Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill

Members, we now have two amendments in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith relating to the distortion of proportionality. These will be debated together, but with the question put separately.

The amendment in my name providing for a definition of this distortion of the proportionality of Parliament really cuts to the heart of whether this bill truly is, as the Government says, all about protecting the proportionality of Parliament, or whether that’s just a crock and a cover for Winston Peters wanting the power to fire his MPs. It’s a real test. It’s a real test as to all of those speeches that you’ve heard from the justice Minister, Andrew Little, that this legislation is about protecting the proportionality of Parliament—is what it’s all about.

I’ll tell you what it says. It says that, of course, the distortions that occur in the pure proportionality of Parliament from MPs switching parties has been, over the history of MMP this century, a fraction of that of MPs exiting under the six-month rule, MPs exiting and causing a by-election, or, for that matter, for the threshold rule or, for that matter, for the top-up provision that’s provided for in the legislation.

So what we’re saying is that we need to be clear that if we are going to be sacking members of Parliament on the basis that they are distorting the proportionality of Parliament, then it needs to be to a significant degree. It needs to be more than those other things. How can the Minister of Justice and Government members, who are saying that we’ve got to make these extraordinary changes that breach the Bill of Rights, that affect the freedom of MPs’ speech—how can you do those things on the basis that “Oh, we’re doing this to protect the proportionality of Parliament. Oh, but let’s ignore the six-month rule”—that means that for 15 percent of a term of Parliament, the Parliament is distorted—“or, for that matter, the threshold rule.”

The National Party was very pleased at the last election to secure 44.5 percent of the vote, but we actually have a distorted proportion. We’ve actually got 45.8 percent of the seats in the Parliament—that’s a distortion. If the members opposite want to be consistent and say “Actually, we believe absolutely in proportionality.”, then, actually, National should not have 45.8 percent of the seats in the House. The justice Minister in the chair has a chuckle. Well, that’s a difference of about 1.3 percent. When a member of Parliament changes party, like Jim Anderton or Brendan Horan, that’s only an effect of 0.8 percent, and, what’s more, it happens every single Parliament. It’s not just a one-off; it’s every one of the last six Parliaments. Here are the numbers—and I’m an engineer and I do maths. Here are the numbers: this century, the degree to which there has been a distortion from the proportionality of Parliament has been eight times greater with the threshold rule, five times greater with the by-election rule, and four times greater with the six-month rule than what it has been for the issue of MPs changing party. Isn’t that interesting? It’s a lot more significant from those three factors

So I say to the Minister in the chair and I say to members opposite: if this bill is really about protecting the proportionality of Parliament as determined by the election, why have you got this huge blind spot on those other provisions that do distort proportionality? You know what the honest answer is? This has got nothing to do with proportionality. This has got everything to do with the all-powerful Winston Peters wanting powers to be able to fire MPs, of which he has a long history of falling out with since he established the New Zealand First Party, and the Labour Party members are prepared to sell their souls simply to be able to grab the power at the last election.

So I do invite members to support this amendment that provides some definition around the distortion of the representation of Parliament. What my amendment does is it says that in defining that, it has to be greater than those other factors. It has to be significant. It has to be more than just some little, tiny percent that the Government has acknowledged is off and distorted for those other provisions. Without that, then we can only conclude that it’s nothing to do with the proportionality of Parliament.

I just wanted, at this early stage, to respond to a couple of things that the Hon Dr Nick Smith has just said there. He is right that there are other aspects of the current legislation that do cause distortion. The one seat-rule is one of those things, and, arguably, the threshold set at 5 percent rather than, for example, at 4 percent—as recommended by the royal commission—has the potential for a distorting effect.

I suppose why I’m stunned by that contribution by Nick Smith is because his party, when in Government, had the opportunity to change that. They actually had a report that recommended that they make that change, and they would not do it. Here’s the argument they used. They said: “But we can’t get the agreement of all parties in Parliament.” Do you know, actually, what that was? Do you know the one party that didn’t agree? Them—they wouldn’t agree. So their argument was “We can’t possibly change this because we need the agreement of all parties in Parliament. Oh, by the way, we don’t agree.”—that was their argument.

That is how hideous that party is when it comes to constitutional and electoral principle. It is outrageous that Dr Nick Smith should stand up and say that just now, but he has done. It is good to be able to correct, once again, the historical record just so we understand the kind of character of some of the people we are dealing with.

I want to make this point too, and that is to say this: I was also stunned at Dr Nick Smith’s representation of another factor that distorts proportionality of party representation. That is—although he didn’t use the words—the wasted vote. We know there are parties that stand perennially—or, at least, every election—who have no chance, ever, of getting elected, but they might get, you know, 0.01 percent of the vote share, and between them, they can get 2 or 3 percent, or sometimes 4 percent. Sometimes there is a huge wasted vote. The poor old Conservative Party of New Zealand in the 2014 election—they got over 4 percent; not quite 5 percent. What a wasted vote. The Opportunities Party had a go. Gareth Morgan had a go—2.5 percent or whatever it was—but ultimately the vote was wasted.

So while Nick Smith is technically correct in the kind of engineer’s sense that Parliament isn’t fully proportionally represented, because there is this thing called the wasted vote. That’s what happens when you have a threshold and you have some parties that don’t make the threshold. It is called the wasted vote. Now, unless Dr Nick Smith is suggesting that we start ruling out parties—a bit like we see in countries in other parts of the world where there are committees that decide whether or not particular parties can stand or not. Maybe that’s what he’s proposing—I don’t know—but that’s not the system that we’ve got. We do allow all-comers to come and offer themselves, to see if they can get a share of the vote. Maybe they can get 5 percent on a good day. There have been all-comers that have tried this, and many have struggled to do it. But I suppose what it really highlights is that we are now very much into the “scraping the bottom of the barrel” territory when it comes to arguments from the National Party about this piece of legislation.

I go back to the point. This is a very simple piece of legislation. It doesn’t need further provisions requiring definitions of distortion or what it means to act in a distorted proportionality. We don’t need that because the principle is very simple. This is about affirming that principle under our current Electoral Act that once the electorate has voted and we’ve established the proportionality of representation in this Parliament—taking into account the wasted vote, taking into account all those other things—then it is not for individual members to undermine that proportional representation by flitting off and doing other things for whatever reason.

The one thing that, of course, will remain in all of that when politicians act, when parties act, when party leaders act, and when caucuses act is that people will make political judgments, bearing in mind the political dynamics of the day. There are shifts of mood and shifts of support in things amongst the electorate. People will kind of work within that, and that will determine what happens. There is every possibility that an MP will go off and set up another party while in Parliament, join another party, and nothing will happen because that’s the political judgment of the day. It suits everybody to do so.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I was actually quite surprised that you allowed Minister Andrew Little to get away with some aspects of that call, because he wandered so far away from the meaning of the word “distorted”.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! That’s my job, not yours. Thank you.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: As long as you’re consistent.

OK, I take that reprimand—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Dr Nick Smith, the interjection on my ruling—the Chair is always consistent, or tries to be, and in his contribution and the Minister’s contribution they did go fairly beyond both the proposed amendments. I, in consideration of the member’s long service to this House, did give him some latitude, but for the rest of the contributions to this part of the debate, it’s very narrow on the distortion to the proportionality of this part of the Act and the bill, and I will ask members to stick to those.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. The Minister in the chair has, on several of the clauses and amendments that I have moved, chosen to have a pretty wide-ranging debate so he can have a few flicks at me. I’m a big boy and I can take that—no problem at all. But what you cannot then do is say to my parliamentary colleagues that they can only talk very narrowly over the clause. So what National members of the House ask is that we don’t mind what the rules are and we will comply with them, but we do ask that they be applied consistently. If it is good enough for the Minister to raise quite extraneous matters about all sorts of comments which are not particularly relevant just to have a go at me, I’m sorry, but that same right should be available for members of the Opposition.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): That was my very point, but you can be assured that I will apply the rules consistently.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Thank you for that explanation, and I apologise to you for any inappropriate comment that I may have made before. But can I just check: is it permissible now for me to respond directly to some of the comments that the Hon Andrew Little made in his previous contribution—that would be acceptable?

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): As long as it’s within the new clause 3A.

Well, the Minister in the chair suggested that we had had, as an example of distortion, the findings of a previous MMP review. He made some extraordinary claims, and the reason I want to refer to them is that at the time of that review I was the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee. What I recall was that the Minister of Justice at the time was the Hon Judith Collins and she did her level best to consult right around the Parliament, after the review had been conducted around the country, to see whether there could be consensus formed on some essential questions that had been raised in the review. After doing that work, she produced a table which showed that some parties agreed with this but others didn’t. Some parties felt that way but others didn’t, and, therefore, where it was not possible to find consensus, she published that material and showed that it was not possible to go forward.

So the reason I put this on the record is that Mr Little has just tried to rewrite history by suggesting that somehow there was unanimity of view over a whole lot of these aspects. Well, there was not, and that is a matter of public record. It’s documented. It’s out there in the public domain. I could, if necessary, find the information that the Minister put out at the time, but I just wanted to clarify that.

Let me come back to what I think is at the heart of this particular amendment—which I strongly support—and could I make the point that times and circumstances change. That may be fairly self-evident, but I think in the nature of this particular discussion it’s important to put it on the record. Let’s take, for example, the fact that there’s a general election and a particular minor party goes to that election with strong support for what we might call three-strikes legislation. They feel very strongly about this and they come through the election, and let’s say they might have nine MPs in the Parliament at the end of it. But then they find themselves in a coalition arrangement with another party, which is the major party of the Government, and another minor party that’s outside Parliament. This is all hypothetical, of course, but those two other parties might not agree with their position.

So the point I’m making here is: what happens next? It is my contention that it’s very difficult to make a cast-iron promise in an MMP election, because no party in the 22 years that we’ve had MMP has been able to form an outright majority and, therefore, been able to come into the Parliament and enact every aspect of the policies on which they were elected. That very fact distorts an aspect of the proportionality of Parliament, because it’s in the nature of MMP Government that there have to be trade-offs. I do hope that the Hon Mrs Martin won’t take objection to the word “trade-off”—

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: No, that’s perfectly fine, Mr Macindoe. Trade-offs are fine.

Oh, I can hear a chirp, but I can’t actually hear what she’s saying. It is absolutely in the nature of MMP politics that there will have to be compromises. There is give and take, and therefore that distorts the outcome of an election. So for the Minister to be suggesting that here we have a provision that is in some way objectionable—that Dr Nick Smith’s amendment somehow is unacceptable—seems to me to fly in the face of reality.

Should a party be absolutely bound by every aspect of its manifesto, regardless of whether they can attract the support of their fellow members of Parliament—because the reality is they’re not going to be able to do so—and should we hang them out to dry for that failure? Should we hang the Green Party out to dry for the fact that they came into this Parliament clearly opposed to any waka-jumping legislation? All of their records, all of their public statements on that, have shown over many, many years that that’s their position, and yet they’re now distorting the proportionality of Parliament by completely ignoring that, by failing to take any calls tonight to justify their position, and by letting down their supporters, who I know are deeply hurt by what they’re doing. Here we have this ridiculous position where the Government is trying to oppose the amendment of the Minister—[Time expired]

Members, before I call the Hon David Bennett, I’d just like to draw to your attention that there is now a third amendment on this topic, in the name of the Hon David Bennett, which is also in order. It is also, as I said, part of this topic and, therefore, part of this debate.

Thank you, Mr Chair. My copy of my amendment is with you as well, so bear with me as I take it from memory. Essentially, what I wanted to do was to follow up on a question I’ve asked the Minister a number of times, and he has refused to answer when he has stood up and spoken in this committee. Just 10 minutes ago, he spoke in this committee and did not answer this question—that is, how that proportionality will work out in regards to constituent MPs against list MPs. He’s been very cute in not replying to that after many requests in this committee.

I go back to the very example he used in the earlier parts of the debate, when we talked about a by-election result. His words were that it is the “expression of the will of the electorate”. So he is very happy for the “expression of the will of the electorate” to mean that there can be a change in the dimensions of this House through a by-election, but, at the same time, he will not take that to the full extent when it comes to list MPs, and believes that list MPs aren’t subject to that rule.

You can’t have it both ways in this Parliament. I request that the Minister explain why he is devaluing list MPs, and he is—he is continuing to do that. I know that he’s a list MP himself and I know he feels this Parliament hasn’t been just to him over the years, and that’s not our fault. There’s many other list MPs on the other side of the House who will feel unjustly treated through their political careers as well, but that is just the nature of being a list MP, which is no different in this House from being a constituent MP.

His very words this afternoon were that if a member won a by-election, there would be no problem with the proportionality change in the House—if New Zealand First, for example, picked up another member and the New Zealand National Party lost a member because of the proportionality change from losing a by-election. “No problem with that at all.”, he said in this committee. But if there is any change in list membership because a member of a party disagrees with their leader, then, no, that cannot happen. That disproportionality cannot occur, in the Minister’s view. I request that he explain that to this committee: how he can have two points of view in regard to the different MPs when, under our system, every MP is exactly the same, every MP has the same vote.

I request that the Green Party take time tonight to look into their soul, because the Green Party—

💬 Hon Tim Macindoe: They’ve sold it.

The Green Party has sold it. But I request that the Green Party look at these amendments and look at this bill, and have one more go at it. This is not necessarily for the Green Party to think about tonight. What I said in my last speech is very true. This is the tip of the iceberg for the Green Party in relationship to the other parties in this House. This is the end of the green movement. We’ve seen that in political polls around the world. Around the world, the green movement is being shut out as the two major parties tend towards more green policies. The green movement needs to show that they have a reason for people to vote for them, and there will be no reason for them to be voted in in the future if the Green Party doesn’t stand up to people like Winston Peters, and doesn’t stand up for principles, and doesn’t stand up for the values that they believe in.

Every time the Green Party bends over and lets Winston Peters run the roost in this House, the Green Party loses more votes and more votes and more votes. I don’t want to see the Parliament without a Green Party in it.

I’m sorry to interrupt the member, but it has come time for me to report progress.

House resumed.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 9.55 p.m.