Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill, Electoral Amendment Bill

I move, That the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill and the Electoral Amendment Bill be now read a third time. These bills are the latest instalments in an ongoing endeavour to ensure New Zealand’s electoral system is up to date and fit for purpose. These reforms are important for the smooth delivery of the 2017 general election, ensuring it will run effectively and efficiently. As members will be aware, the bills primarily progress the recommendations of the Justice and Electoral Committee’s Inquiry into the 2014 General Election. These regular reviews are conducted after every election, and help ensure our electoral laws are continually improved and reflect the changing needs and expectations of voters and parties. They also ensure that electoral laws are modern and up to date with changes in technology.

The Electoral Amendment Bill implements recommendations that require legislation and can be put in place in time for the 2017 general election. The Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill addresses the recommendation from the inquiry for the reform of parties’ opening and closing addresses. This will also be implemented in time for this year’s election. Because these bills deal with interrelated matters of electoral law, they have been made cognate so that they can be progressed quickly. This has helped ensure that these bills are in place with enough time for the Electoral Commission to prepare for the general election on 23 September this year. It is also important that all parties, candidates, voters, and advertisers know the rules well in advance of the election.

I would like to again take this opportunity to thank the Justice and Electoral Committee for its diligent consideration of the bills and its timely manner in reporting back. I would also like to again thank those members of the public who made submissions. I particularly want to thank the committee for its sound recommendation to add into the Electoral Amendment Bill a requirement for parties to file an audited return on how their Broadcasting Act allocation was spent, just as they do for their other election expenses. This is a prudent change that highlights the importance of considering these bills together.

Electoral reform should be based on consensus. These bills had broad support in the committee, and the changes recommended at the select committee stage were unanimous. Similarly, I am pleased that these bills have enjoyed wide support as they have passed through their House stages.

I would like to talk about some of the specific changes that the bills make. The Electoral Amendment Bill will simplify and clarify electoral law by changing outdated wording and making some forms more user friendly. Many electoral forms are complex and could discourage enrolment. Simplifying these forms will ensure that they are easy to use, while still collecting the necessary information.

I do want to note, however, that this change will not affect ballot papers. These will remain as prescribed, as recommended by the inquiry and the Electoral Commission. The bill will also improve electoral services—for example, by allowing the counting of advance votes to begin earlier. This will ensure that preliminary election results can be announced in a timely manner. The bill also allows greater use of technology by enabling the Electoral Commission to provide information to voters by email as well as post. Collectively, these changes will improve services to voters, candidates, and parties and improve the efficiency of elections.

As was highlighted in previous speeches, the bill makes a number of other amendments to electoral law, all of which are minor and technical in nature but are no less important for the smooth delivery of elections.

The Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill will modernise some election broadcasting rules to give political parties more flexibility. It removes the requirements for parties’ opening and closing addresses, and for Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand to provide free time for these. These were an outdated format, and it is important that resources made available for political parties to engage with the public at election time can be used as effectively and efficiently as possible. The bill allows parties to advertise more flexibly by enabling them to use their funding allocations under the Broadcasting Act for internet advertising. It is particularly important, in light of declining voter participation, that political parties can engage effectively with the public in the most relevant media.

As I mentioned earlier, another key change is the requirement that parties file a return of how they have used their allocation on television, the internet, or radio advertising. This change will ensure transparency, giving the public confidence that public funds are used appropriately and as intended. This change is made through the Electoral Amendment Bill, to align with existing returns requirements in the Electoral Act.

It is vital that we do not take the strength of our electoral system for granted. We are lucky to live in a nation where we take a multiparty approach to electoral reform, building on the lessons learnt after each election. As a result, our electoral system has a very high level of integrity. These two bills help ensure our law remains relevant for the upcoming election and in the future. I commend these bills to the House. Thank you.

I want to start by thanking the Associate Minister of Justice for his guidance in the last phase of this bill, and he is absolutely correct that what has been really important in our discussion around electoral laws generally has been to try to build as much consensus as we are able to do, because it benefits no one if people do not have confidence in our electoral laws and our accountability structures around our electoral system and so on.

There was a unanimous Justice and Electoral Committee report with recommendations based on the inquiry into the 2014 general election, but that is not to say there were not areas where we would have preferred to see greater progress. And I do want to talk about those lost opportunities, because we would still like to see these things picked up in the next round of reforms, because we think they are a blockage to people’s participation in our system.

If I were to talk about the first of those opportunities—we have a situation where we have a growing number of people who are not engaging with our electoral system, whether it is those who enrol but then do not vote or those who do not even choose to enrol. It is, though, however, incumbent on us that we try to remove as many barriers as possible, administratively and, some might say, even when it comes to accessing a ballot box itself. I do not believe we are doing that at the moment.

If I were to walk you through, for instance, Mr Assistant Speaker, the process, which I know you know all too well, for enrolling and voting, it becomes very obvious where some of our issues lie. For instance, of course you must be on the electoral roll before you can vote, and being on the electoral roll itself is compulsory. If, however, you do not get on the electoral roll roughly 4 weeks before an election, you will not be on the printed roll. That means if you go to enrol before election day and it is within that 4-week period and you fill in an enrolment form and send it off to the Electoral Commission, when you walk into a voting booth you will not be there on the printed roll in front of them. That means that you are likely to be told to fill in a special vote form. If you do not fill in that special vote form 100 percent accurately in comparison to the enrolment form you have filled in, your vote will not be counted. That is, however, if you manage to get that enrolment form in at least before voting day.

If you go into a ballot booth to vote and you are in the advance voting period, you can fill in an enrolment form while you are there, then fill in a special vote form while you are there, and then cast a vote. If when filling in those two forms you do not get them absolutely accurately correct in comparison to each other, your vote will not count. One simple thing we could have done, and it would have made sense, is that if you walk into a booth and it is advance voting and you are not on the roll, get people to fill in one form—a special vote form that acts as an enrolment form. There is no room for error in that. There is also no room for me to walk in and say: “Look, I’m not on the electoral roll, but I’m sure I filled in an enrolment form, so I won’t bother with that; I’ll just do a special vote.”

The reason we know that some of this is happening is that because at the last election, guess how many individuals walked into a ballot booth and filled in a form—they ticked, they voted, they took the time out of their day to go and vote, they made the effort, but there was something wrong, either with their special vote or their enrolment form, and they did not count. How many votes?

💬 Jono Naylor: You’re going to tell us. Come on.

You know I am going to tell you, Mr Naylor. Twenty-seven thousand votes.

💬 Jono Naylor: How many?

Twenty-seven thousand votes were discounted—people were disenfranchised—because there was some administrative issue with either their enrolment or some of the form-filling that led up to their vote. Surely it would be in our best interest to remove some of those issues.

So the first thing we tried to propose and we thought we had got the select committee to the right place on was to simply combine an enrolment form and a special vote form—simple. It is so simple. Why would we not agree to that?

The second point—it is now possible to walk into a booth and enrol and vote at the same time during an advance voting period, and you do not have to sign a form to give a valid reason about being out of town or working in order to do that. That is why roughly 30 percent of New Zealanders are voting early. It is great. We should encourage that. It is participation.

However, there is some confusion over the fact you can do that right up until the Friday before the election, but something magically changes with our system where it somehow becomes inappropriate on the day itself to fill in an enrolment for and a voting form at the same time. What that magical thing is that makes it inappropriate within that 12-hour period is not exactly clear.

I say that because we raised it in select committee. Why can you not enrol and vote at the same time on election day? Why not? Because that means that everyone who walked into a booth and was found not to be on the roll could simply fill in an enrolment form and have their say. Surely that should be our joint aspiration? We still, I do not think, have adequate reasons. There used to be arguments around the integrity of the roll. I think that has diminished over time. We have proven, with the advance voting we have done now, that it is possible to maintain the integrity of the roll. Our electoral fraud is minuscule in New Zealand—minuscule. In fact, the increases that we have seen, which are still minor, are thought to be down to the longer periods of advance voting that we have now and the confusion that does cause for some voters.

One final other additional thought was on the Māori electoral option. It is our view, and the view of our Māori caucus in particular, that we should have the ability for someone who is on the Māori roll that if they would like to change from either general to Māori or Māori to general, they should have that option once within a 3-year period, rather than the off-cycle that we have at the moment. At the moment we are looking at doing it in 2020. I think that is an unfortunate delay and we could have resolved it this time round.

But what about the things we do agree on—and there were plenty of those in the bill. We did want to give the Electoral Commission the ability to use new methods of providing information to electors in addition to post. It may surprise people that we are that prescriptive in our legislation, but we are. We also, for instance, are quite prescriptive around form-filling. So we agreed on giving the Electoral Commission the ability to go away and say “What is going to be best for voters in terms of making these things comprehensible and giving them that freedom?”.

Also we agreed on allowing the Electoral Commission, where an elector has informed it of a change of residence to a different electorate, to allow enrolment that will take effect after 1 calendar month from the moving date. I have had this happen to me. I was so eager when I moved that I filled in a new enrolment form, but I had not lived there for a month and so I got a letter back from the Electoral Commission saying “Sorry, we can’t enrol you. You haven’t been there for 4 weeks.” There was not the ability to then just simply acknowledge that and from the 1 month period make it kick in. So that would be quite dispiriting, I imagine, if you got one of those and did not follow through the process. Who knows whether someone would follow up.

There are other various things around allowing electoral officials to use online electronic roll look-up, allowing the Electoral Commission to look at advance voting counting—all things that do make good common sense and clarifying, in particular, section 199A of the Electoral Act, through new section 199A set out in clause 97 of the Electoral Amendment Bill, to cover material first published or actively republished, promoted, or distributed on election day for 2 preceding days on, for instance, social media. We had this issue where someone might have put something that usually would have required a promoter’s statement—clearly an electoral advertisement—and that actually might just stay in someone’s feed on the day itself, even though it was not posted outside the law. So we are clarifying what our intent is there to keep pace with the modern electoral environment.

On broadcasting it makes sense what we have done with opening and closing broadcasts. It makes sense to say an allocation needs to remain, but we need to give flexibility to political parties as to how they use that allocation. All of the parties agreed with that. The idea that people sit down for, you know, 30-minute spots to watch a long broadcast—

💬 Denis O’Rourke: New Zealand First does not agree.

—it is not consumable, it is not the way people consume media, it removes flexibility. Excuse me, I may not have spoken for every party. Certainly, Labour was of the view that we needed to move away from that form and allow multi-platform as well, not just screen for those broadcasts, because that is where our voting public is.

So, all in all, there are some missed opportunities with this bill. There is more we would have liked to see done. Ultimately, our goal should be to ensure that everyone takes up the opportunity to use their democratic voice through our electoral process. It should be incumbent on us to maintain transparent rules and regulations but to do as much as we can to encourage voter engagement. So although we agree with what we have got here today, we disagree with what has been removed and the lost opportunity.

I have to say that when I was first put on the Justice and Electoral Committee and found out that we would be doing the review of the election I never thought it could be so much fun. There are certainly a whole bunch of things that we managed to get conversations on along the way during the process of the review and, of course, being able to doing that review, report back to the House, and then see so many of the recommendations that came out of our review arrive in legislation is fairly satisfying.

I think, overall, what we were trying to do through this process was actually make it a better, more efficient service that we were providing. So, as Jacinda Ardern has just said, changing from having simply the 30-minute or 25-minute, or 10-minute broadcast, depending on what your party allocation was, at a time when—certainly there are some people who want to sit down on a Saturday night at 7.30 and watch those things, and I think Mr O’Rourke mentioned to us in the committee that he would be quite happy to do that. The rest of us thought that perhaps it was more appropriate in this modern age, when we are trying to engage younger voters and the like, to have multiple platforms on which that funding allocation could be used. So we have been wanting to modernise the system and make it more up to date and that was through the broadcasting part of these two bills.

There were also some other things that we needed to address within the structure of how things take place. On voting day, for example, to be able to count those early votes earlier in the day so that we can have earlier results on election night obviously makes a great level of sense. Our days of being worried about results slipping out during the party voting process are, I think, long gone. We have got confidence that people can start counting those votes early, and that is going to deliver a better result.

There was, as Jacinda Ardern said, a significant debate about this idea of being able to enrol on election day. I can speak for myself at least in terms of my opposition to that particular point that was raised. I believe that if we actually want to encourage people to engage early within the democratic process, simply allowing them to turn up on Saturday and then go “Oh, I didn’t realise there was an election on. Oh, I had better just vote.”, with not having taken the steps in advance to enrol, to connect with the process, does not make a lot of sense to me. I think actually what we need to do if we want people to enrol is we should either scrap the electoral roll and just say that anyone can turn up on the day and enrol and vote at the same time, or actually have a process whereby people enrol and engage with the democratic process.

Yes, I guess there is time when you are looking for that to be scrutinised in the early voting process when you have those two steps to the process before you vote. I do not think it is appropriate to have just one form. What we want to do is encourage people to enrol, and if we simply do away with that by saying to them “You’ll never have to enrol. It doesn’t matter. Just show up anytime you like and just vote based on whatever else it is that you’re seeing out there.” I do not think it actually encourages people into their civic responsibility of actually enrolling prior to voting. So despite the fact that there were members on the committee who wanted to see that happening, we did not pass that and that is not part of this legislation.

That said, there are some things that needed to change. During the increased activity in the early polling situation that we find ourselves in now—and we are predicting that there may well be up to 30 percent at the next election who will vote in those prior couple of weeks before the polling day—what actually are the rules around campaigning? We had a very long discussion about what the difference is between the pre-election day voting period and election day, and what should be permissible and what should not. I think arriving at the situation that we did, which is that there can be no active campaigning within 10 metres of an early polling booth, sends a clear signal that, actually, we have got to make sure that people are not being coerced to vote one way or the other on their way into the pooling booth. There is still something quite sacred about people being able to do that without being harassed or harangued on their way in. So we arrived at a sensible solution. Clearly you cannot have just too wide an area or else there probably will be no signage up around town at all.

So a sensible review of the election took place. I thought it was great work by the Justice and Electoral Committee—good recommendations that have made their way into legislation by the previous Minister and now by Mark Mitchell carrying it through the last part. I think what we are going to have in 2017 is a better run election than we had in 2014 as a result of this legislation and I commend it to the House.

That was an absolutely pathetic argument for not allowing voters to enrol on the day. I have a message for Jono Naylor: a lot of people show up at the polling booth on the day and find that they are not on the roll, and they are not aware that they are not on the roll. It is not that they are too apathetic or lazy to actually go along and vote, or that they just decide on a whim that they are going to show up to the polling booth; many of them arrive at the polling booth fully expecting that they are going to be able to exercise their democratic right but find that their name has dropped off the roll. Who are these people? Well, they are more likely to be the people who are transient, so are therefore less likely to be the people who are voting for the National Party—which, of course, suits it to have those votes discounted—but, actually, many of them were not aware that they were not on the roll.

Under the old system—the new system is much better—everybody had to re-enrol every election. A few elections back, we changed that so that people stayed on the electoral roll. But, of course, what happens is that if somebody moves house during that period of time and they do not update their enrolment details at the time they move house—some people might move house several times between elections—then they might not even be aware that they have been dropped off the roll because their confirmation is sent back to the Electoral Commission. To say that they are too apathetic to update their enrolment details is absolutely pathetic. It means that they are not having their right to vote respected because the Electoral Commission has decided to remove them from the roll, and they may not have even been aware of that.

There is no good reason not to allow people to enrol and vote on the day. They are allowed to enrol and vote as an early vote, so therefore how is it in any way different for someone to go to an early vote polling booth and say “I might not be on the roll. Can I fill in an enrolment form and cast my vote now?” versus someone who shows up on election day and says exactly the same thing? There is absolutely no justification for that, other than the fact that National would prefer to disenfranchise a group of voters who it knows are less likely to vote for it than to vote for some of the other political parties on the ballot paper. I think that is completely wrong.

I liked the idea put forward by the Electoral Commission, bearing in mind that the Electoral Commission is the independent body that we have to oversee elections. It put forward a suggestion that somebody who is completing a special vote declaration on the day should be treated as having enrolled on the day, and that their vote should be counted in that regard. I think that is a very sensible solution that means that everybody’s vote will be counted. So I am very disappointed that the National Government did not take up that opportunity.

I think there are some other areas around modernising electoral law that were missed. One of the ones that I have always been a little surprised by, certainly at the last election, is this issue of selfies in the polling booth. I have no problem with someone taking a selfie of themselves voting, or even indicating the way they are voting when they are doing an advance ballot. Actually, I do not have a problem with them doing it on the day either. If someone is allowed to put up on Facebook when they cast an early vote that they just voted for whichever party they voted for, why should they not be allowed to do that on election day as well?

If we want to encourage participation and turnout, there is no good reason, if we are living in the 21st century, to say to someone: “You can’t do a selfie in the polling booth.” There have to be a few constraints around that. Of course, I think they should be allowed to share their vote. They should not be allowed to infringe on the rights of somebody else who is voting, so they should not be taking photos of somebody else in the polling booth or the way somebody else is voting. But if they want to share the fact that they have been down to vote and they voted for a particular political party, this is the 21st century, and they should be allowed to do so. I know that not everybody, including some of the people who are on my own side, will agree with that, but I think it is time we got into the 21st century.

I want to talk about the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill, which is part of this package that we are debating at the moment. Again, it comes down to the fact that Parliament needs to drag itself into the 21st century and we need to make sure that our electoral system gets into the 21st century as well. When the rule around opening and closing broadcasts for election campaigns was introduced, there were two TV channels in New Zealand—only the two. If you were sitting at home watching TV and the opening and closing broadcasts were broadcast on both of those channels, as they were back in those days, you had no choice other than to watch them or turn off the TV. The reality now is that that is simply not the medium any more. People can be watching live streamed content on Netflix, they can be using MY SKY or any other type of device, they could be watching all sorts of other things, or they could be accessing content via social media.

The idea that we have these opening and closing broadcasts, which are expensive to produce because they are quite long-form and very few people watch them, and the idea that we should lock that into law and lock political parties into spending some of their broadcast allocation to do that simply does not make sense. It is not good for the broadcasters either. Let us be really frank about this. TVNZ had 25 percent fewer viewers in the timeslot that it set aside for the opening and closing broadcasts at the last election campaign than it would normally have had during that timeslot. From memory, Coronation Street was supplanted by the opening and closing broadcasts. So if even Coronation Street can get more viewers—

💬 Sue Moroney: Rugby test.

—than the opening and closing broadcasts, that might say something about that. It was on at the same time as the rugby test. That might have been one of the reasons people were otherwise engaged.

The law also allows political parties to spend some of their broadcast allocation on internet advertising. Actually, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern between the two, in the sense that a lot of the way we access content now is through an online medium. If you take something like TVNZ Ondemand or TV3’s equivalent to that and someone missed their TV show at the regular appointed timeslot and decided to watch it on the on demand channel, under the old law, political parties would not have been able to insert their adverts into the on demand version that people were watching through live streaming. What is the difference? It is the same TV programme; it is just being watched at a different time using a different way of conveying it to the television set that somebody is watching it on, or the laptop or whatever technology they are watching it on. So there is no good reason to say that political parties should not be able to use that form of advertising.

We also need to consider the fact that there are other forms of content that people are accessing online. If we want informed citizens going to the polling booth, then being able to advertise in the other forms of online content is also important. It is important, too, because it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish between them. If you are looking at the Stuff news website, for example, and you are watching a video clip on the Stuff news website, would that be deemed to be a TV programme or would it be some other form of content? I think through this bill we have actually removed the need to try to draw that distinction by simply saying that online advertising is an acceptable use for the broadcasting allocation that is being given to political parties.

I do not agree with the suggestion put forward by some in this debate that there should be no limits on broadcast advertising. I think one of the things that is good about New Zealand, having visited other countries, particularly having visited the United States during a presidential election campaign, is that it is fantastic that we do not have the plethora of attack advertisements that they have in those other places. I remember sitting in a hotel room in Wisconsin, which was one of the battleground states in the last presidential election, and literally every second advertisement was an advertisement attacking someone. It was not promoting in any way, shape, or form the candidate that they were trying to promote; they were just attack ads. That is the sort of territory I think we would get into if we removed all the restrictions and all the caps on broadcast advertising in New Zealand. I think it is fantastic that we do not have that level of smear campaigning in New Zealand that they have in the United States in particular. It is good to see that the current restrictions are being protected.

Overall, I think there are some good changes. I think this bill takes a few small steps towards bringing electoral law into the 21st century, but I think there is significant progress that still needs to be made if we want to engage everybody in the electoral process, and if we want to ensure that everybody’s democratic right to vote and to have their vote counted is respected. If we want to engage younger voters in the process—bear in mind that younger voters are the least likely to vote—I absolutely do not accept the argument put forward by many that it is because they are too apathetic or self-interested. In fact, I think the young voters whom I have spoken to are some of the least self-interested people when it comes to voting. I would like to ensure that they have their votes counted and that they are encouraged to participate in the process. It is disappointing that this bill, as it is currently put before the House, misses the opportunity to do a lot more in that regard.

I too stand today in support of the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill in its third reading. Thanks to the effective and solid work of the Justice and Electoral Committee the review of the 2014 elections enjoyed good support across all the parties, even though there was some debate about some of the content, and this is evident in the contributions being made in the House today.

Following a general election there is a review, and as a result of the review of the 2014 elections, we are now debating the changes that have been recommended by the Justice and Electoral Committee. Currently, it is a requirement that political parties have their opening and closing addresses broadcast by TVNZ and Radio New Zealand and that those companies must make time available for those addresses. So in this bill we are recognising that that is now a very outdated requirement, because we now know that people get their information from an increasing range of outlets, and most of those are from the internet. Thanks to the sterling work of this Government getting ultra-fast broadband around the country, this is more accessible to people than ever before.

This committee’s review revealed that in 2014 there were actually less than 25 percent of people tuned into those broadcasts on TV than their normal viewer numbers. So, in actual fact, the viewers tuned out when those broadcasts were being made. So it does make sense that we open the door to other ways of parties communicating with their audience. As a result, the Government has allocated a funding increase of $750,000 to each of the parties so that that money can be allocated to the broadcasting choice of each individual party, whether that be print or whether it be radio, TV, or signage, but more especially through social media.

The Government has also recognised that because of the increase in advance voting—and the Electoral Commissioner, who spoke to the select committee, anticipated that up to 50 percent of votes could be cast in advance of polling day—the counting day should be moved from 2 p.m. to 9 a.m. on the day of the election. They are some sensible requirements and I have pleasure in commending this bill to the House. Thank you.

I did not have the privilege of serving on this committee to review these two bills, and I am speaking on behalf of our co-leader Metiria Turei on this matter when I say that the Green Party is entirely prepared to support both amendments—the Electoral Amendment Bill, which aims to rationalise and clarify the law and improve services to voters and assist with the smooth delivery of the elections, on the one hand, and the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill, which aims to increase flexibility in the use of funding allocations provided to political parties for the election programmes.

There have been some pretty interesting issues raised in the course of the drafting and submissions, and the committee’s deliberation and its report back. I tend to agree with our colleagues from Labour—Chris Hipkins, who tends to say that it really amounts to just a few small steps to improve the electoral law and bring it as close as we can into the 21st century, but that much remains to be done if we really are going to complete that job. I recall also the comment of the Hon David Parker that the essence of liberal democracy is an honest, accurate, and transparent electoral system. We can take some satisfaction in the fact that New Zealand is pretty well endowed in this, but we cannot afford to rest on our laurels. It is wise for us to revise this every 3 years after the election and to see how we can improve it.

There were some pretty interesting suggestions raised in the course of the debate in the previous readings: whether the IRD system should be used by way of identification for the purpose of voting, as happens in the Nordic countries; the question of whether it should be sufficient to simply enrol at the time of voting, turning up at the voting booth, as Jacinda Ardern suggested; the question of a children’s civics education programme to get them familiar with the idea, the essence, the intrinsic merit, and the processes of voting; the question of advance voting; the question of prisoners voting, and the slight absurdity of the situation of the law at the moment; the question of further improving access for voters with disabilities; making it easier for Māori to switch between the Māori roll and the general roll; issues pertaining to the display of campaign material; and having regard for and trying to answer to the increasing use of social media—digital technology—by younger people. I do agree that the issue is not one of intrinsic lack and apathy on the part of young people, but rather the fact that the mechanism by which they are invited to participate in politics and in the electoral system is changing, and we need to keep up with that.

On balance, the Green Party is entirely happy with where we are at the moment, in full recognition that more needs to be done, and we will need to pick up where we left off, after the coming election. The Green Party will be supporting the cognate bill. Thank you.

Firstly, on the Electoral Amendment Bill, I note that only 12 out of the 28 recommendations made by the Justice and Electoral Committee have been progressed by the Government. That is not a very good record—12 out of 28 recommendations. So it is less than a 50 percent pass mark as far as I am concerned. It is a lot of work that is not being done. The bill, in addition, addresses only some of the issues, some of the statutory issues, and, really, the Government has given no indication about addressing some of the other things. One of those is that there simply were not enough polling places during the advance voting period. People were looking for them and could not find them. A lot more people would have voted if they had been able to find them. Secondly, some of the voting places used for advance voting were not the same voting places used on election day. So that caused confusion and that should not happen. So those are two things that cannot be in this bill, because they are not statutory. But the Government needs to give an indication about whether it is going to fix those things as well.

I just want to add about the Electoral Amendment Bill that I agree with the other speakers who have said that any qualified elector should be able to enrol on election day or indeed on any day during the 3-week voting period—any day. The reason for that is it can be done safely and securely, and it should be done, because it gives people more freedom to choose when and how they are going to enrol. So they ought to be able to turn up and enrol and vote at the same time. Why not? There is actually no good reason for that. So the legislation does not go far enough, but New Zealand First will vote in favour because as far as it goes it is OK.

I really want to spend most of my time on the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill, because claims that the broadcasting of the opening and closing addresses have become unpopular are grossly exaggerated. The truth is that TV ONE and Radio New Zealand have been lobbying for years so that they do not have to perform their public duty of broadcasting these opening and closing addresses free of charge. No doubt they could get a bigger audience if they were free to broadcast something else instead, but that is not the issue. The issue is that they are public broadcasters and they have a public duty to do this. Many people, in fact, still do watch those, especially people who are not much interested in the digital media. So that should still happen. If there is going to be funding for digital media, it should be done separately and not at the expense of these opening and closing addresses. We should not just be letting those broadcasters off the hook; we should be making them carry on and do their public duty.

What the bill does, effectively, is convert the assessed value of that free air time into cash funding for advertising on digital media, and, in addition to that, the Government has increased the total amount by $750,000 to a total of $3.6 million. So that is a lot of money, and it is important that it be fairly distributed. That brings me to the other reason why New Zealand First opposes this particular bill and that is that the Minister and the Government have chosen not to review and change the criteria for the allocation of those funds, and they should have done so. The Minister wrote to all of the parties asking whether they supported her proposals. New Zealand First said it would not do so unless those criteria were, in fact, reviewed and, hopefully, changed. There was no effort put into doing that at all, and, therefore, there is no consensus, as Mark Mitchell claimed—no consensus at all. New Zealand First is very definitely opposed to the proposal unless those criteria have been changed, because they are quite simply unfair to smaller parties. There is no problem, I guess, for the National Party and the Labour Party, but the criteria are unfair to the smaller parties, and I want to explain why that is.

The criteria are simply outdated. This is what they say. This is what the Electoral Commission is required to do by statute, in terms of those criteria. Section 75(2)(a) of the Broadcasting Act states that the commission must have regard to: “the number of persons who voted at the immediately preceding general election for that party and for candidates belonging to that political party;”—no problem with that; that is very proper criteria—“(b) the number of persons who voted at any by-election held since the immediately preceding general election”. We say that that is not relevant. General elections include, most importantly, a party vote and that does not happen at by-elections so how on earth could they actually be relevant to the allocation for funds at a general election? Paragraph (c) mentions the number of members of Parliament who were members of that political party immediately before the end of the last Parliament. We think that is the best and most solid criterion, and we would like to see that stay. Paragraph (d) states: “any relationships that exist between a political party and any other political party;”. I struggle to see the relevance of that, but perhaps somebody can explain why that should be relevant. Paragraph (e) states: “any other indications of public support for that political party such as the results of opinion polls”. For goodness’ sake—opinion polls!

Opinion polls are notoriously inaccurate before an election. Just look at the much lower poll results New Zealand First had at each and every one of the recent general elections—much lower than the result we actually got as a party. There are reasons for that. There are good and identifiable demographic reasons why that is the case. I am not going to go into that detail, but if you talk to the pollsters they will agree that there are issues there that will make those polls not accurate enough for the purposes of an allocation of $3.6 million of public funds. Finally, paragraph (f) is fine and it is: “the need to provide a fair opportunity for each registered political party … to convey its policies” and so on. We say that those criteria are inherently unfair to smaller parties and are complex and uncertain.

In 2014 the National Party was allocated $1,053,622. It got 59 seats, so that is, by proportion, $17,858 a seat. Labour was allocated $919,828. It got 32 seats—$28,744 per seat, by proportion. The Greens were allocated $401,380. It got 14 seats—$28,670 per seat, by proportion. New Zealand First got only $200,690, but got 11 seats, which equates to only $18,244 per seat. Even the tiny Māori Party got $100,344, but got only two seats, which equates to a very high $50,177, and the one-member ACT Party got an incredible $76,930 for one seat. So I put it to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and to everybody else listening: how could that possibly be a fair allocation of that money? There is no possible way that there is any fairness or even any rationality to support the current criteria. They are thoroughly out of date. They need to be changed. The Minister just brushed over that, despite New Zealand First’s objections. There is no consensus. This bill should not be proceeding, for those reasons, and New Zealand First will therefore definitely vote against it.

Just a brief call for me on these two cognate bills. I want to take issue, as I have done, actually, throughout the passage of this legislation—I want to take issue with what Mr O’Rourke said. I seem to find myself always speaking after him, and I have the pleasure to rebut Mr O’Rourke.

I want to talk about his suggestion that we need to amend the criteria by which broadcasting funds are allocated. I actually think there is an a priori question, which is why it is that the Government divvies up a pile of money to parties and says: “This is the cap, you can only spend up to a certain amount of money per party, and this is what you have got, and that is it.” There is actually a principled question about whether all that is a good idea: whether or not you should actually just let parties purchase their own advertising time with their own money and you should let them spend as much as they like. But leaving that aside, we have the system in place and the bill does not propose to make any amendments to that. So I guess the next question is, how do you divide up the money?

💬 Denis O’Rourke: Fairly.

Fairly, says Mr O’Rourke. I agree you do it fairly. That is actually the question though, is it not? The question is what is fairness? Because you need some mechanism. I mean, one argument is that you just divide up the money equally and you say: “Righty-o, New Zealand First gets $500,000, the National Party gets $500,000, the Greens do, ACT gets exactly the same.”—that would be one way of doing it. There is an argument that that is a fair way of doing it—that all political parties are entitled to exactly the same amount of money and they just go forward and spend it on whoever they like. There is an argument for that, but a lot of people would say that is not fair. It is not fair to give the National Party, which currently has 59 MPs, exactly the same amount of money as the ACT Party and United Future, which have only one MP respectively, or, indeed, the same as the New Zealand First Party, which has 12 or 13 MPs.

So fairness is, in many ways, in the eye of the beholder, and I actually reckon what we have right now is a pretty fair system. Denis O’Rourke said that we tend to take into account the votes at the last election. We do that; he does not have an issue with that. But he also said that by-elections are irrelevant—those were his exact words. By-elections are not relevant. Well, I think he should talk to his leader, because I reckon the leader of New Zealand First is going to be strongly of the view that by-election results, for example in Northland, are strongly relevant. I reckon he would actually disagree with the member on that.

Then Mr O’Rourke talked about how opinion polls are irrelevant—that they are no indication of support. Well, actually, the opinion polls before the last election were broadly correct. They were slightly under on New Zealand First; they were slightly over on other parties. But they were broadly correct. So I put it to the House that we have the balance about right. It is always tricky to work out how you are going to divide up things like this, but, actually, the balance is about right and therefore I reject Mr O’Rourke’s characterisation that this is not a fair system.

I think I just made it. Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to support the Electoral Amendment Bill and the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill. The Green Party supports this pretty pragmatic, albeit very small, change to our electoral arrangements in New Zealand. We have all seen the decline of the opening and closing broadcasts and the need for greater flexibility for the political parties to get their message out to the voters, wherever they are. As a politician and a student of history, I very much believe that we, as elective representatives, have to be where the people are. In the 1930s they were at home listening to the radio. In the 1970s they were watching television, and now, in the 21st century, they are increasingly online. So it makes sense and it is a pragmatic step that we can move away from some of these, I guess, legacy distribution means, like television, towards more modern means.

But let us get the facts straight. This is a tiny, tiny step in the right direction. The Government is ignoring and avoiding the big issue that is the crisis of electoral participation in New Zealand. We have a crisis when a million New Zealanders are not voting. If they were represented in this House, they would be the second-largest party—the Kiwis who chose not to or could not vote on election day. Although this legislation passing today comes out of the post-election inquiry, this was one of the only things to be picked up. We have seen review after review, academic study after academic study, pointing to where the problem is—30 years of declining electoral participation, a million Kiwis unable or not choosing to vote—but the Government is absolutely avoiding the critical things, the pragmatic, smart, effective things it could be doing so that all New Zealanders’ voices could be heard in this, the House of Representatives. At the moment we have an absolute tonne of Kiwis who are not represented in this, the House of Representatives.

We have heard in the debate a whole host of steps that have not been taken. We have seen a policy of omission from the Government—of avoiding the critical things it could be doing. We have heard simple things that should happen, such as allowing people who turn up on election day to be able to enrol at the ballot booth and be able to vote. Too many people I talk to around New Zealand and where I am standing on the East Coast are scared, actually, of what is going to happen if they turn up having not been enrolled, so they therefore avoid turning up entirely. That is a simple step that we could clean up in an afternoon.

We have heard about the need for civics education, and how poorly we are serving New Zealanders in terms of giving them information about their democracy and about their society. We do not want to see partisan political propaganda being taught to kids, but what we want to be seeing is them being educated on how their democracy works, how they can participate in their society. And let me say how disappointed I am in this House that we are no longer livestreaming select committees. Here is a chance for people anywhere in New Zealand with an internet connection to be able to actually see us politicians working together collaboratively around a select committee. It is disappointing that trial was discontinued.

We need to see better promotion of how and why people should vote. Every year the Electoral Commission trots out Lionel from Shortland Street in the guise of the Electoral Commission’s orange man. I cannot believe we are still using an advertising and marketing campaign more than a decade old. It is clear it is not resonating with young New Zealanders, as we see with the absolutely massive decline in the last 30 years.

Personally, I strongly believe we need to move to lower the voting age. Last week we saw the Children’s Commissioner, Judge Andrew Becroft, come strongly out in support. Even The Economist magazine has come out strongly in support of lowering the voting age. I support the idea that people can learn about their democratic responsibilities at school and then vote with their peers at school. All the data shows that if someone votes the first time, they are subsequently much more likely to vote in succeeding elections. I want to see people being able to vote with their peers at school, and then continuing to vote.

Lastly, we need to clean up our electoral system. The big issue the Government has avoided is removing the unfair, disenfranchising coat-tailing clause. What we see is a Government, through its pleasure, propping up two zombie parties, the ACT Party and United Future. These parties exist only at the Government’s pleasure. The Government sends the message very clearly, through cups of tea and other things, to vote for these parties, and why does it do it? It does it for an electoral advantage. It is trying to screw the scrum, and despite the absolute—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

I rise to make a small contribution in respect of this bill. I have to stand up, firstly, and address Mr Bishop—through you, Mr Assistant Speaker—because the only people in New Zealand who do not understand what the concept of fairness is are Tories. That guy got up and wanted the House to sort of explain to him—he did not quite understand what the notion of fairness was. He is not a bad bloke, but I have got to say it does not surprise me, given his political allegiance and given his political history, that after many years in the National Party, he does not understand what the concept of fairness is.

I say to him that he may well want to go out and seek advice from others. There are plenty of colleagues on this side of the House who could elucidate and provide a definition, but you do not need to get out the Oxford English Dictionary or pretend that it is sort of a Rotarians debate or that you are back at school in the debating club to work out what fairness is.

Fairness in respect of this bill—fairness in respect of this bill—would be to allow people to enrol to vote on election day, if you believe it is fair that you want to maximise the ability of the populace to participate in the democratic process. If you believe that you want those 27,000-plus people who voted at the last election but were disallowed from participating—not because they were fraudulent but simply because they had not enrolled—then there is a definition, Mr Bishop, of fairness. If, though, like the Government, which has never explained its position—it has never explained what the difference is between allowing people to enrol 24 hours prior to polling day, and allowing them to enrol right up to and including polling day, where, after they have enrolled and after they have voted, if they have done something nefarious or they have acted in a fraudulent way or they cannot prove their identity, which would be nigh impossible in New Zealand, you could then of course disallow their vote in the normal way. The National Party in Government has never explained why it will not allow this.

I think I may be right that, going back quite a few years—I think it may have been in the 1970s—for some particular reason, we had to enrol some days, a week, or I think, at some point, possibly a month before the election. Then a Government, of whichever party, got a bit smarter and said “OK, this is nuts. We actually want to encourage participation.”, and it grew and grew, to the day before. The question the National Government has never answered—and a member might take a call and do it today—is why it will not acquiesce and allow people to maximise their position to vote in the process.

Well, I think there is an answer to that, because there is a sector of society that the National members—perhaps those who, like Mr Bishop, do not understand the concept of fairness. It is that sort of quartile in the polls that, you know, he is trying to attract. Of course, those members want to attract only certain folk to the polls, to vote for them—to vote for them. And, yes, I concede, it is harder to get working folks out on polling day because, actually, most of them are working. It is harder to motivate some individuals. So I would have thought it was incumbent on every member of this House to make it as easy as possible for people to exercise their democratic right. Even if that means they might vote against my party, they should still have the right to do that, and we should not put any barrier in their way, as long as they act legitimately.

So I ask Mr Bishop, Mr Muller, or Mr Mark Mitchell, the “Three Amigos” up the back there, which is quite an interesting sight—a Minister and two backbenchers. I do not know whether the plot is on, whether the numbers are being done, or whether commiseration is being handed out to somebody, somewhere or other. We waited with bated breath to find that out. But I just say to Mr Bishop that the definition of fairness is giving people a fair go, and giving them every opportunity in this case to participate in the process. That is fair.

Whether you are the blue party, the red party, or whatever party, encouraging your opponents in terms of voters and your supporters, and anybody else, to get out there—I actually, personally, favour a compulsory vote, like the Australians have, because I think people should stump up. We look at the plaques around the wall here. Men and women died in order to give people the ability to vote in our democracy. Many folks around the world do not have that privilege, and I personally would favour a compulsory vote.

But the definition of fairness is to not put barriers in people’s way so that only a few—those who have the Range Rover, shall we say, and can drive themselves the polls—are motivated to vote. So I look forward, if there is a speech left, to having somebody in the National Government telling us and giving us the definition of what they believe fairness is, to help Mr Bishop out.

I rise to take a short call on these two cognate bills. Well, there really is not anything more attractive than watching Clayton Cosgrove and listening to him wax lyrical about fairness—Clayton Cosgrove, of all people over on that side. And he got it wrong, because, actually, Chris Bishop’s comment related to fairness in respect of broadcasting allocations. Somehow he managed to take it down a different path, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. He is not a bad bugger himself.

I would like to talk just a little bit about this move away from the compulsion to have opening and closing addresses on television. I had an experience a long time ago—21 years ago, in fact; in 1996—up on the ninth floor, sitting around there with Prime Minister Jim Bolger. We were about to see the opening of the campaign in 1996. We had this fantastic video, and we watched it, and it was just extraordinary. He was looking statesmanlike. I think our campaign line was “First Tick National”, which has gone down in the annals of great political campaign lines. So we watched that, and then we followed Helen Clark looking particularly austere and determined, and all a bit negative. And of course, then there was Winston, with his wavy hair, and talking I think, from memory, about superannuation and immigration—21 years ago. I thought it was a very, very impressive series of political advertisements. I walked from that office and talked to friends of mine, and said: “Did you see it—did you see it?”. They looked at me blankly—they had not looked at it. This was 21 years ago, and I realised that, actually, no one really tunes in to those electoral ads.

So it is very, very good to see that finally we have adjusted the Broadcasting Act to reflect the reality, as so many of our speakers have said today, of New Zealand civil society, really, in terms of the way they engage with their media. Certainly, sitting in front of television at 7 o’clock at night, watching our professional PR promotions, certainly does not cut it any more. Building in the flexibility to be able to talk in our own language to New Zealanders, in the language of their lives, and in the medium that they are most comfortable with, is appropriate. These are indeed the sorts of changes that a sensible Government—with, by the sound of it, borderline reluctant support from an Opposition being dragged, kicking, into the 21st century—has finally got across the line. I think it is good. It is good direction, and I strongly support these bills. Thank you.

Before I call Louisa Wall, I did not interrupt the member, but I just want to counsel him that one of the expressions he used I think is probably not to be encouraged.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. It is my pleasure to take a call on this third reading of the Broadcasting (Election Programmes and Election Advertising) Amendment Bill and the Electoral Amendment Bill, as a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee, which heard submissions on these two pieces of legislation. What I want to highlight is that, as a member of that select committee, we were able to receive the Electoral Commission’s 2014 report, and, in fact, our own select committee report highlighted two priorities, the first of which is that legislative reform must promote and encourage voter participation and, secondly, that we need to find more ways to meet the changing needs and expectations of voters and communities.

This legislation implements 12 of 28 recommendations in the select committee report. I know my colleague Denis O’Rourke has highlighted that it is not ideal, but the justification from the Government for not implementing more of those recommendations is that it had no time to implement those recommendations before the 2017 general election, but there was a commitment that it would enact legislation to ensure that the recommendations were applicable for the 2020 general election. I want to put that on the record, because colleagues on the select committee were very clear that if we had the time we would have implemented all 28 recommendations, but we were not able to do so.

I would like to take the opportunity to highlight a few aspects of this legislation, the first of which I find really interesting. I have been talking to my colleague Poto Williams about this. One of the changes in the legislation is going to ensure that there is transparency in submissions related to proposed electoral boundary changes. I find that incredibly fascinating, because what that means is that we will be treating submissions like we do submissions to this House, and they will go up on the website. People will be able to see who submitted a submission to the Electoral Commission about proposed boundary changes that they will implement after the 2018 census.

So it got me thinking about the relevance of the 2018 census, because what that does, amongst other things, is also anticipate how many general and Māori seats we will have. I also want to highlight that within that process, those particular seats are capped in the South Island at 16. So it does have relevance, because if our population is increasing by hundreds of thousands of people every year, I am going to be really interested in that process, to know whether those people have settled in the South Island or not, because the number of people who live in the South Island, divided by 16, becomes the size of our electorates. So I think it is an incredibly interesting thing to note. Also, since the introduction of MMP, where in 1996 we had 55 list MPs, in fact, in 2014, we had 50. So this particular change, which will ensure that people who make submissions to boundary changes—which is where my conversation is providing the context to that particular submission process—is, I find, incredibly important.

One of the recommendations that has not been taken up that fits into this particular discussion is that the Māori electoral option is run in conjunction with the census. So every 5 years, if you are a Māori, descendant of a Māori, or identify as Māori in Aotearoa you get to choose whether you go on the Māori roll or whether you go on the general roll. One of the recommendations from our select committee—in fact, to again go back to our priorities to increase voter participation—is to enable Māori to choose every election cycle. So, in fact, we would be able to choose every 3 years, between elections, whether we want to stay on the Māori roll, whether we want to go on the general roll, or, if we are a first-time enrolee, obviously which roll we want to go on. It would be relevant to the 2020 election. That is one of the commitments that the select committee and the Government agreed to, which is why I think it is important to highlight it.

There has been much made about the broadcasting of the party political broadcasts on the public platform, which traditionally has happened both on TV and on radio. I want to particularly highlight a submission from Tom Frewen, who thought that we all should think seriously about what we have done with that public broadcasting platform—essentially, we have translated that into an amount of money. That money is $3.605 million, and, rather than use that as a requirement for an opening and closing statement delivered on the public platform, which reinforces our public broadcasting service, what we have done is actually commodified that amount of money, which will be allocated to political parties at the next general election, and said to them that they can spend it as they choose.

I would like to highlight it because I think Tom Frewen had an incredibly valuable point, and that point was: what is the purpose and point of a public broadcaster and those party political broadcasts—opening and closing addresses—off a public platform? That purpose, actually, was to ensure that every home in New Zealand engaged in the political process and understood who the leaders of the political parties were, what their messages were, and why, actually, people should participate, which is at the heart of this entire reform. Whether that can happen through other modes—that is, Facebook or email or other platforms—is yet to be seen, because I think that will be interesting, in terms of the inquiry that will happen after this 2017 general election.

What I forgot to mention too is that we do have a serious issue in terms of voter turnout. In 2011 it was 69.57 percent. In 2014 it was 72.14 percent, and, obviously, our ultimate goal, I think, would be to get to 100 percent, but that is not realistic when we currently have an enrolment rate of 93 percent. The aspiration is 95 percent. I think anything over 80 percent today would be absolutely fantastic. So we do have to engage with particular cohorts, and I do want to highlight that I think the Children’s Commissioner’s current proposition of allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to enrol and vote—to enable 16-year-olds to participate—is really focused on the statistics around youth participation. There is approximately 68 percent of the 18 to 24-year-old cohort who are enrolled. There are about 450,000 people in that age group.

We have 150,000 young people who are not engaged in the political process. The Children’s Commissioner’s proposition would add another 150,000 young people, who would be able to enrol at school. So I think his proposition has merit, because the reality of the research that I have seen is that if we can get young people enrolled when they are eligible and if they vote from the first time that they can vote, they actually vote for life. But if they do not engage and vote when they are eligible, then some of them never vote at all.

So I think that the Children’s Commissioner’s proposition needs to be fully assessed and discussed, because at the last general election only 62 percent of the 68 percent who were enrolled actually voted. So 150,000 are not enrolled, and there is another 114,000 who did not vote. It is a serious erosion of our democratic process if our young people are choosing, for whatever reason, not to engage, not to vote. I think it is a big issue that this House should be incredibly concerned about.

The other issue that I would like to highlight really quickly is that we will be able to start counting votes from 9 a.m. on election day. These are all the early votes. In 2011, 14 percent voted early. In 2014, 34 percent voted early. The Electoral Commission is anticipating that in 2017, 50 percent of voters who are enrolled will vote early. So being able to start counting from 9 a.m. is actually going to produce faster results. I will not say better results, but faster results. Obviously, in terms of the integrity in the system, people who have chosen to participate want to know those results, as do the candidates, as soon as possible.

It has been very interesting being on this select committee. This is an area that I am incredibly passionate about. I too commend the bill to the House. Thank you.