a lot of confusion about where they are going to vote. Most people are actually totally uninterested in voting this year, because they have way too much to be thinking about in terms of their own futures, and the election seems to be an irrelevancy compared with all the other things they have to cope with. But I think it is important that people are on the electoral roll on a correct basis, and that they can then take the option to exercise not only their democratic right but, in my view, their civic duty on 26 November.

I commend the bill to the House.

I rise briefly to indicate that the Green Party will continue to support the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2) at the third reading. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koe. I will start my contribution to this debate on the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2) by reminding us of what a third reading presentation to the House entails. Speaker’s ruling 116/7—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Oh, no pockets.

That member had better speak to his leader; I am following him. Speaker’s ruling 116/7 states: “Members must confine themselves to the general principles of the bill as it emerged from the committee.” Speaker’s ruling 117/1 states: “the third reading debate should be in the nature of a summing up.”

I wanted to refer to those Speakers’ rulings because in our process, when the bill came to the Justice and Electoral Committee, we had the Hon David Parker, Lynne Pillay, and Jacinda Ardern contributing to the discussion on the bill. When the bill left our select committee our presence was graced on the Labour side by Charles Chauvel, Carol Beaumont, and Carmel Sepuloni. The National members were ably chaired by that outstanding member for Wanganui, Chester Borrows. The other members were “steady as you go”, providing a steady performance. So, as has already been alluded to, this bill has received wide support.

But there is one aspect I particularly want to speak on and place on the record. During the select committee process we provided the avenue for the Tūhono Trust to receive information from the Electoral Commission and to pass on names to Māori organisations and iwi organisations. This is an excellent service because it enables rūnanga and other iwi groups to make contact with their members, and it enables individuals to connect with their trust boards. In terms of the service it will provide, it will be able to supply iwi and other Māori organisations with this electoral information and affiliations so that they can be assisted in connecting back to their whānau, hapū, and iwi.

That aside, the bill, of course, falls into line with this Government’s criterion of improved efficiency in providing Government services, and it does that by bringing together a number of organisations that are providing similar services under the one umbrella. It has been a hallmark of the sorts of efficiencies that this Government has driven in providing front-line services to the people and reducing back-office expenses. So it gives me great pleasure to be able to join with all sides of the House in supporting this third reading of the bill.

It is a pleasure to rise and speak in support of the third reading of the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2). As the previous speaker, Paul Quinn, said, I am a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee that this bill emerged from.

I listened closely to what the chair of our select committee, Chester Borrows, said. Interestingly enough, I probably could give exactly the same speech word for word, because this is not a controversial bill. We all support it. One might argue that if it is not controversial, maybe there is nothing significant in here, but that could not be further from the truth. The reality is that this legislation is about improving and strengthening our electoral system, and it has done that by establishing the Electoral Commission and bringing together a number of agencies into one format to streamline and strengthen our electoral system. As others have said, this is of fundamental importance. Across the House something we can agree on is that we want to have an effective democracy, that we are a stronger country for having an effective democracy, and that our electoral processes are robust, transparent, and corruption-free—or generally speaking they are—and compared with many countries around the world that is certainly the case. So anything that improves our electoral system should be something that members from all parts of the House agree on—as is the case with this legislation.

I do not want to go into detail on the bill but I will make just a couple of points, given the proximity of this debate to our election on 26 November. We have a responsibility as members of Parliament to ensure that our enrolment processes are something we actively support and in which we ourselves are actively out there participating. We should be ensuring that New Zealanders are on the electoral roll—as they are required to be, but are too often not—so that they can have their say in the election, and so that that say is counted. Although it is true that we have achieved an enrolment rate of about 95 percent under our current system, it is often, I think, an overstatement. People who are doorknocking and talking to people will see that often many people are enrolled at a house but no longer live there. Of course, our continuous enrolment system means that often they do not come off the electoral roll for that address unless the agency is directly notified.

Just to conclude, I say, as others have, that we support this bill wholeheartedly and look forward to the further development of our online processes of enrolment. Thank you.

Tēnā koe. I am very pleased to speak on the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2), which has the aim of amending the Electoral Act 1993 to implement further electoral reform, with amendments arising from the Government’s response to the report from the Justice and Electoral Committee on its inquiry into the 2008 general election, and amendments relating to online enrolment.

I think it is very important that we have this legislation, and that we have a very robust and transparent electoral system. Last year I was one of the members of the delegation from New Zealand that went to the Solomon Islands as official observers of the Solomon Islands elections. While we were there one of the things we observed was the fact that the enrolments there were not very clear; they were not very transparent. In fact, it was very obvious that many people were enrolled several times over, and many people who were no longer living were enrolled several times over. There were real problems with the electoral system there, and it meant that when it came to voting time, people there were not in a position to actually use their democratic right to vote very fairly. We observed instances in which people were actually living in one area and were voting in another, because they preferred to vote in their home villages rather than in the area in which they were working. So they were filling up the boats going home to their home villages. There were horrific photos, actually, of people in these rust buckets, sitting crammed on to the boats to go home. There were instances of candidates picking up and actually paying for people to go home to vote for them. It was altogether a real problem for the people of the Solomon Islands, and particularly for the Government of the Solomon Islands, to be able to put in place a system that actually was fair to all people.

Here in New Zealand we have a system that we can rightly be very proud of. But we still need to keep working on it all the time to make sure it is improved. One of the things we need to work on and make sure is improved is the ability of people to vote. We heard earlier about the fact that people who are leaving Christchurch and moving to other areas may not actually realise that they have the ability and the right to still vote in Christchurch, so we need to get that information out to them. There is also the fact that Māori have the lowest proportion of people who engage in the electoral system. We need to get information out to Māori to encourage them not only to enrol but also to vote. I think the ability for the Tūhono Trust to be able to get this information on Māori voters and get it to their iwi will be helpful, because I think if people are voting through their iwi structures, they will get into the habit. They will realise that they can have a say in the system, and that one voice is very powerful, because once people start to put all of those voices together, they can actually vote in the people who will make a change and will make a difference in their lives. I am very pleased on behalf of the Māori Party to support this bill, and I commend it to the House.

Sat sri akaal, Mr Assistant Speaker.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member, but the time has come for me to leave the Chair.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.