Appointments — Electoral Commission

I move, That, pursuant to section 4D of the Electoral Act 1993 and section 32 of the Crown Entities Act 2004, this House recommends Her Excellency the Governor-General appoint Kristy Pearl McDonald QC as deputy chairperson of the Electoral Commission and Alicia Wright as Chief Electoral Officer, each for a term of five years. The Electoral Commission plays a central role in New Zealand’s constitution and democracy. It ensures that parliamentary elections, by-elections, and referenda are held so that New Zealanders can effectively participate in their democracy, choosing their elected representatives and expressing their views on important issues. It manages the Māori electoral option, allowing those of Māori descent to choose which electoral roll they want to be on, and, overseas, the enrolment of electors for parliamentary and local elections. It also supports the Representation Commission in setting boundaries for general and Māori electorates after each census, and it provides advice and public education on electoral matters.

Given the significance of the commission, Parliament has decided that its three board members—the chair, the deputy chair, and the Chief Electoral Officer—are appointed by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the House of Representatives. Both the chair and the deputy chair serve in part-time roles, while the Chief Electoral Officer, who is also the board’s chief executive, works full-time. The people appointed to these important positions need to have strong experience in governance and knowledge of the public sector. They need good strategic planning skills and unquestionable personal integrity and independence. The Chief Electoral Officer, as the chief executive of the commission, also needs to be a strong manager of people and to hold expertise in financial and risk management. The appointee needs to have a sound understanding of the electoral process and a track record of demonstrating a clear commitment to neutrality and delivery in a complex political environment.

The term of the current Chief Electoral Officer, Robert Peden, expired in August 2015. Mr Peden kindly agreed to continue to serve as the Chief Electoral Officer while awaiting the outcome of the appointment process. Additionally, a new deputy chair needs to be appointed after Jane Hūria advised that she was also not available for reappointment and resigned with effect from 30 September this year. I particularly want to thank Mr Peden and Ms Hūria for their public service to the Electoral Commission and to New Zealand. Their dedication to the roles and to the Electoral Commission has been greatly appreciated. Their work was of a very high standard and was carried out with the utmost integrity.

The Electoral Commission is, undoubtedly, the cornerstone of ensuring our elections run smoothly and fairly. It is important that political parties across the spectrum are confident in the Electoral Commission’s neutrality. In the interest of ensuring that all parties were confident of this, I invited all political parties in Parliament to be part of a multipartisan appointment group, which undertook the selection of the new Chief Electoral Officer. I would like to thank all members of that group for their efforts in this process.

Alicia Wright is, I believe, an outstanding candidate for the role of Chief Electoral Officer. She has held senior leadership roles in central government for the past 13 years. She is currently Deputy Secretary Evaluation at the Ministry of Defence, and has previously served as General Manager, Centre for Social Research and Evaluation at the Ministry of Social Development. She has extensive policy, operations management, and central government experience, and is adept at working with volunteer networks and through online channels.

Likewise, Kristy McDonald is an outstanding candidate for the position of deputy chair. She is a Queen’s Counsel and has extensive experience both as a litigation lawyer and in numerous governance roles. She is a former chairperson of the Mental Health Review Tribunal and the Judicial Control Authority for racing, and was the inaugural chair of the Real Estate Agents Authority. She is currently a member of the Accident Compensation Corporation board and chair of Kiwifruit New Zealand. Ms McDonald has also been involved in a number of commissions of inquiry and ministerial inquiries, including the commission of inquiry into police conduct and the Pike River inquiry.

It is with great pleasure that I commend to the House Ms McDonald and Ms Wright for these two very important roles. They are both highly able New Zealanders and I am confident that they possess the range of skills and attributes that will ensure the Electoral Commission continues to administer our electoral system impartially, efficiently, and effectively.

Labour supports this motion. We thank the Government for complying with the traditions that we have as to the appointments of these people, and Jacinda Ardern, on behalf of Labour, has been involved in those processes most closely. Can I add, to the thanks of the Minister of Justice, Labour’s thanks to the outgoing people in these two roles: Mr Peden and Ms Hūria.

Can I say, in respect of Ms Wright, who has been appointed as Chief Electoral Officer, that I think one of the most important challenges she faces is maintaining public confidence in our electoral system. I think it is a terrible shame what is happening in America at the moment, where one of the presidential candidates, Mr Trump, is trying—even in advance of what will, hopefully, be a loss on election day—to question the legitimacy of the electoral outcome and is undermining public confidence in it. In New Zealand, we do have great public confidence in our electoral processes, and that is deservedly so. In order to maintain that confidence, we have to do really well in making sure that as many people as possible are enrolled. People have a legal duty to enrol, but we have to facilitate that and make sure that we maintain the proportion of our population that are on the roll and make sure that people are entitled to exercise their right to vote.

At the last election, compared with the prior election, we had a drop of about 1 percent in the people who were estimated to be on the roll. In 2011, 93.7 percent of the population who were entitled to vote were on the roll; the estimate for the last election is that that was down to 92.6 percent. Maybe that is one of the reasons, according to the Justice and Electoral Committee, that of people who voted at the last election, there were about 40,675 invalid votes. That was split into two main groupings: over 10,000 were informal votes, and 29,800-odd—close to 30,000—were disallowed votes. The centrality of paying due attention to ensuring that our roll is robust and up to date is important, and it is becoming a harder task as more and more people—now, I think, more than 50 percent of all New Zealanders—live in rental accommodation. As the proportion of the population in rental accommodation increases there are more changes of addresses, and therefore it is a bigger task for the Electoral Commission to ensure that the roll is up to date.

I am sure that these people are up to the task. Alicia Wright, as we have been told, comes from Defence and has the background that is necessary to perform this important role. Kristy McDonald is known to many of us. I have had dealings with her over the years—actually, as far back as university, when she was ahead of me by a year at Otago University.

Kristy McDonald has had an outstanding career. In terms of the work that she has done on behalf of the Government, I can remember one particularly difficult inquiry that she ran for the Government into problems that there were around people who had been convicted of crimes but were on the police witness protection programme because of their cooperation with the Crown, and while on the police witness protection programme had committed traffic offences—some of them quite serious traffic offences—that had not been properly disclosed to the court and so they were treated as first offenders even though they had a prior record of criminality. I thought that Kristy McDonald handled herself very well in respect of that inquiry, and all of the other leading roles that she has had, as a prosecutor for the Crown, as defence counsel, and as the chair of various bodies, including disciplinary tribunals and commercial bodies. So I think she is very, very well qualified to be the deputy chairperson of the Electoral Commission. We are very lucky that she has agreed to serve in that role.

I am sure we will also be served well by Alicia—I am not sure how to pronounce that; I am sorry if I have got that wrong—Wright. I really just end by saying, again, that it is absolutely imperative for public confidence and democracy, which we all so believe in in this House, that we have good people to ensure that our elections and our election processes enable people to exercise their right of preference on the day.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. I rise to offer the Green Party’s support for this motion for the appointments of Alicia Wright as the Chief Electoral Officer and Kristy McDonald QC as the new deputy chair of the Electoral Commission. It is particularly nice, I might say, to be able to stand in support of the appointment of two women to such important positions. It is nice to see that leadership being recognised.

💬 Tracey Martin: On merit.

On merit—exactly. It always is, usually, so much more of a struggle to have merit recognised, and it is great to see that breaking through. They are both supremely qualified women. We have absolute confidence in their ability to do the job and do it very well. It is, as has already been said, a very important job for us in this House. I hope, as well, that some people in the country at least understand how important it is for all of us.

It is quite a challenge ahead for both of them. We had about a million people who were eligible to vote who did not vote in the last general election—that was about a third of eligible voters who did not participate in our electoral system. That undermines our mandate in this House for every single one of us, and it means that a third of our population, roughly, is unrepresented in this House. I am very pleased to hear that these women are not just very well qualified but very passionate about the roles that they are taking on, because part of their roles is ensuring the integrity of the electoral system, and another part is providing advice, reports, and public education on electoral matters. It does seem to me that there is work—some very serious thinking—that we need to do in this country to be able to ensure better representation for those people, and give them confidence and a sense of purpose in voting.

It is with great pleasure, again, that I just offer our support and, also, thanks for the opportunity to provide feedback through this process, which our co-leader Metiria Turei did. So, again, the Green Party supports these nominations.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to congratulate Kristy Pearl McDonald, deputy chairperson of the Electoral Commission, and Alicia Wright, Chief Electoral Officer, on their appointments. We look forward to working with them, and the commission as a whole, constructively and cooperatively in the future, as we have in the past. New Zealand First will be pleased to vote in support.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. The Māori Party also wants to congratulate Alicia Wright and Kristy McDonald on their appointments: one as the Chief Electoral Officer, and the other—Kristy McDonald QC—as the deputy chairperson of the Electoral Commission. The process we undertook to find these appointees was a robust one, and across the House everybody was involved. They are most important positions and, as has been spoken about already, there are a number of issues that confront us to ensure that we can get everybody out to vote.

In the recent Budget the Māori Party was able to successfully bid for a small pool of funding so that we can look at increased participation in the electoral process. A number of people have talked about civics education being needed in schools because at the last election we had the smallest turnout in our history of young people aged 18 to 25, specifically for Māori—ever. If that continues on the predicted pathway, then we will have smaller and smaller participation for the next 50 years. So we must do something. We must do something now. The inquiry that was held through the Justice and Electoral Committee made a number of recommendations. That amendment is coming to the House now, and it will give some direction for the appointments, for these two new members of the Electoral Commission.

For Māori there are a number of issues that we find are significant. One is the entrenchment of Māori seats. You can remove a Māori seat in this House with a vote of 50 percent, but to remove a general seat there must be a vote of 75 percent of the House. That, in and of itself, is an unjust law. There is the issue of the huge Māori electorates where, if we rose the threshold from the current 5 percent to 10 percent, then we could have a better distribution geographically by iwi to fit, and secure people—so the South Island could be the South Island on its own, and not all the way into Wellington, and so on. So these issues we look forward to taking up and moving forward into the future. We as a party support these appointments.

Motion agreed to.