Local Electoral Matters Bill

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Continuing this third reading debate on the Local Electoral Matters Bill, on this side of the House—just to reiterate for those who might value the reminder of where we had got to previously when the House was sitting—on the National Party side of the House, we do support the bill. We note that the Justice Committee has examined it and made some recommendations, and its recommendation that the bill be passed is subject, I suppose, to those being taken into account and finding their way into the proposed legislation. Those changes are, indeed, in front of us, so I will look at those briefly, but also I’d like to make note of the fact, for the record, that National has reserved its position to the extent of highlighting some reservations about the possibility that the legislation might be employed, and just to sound a note of caution about some of the innovations that are inherent in the processes that are being brought forward, so as better to protect the security and integrity of the voting process.

First, though, I’d like to focus on what seems to me a very positive aspect of the bill, which is the allowing of partial trials of new voting methods, and, alongside that, the innovation to allow local authorities, which almost inevitably would be councils, but I suppose, too, potentially, without having sat on the select committee at this point—

Chlöe Swarbrick: DHBs.

—district health boards and other local bodies—and I’m being given some assistance across the House, for which I’m grateful, as always—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Local government’s awesome!

—but not that grateful, so I’ll continue on.

The ability for date of birth information to be provided from the database of electors by such local authorities as defined in such collaborative fashion a moment ago, and also just to clarify what use that can be put to—so to allow, in other words, researchers to be supplied with that date of birth information and age group information. You might well ask what the point of that is, what the problem is that would be solved by doing so. Well, the problem would be that of under-participation in our democracy by voters in local government elections in general, but in particular those of particular voting groups by age and, more specifically still, those in the younger age brackets. So whereas there’s a general principle of information privacy and security, that information should be used or provided on a need-to-know basis, I think we can safely say that there is a need to know in the wider context not just of voting in a particular election but to understand the extent to which young people are engaged in our democracy. That is an important thing in itself if we are to take seriously the idea that democracy is the rule of the people, and “people” includes those who are old enough to vote but young enough that, historically and traditionally, they have not done so in great numbers.

To touch on the National Party view, as promised, in relation to some of the additional tools, which we’ve called useful, in the select committee report, in that section where we’ve expressed that view, we’ve highlighted the evidence that has been provided around the desirability of having paper ballots that are filled out on paper, notwithstanding that they can be transmitted by electronic means, for example—I suppose by email, but certainly over the internet—the key point being that to ensure maximum protection, essentially, of the citizens’ right to be able to vote in a way that will be recorded accurately, the vote should be cast on paper and to avoid the possibility of problems, whether innocent, but nonetheless significant, or, of course, in a way that might reflect a practice that we could refer to as hacking or similar. Of course, we note the recent experience of the census, which in fact is still ongoing. We’ve referred to it sort of almost in the past tense in that section of the report, but it remains a problem for us. While that’s a slightly different matter from electronic voting, nevertheless there are, potentially, parallels which we are anxious to avoid.

On that note, I’ll bring to a close my contribution in this, the third reading, and look forward to hearing the other contributions and, no doubt, the passage of the bill very shortly.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is my duty this evening to rise and support, and to continue the support that New Zealand First has lent towards, the passage of the Local Electoral Matters Bill. I want to compliment the Justice Committee for the work that it’s done on the bill and in particular the chairman, Raymond Huo, and Ginny Anderson, the Hon Maggie Barry, Chris Bishop, Mark Mitchell, Greg O’Connor, the Hon Nick Smith, and Dr Duncan Webb all participated.

I’ve got to say that the previous speaker who just sat down before me, Chris Penk, whilst not being on the committee, clearly understands the bill very well, so I have to congratulate him for the content of his speech. It actually does beg the question as to how much repetition we want to endure this evening, because the bill is quite a simple bill. It has clearly got unanimous support of the House, as I see it today. The statement, the intent, of the bill has been very clearly defined by previous speakers; I’m not going to rotary hoe that same paddock again.

What I would do is point out—and I think, sometimes, some recognition needs to be given to the Opposition when they raise their concerns. I note with interest, having read the select committee report and read the National Party’s minority view—I think, actually, they raised some valid points in their minority view. I note that the bill provides a mechanism by which local government, territorial authorities, might experiment or trial other voting methods, and the bill specifically allows those councils, should they decide to do so, to select a subset of a council, maybe a ward, to trial it. The observation made by the select committee that the consultation process prior to going ahead needs to be complete, I think is a valid observation.

The observations made that we should not necessarily believe or accept that online voting in itself will increase voter turnout—I look at this bill, and if you look at the intent of the bill, what it does, to me and New Zealand First, it strives its best to enhance democracy and to enhance the level of voter participation. We all know from having listened to the second reading speeches and the third reading speeches that preceded mine that there has been a lot of discussion around how we get New Zealand citizens to participate in local body elections. One of the things that’s pointed out in the select committee report is that very often, in council elections—and I think the example the select committee chose to highlight was Wellington itself—what we are seeing increasingly is local government elections being cluttered by other elections of other bodies, be it health boards or liquor licensing bodies as well, which in itself creates a bit of a mammoth task for electors to wade their way through these booklets. I’ve never seen the Auckland one, but I shudder to think what it might look like. It’s like a volume. The Hon Maggie Barry’s just indicating to me that it looks like I could use it to reach the high shelves in the gallery, being as vertically challenged as I am—it might be helpful.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: I’m with you, brother.

Thank you, the Hon Michael Woodhouse. We share a common affliction. But when one listens to voters, the most often heard comment is “How do I decide amongst all of these candidates, across the range of local bodies that we’re required to vote in? How do I pick these people? I don’t even know them.” That probably explains why, if you’re a very high-profile New Zealand sportsperson or, you know, a former politician from central government, one has a very high chance of being elected, because name recognition is high. It does not necessarily mean to say that one is the best qualified for the appointment or best suited. I have a high degree of empathy with voters who say to me that local government elections are just too cluttered.

Now, there has been the discussion around going to online voting, but I think the Opposition in its minority view is quite correct to point out that that may not necessarily generate the results or fulfil the expectations that we have. It also does, rightfully, raise the question about the integrity of online voting, and one only has to watch the international news and see some of the discussion that’s going on in other jurisdictions as to the fears that people have about their elections being interdicted by outside elements through the internet and through digital means. So I think when the Opposition raise those questions, they’re quite right to do so.

I myself have never been a great believer that online voting’s going to generate the massive change that people would like to see. Maybe I would like to see that one small council might choose to actually return to the polling booth and create a day of significance like the general election, where everybody gets up, gets out, and goes and casts their vote physically and makes a meaningful decision. I guess making the day a day of significance actually does encourage people. I’ve looked at, as a mayor and a person who’s been elected mayor twice and fought how many campaigns, I can’t remember, for central government and for Parliament—[Interruption]—quite a few.

I do know that people who cast their vote at local government elections through the post office box get that book. They put it off to one side. It presents them with such a daunting task that they say, “Well, I’ll do that later.”, and they put it aside. They put it aside, and then the day has come and it’s gone, and it’s too late and they haven’t cast their vote. Then we sit there and ask ourselves why it is we only get a 48 percent turnout in some territorial authorities.

One of the things I’m quite proud of, being a person from the provinces myself, is that generally—and I’m looking at the former president of Local Government New Zealand, Mr Lawrence Yule—in the provinces, turnouts in local government elections are very high in comparison to metropolitan New Zealand. Some might unkindly suggest that we do give a damn more than others, and we do value our right to exercise our vote in local government. So I’m hopeful that this new mechanism that gives councils the opportunity to experiment, to trial different voting mechanisms, might well mean they choose to go back to that strange old thing called a polling booth, on a particular day where everybody understands the significance and gets themselves up and goes and casts their vote physically—but I might be asking too much.

I think the bill is a useful addition. It addresses a number of issues that the select committee has debated well and recorded their view on. Whether it’s the context for changes to enabling local authorities to access the age cohort and the Māori descent information, whether it’s the methodology around trialling different election systems, it all adds and enhances democracy as I see it, and let’s just see how it rolls out on the next day. I’m actually waiting to hear which is the first territorial authority that’s going to give it a crack, so to speak, and trial a different mechanism. New Zealand First supports this bill and recommends it to the House.

On the scale of small and minor amendment bills, this one really does take the cake. I think the House needs to be aware of exactly what this bill does. The current law provides for local authorities to be able to trial novel voting methods, including internet or online voting. All this bill does is say that rather than a council being able to trial it over all of their community, they’ll be able to trial it in a single ward—that’s it. That’s about as much as this bill does. Yes, it does make some very minor changes to the Electoral Act and to the Local Electoral Act to allow the sharing of data about participation rates.

Now, if anybody in this Parliament really believes that this very minor tinkering with the Local Electoral Act is somehow going to deliver on a big change in voter participation, they really are off in dreamland. In fact, this bill is so symptomatic of the gulf between this Government’s promise and what it’s actually done in practice. If you look up the Labour local government policy at the last election, they said that introducing electronic voting was a piece of cake and they were going to be doing it for the 2019 local body elections. I would love Labour members to say whether that’s still their policy. Are we going to be having online voting at the local body elections later this year? No. All we’ve got is this very, very minor bill.

Now, National, in its report, has pointed out—and I actually think, as is so often the case around issues of competency, when National raised at the select committee the international evidence around the issues of online voting and the importance of the integrity of the vote, Labour members got cold feet. I think they actually recognised, once again, that National was right: in terms of online voting, the risks of being able to hack the system or pervert our democratic system are such that it needs a significant amount of caution. The National minority view makes reference to the National Academy of Sciences’ very comprehensive international report on the risks of online voting. I would just draw those to the attention of the House because they, effectively, contradict what Labour promised at the last election, and this bill is a minnow of what Labour promised in this area of policy.

National members are very relaxed about passing this super-minor bill, but I emphasise again that anybody who thinks this bill is going to result in a turn-around in the participation of local government elections, which once was about 80 percent—at the last local body elections, in 2016, it was down at about 45 percent. The idea that that negative trend is going to be reversed by this bill is truly in dreamland. You’re going to need something far more substantial and some of the far more innovative policies that National’s working on to address these issues. This bill is fundamentally an embarrassment for the Government in the area of local government policy.

E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. It’s a pleasure to rise after one Hon Nick Smith—perhaps the longest speech that I’ve ever heard on a relatively minor bill. This Act—sorry, this piece of legislation, this proposed bill—is relatively straightforward, as has been stated by Nick Smith and a number of other speakers. It amends two pieces of legislation: the Local Electoral Act 2001 and the Electoral Act 1993. I also just want to echo the sentiments that were raised by Ron Mark around the fact that province turnout on local body elections is typically higher than it is in metropolitan or urban areas, and that definitely is the case.

The figure just raised by the Hon Nick Smith of around 45 percent in the local body elections in 2016, that being the average across the entirety of New Zealand—I myself was a candidate in the 2016 local body elections in Auckland, where we only managed just shy of a 40 percent turnout. I would, however—

💬 Hon Maggie Barry: One four?

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —say that—it was just shy of 40 percent. But I would, however, say that we did manage to reverse a trend of decline. In the 2013 local body election, the voter turnout was 34.7 percent, and, if I may say, that is one of the many reasons that I decided to throw my hat into the ring.

What I have discovered, in talking about how this piece of legislation is definitely not going to solve all of the problems when it comes to people being engaged in local government, is it’s the case that people have to be engaged in their local communities. I think that that goes to the heart of what was being put forward by Ron Mark around the fact that in provinces, we typically have more tighter-knit communities—people are less likely to move around as much as they do in urban or city areas. It’s also the case that in urban areas, we typically have greater transience, so it’s the case that people don’t have the same postbox on a three-yearly cycle. When I was a candidate, I found myself having to help a number of people trying to enrol and trying to cast a vote.

I would also state that what the stats show, and the evidence from overseas, is that whilst introducing online voting does actually provide a bump in voter participation in the year that it is introduced, that actually goes back down to normal levels subsequent to that, meaning that that increase can be associated to, perhaps, something akin to novelty, but you actually don’t solve the fundamental problems of local democracy or people’s enfranchisement in local democracy, which I believe was the point that Nick Smith was attempting to get at.

So the Green Party is quite happy to be supporting this piece of legislation because, at the end of the day, voting should never be a difficult thing, but what we currently have through the postal voting period for local body elections is, indeed, a little bit of an arduous process, particularly for my generation, many of whom I’ve had conversations with throughout their experiences in local body elections and they haven’t known where to locate a postbox, but also to the point around those young people’s transience, in particular. But notably, of course, this is not going to solve those fundamental issues, and those fundamental issues will only be resolved when people start to feel a sense of connection to that local democracy and start to feel as though their vote matters or can have an impact.

So on that point, for anybody listening, whether they happen to be in this House or at home, please do enrol in your local body elections and make sure that you’re out there not just voting but also ensuring that you’re campaigning for something. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for a candidate, but it can be for a cause. With all of that said, the Green Party is incredibly proud to be supporting this piece of legislation.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to speak with pleasure at the third reading of the Local Electoral Matters Bill, or, as it has been rechristened, the “Super Minor Bill”—oh, what might have been. It is an omnibus bill, and it covers a bit of ground and makes a few tweaks here and there in some of the electoral Acts.

We support the bill, of course, but we remain very sceptical about the points that, particularly, Chlöe Swarbrick, the speaker who has just resumed her seat, made about the ability to encourage young people or, just generally, anybody to vote, really. I mean, the numbers of people voting in local government elections is truly tanking, and we do need to do something about that because grassroots democracy is important. If you have an 80 percent turnout for local body elections and then, I think Dr Smith said, about 15 years later it was down to less than half of that—you know, we have to do something to interest them. Rarely—very rarely—I find myself in agreement with the Hon Ron Mark, but I would have to say that the bewildering array of names of unknown people to vote for in the Auckland area has been daunting, and people have said to me, “Who are these people? Why should we care?” You’ve got electricity boards and a plethora of unknowns who seem to be pulling quite good—

💬 Chris Bishop: They may be saying, “Who is Ron Mark?”

Ah, no—only in Carterton, they would not have to ask that question. In Auckland, they might have to ask the question, but maybe people are daunted by that. You have to do a certain amount, though—a little bit of effort at least, I think—in the interests of democracy.

I do find myself astonished that—what are we—one year and one week out from the census that wasn’t, we are looking at an online experiment that failed woefully. I think that for electoral boundary issues and for giving us peace of mind, really, around electoral reform, we need to understand that the system online is not the silver bullet that people think it will be, and if it fails, it’s the putting right that counts—to get Alan Martin into the picture here. L V Martin and Son, your Fisher & Paykel dealer—

💬 Lawrence Yule: L V Martin and Son—beautiful. I remember it.

We’re of an age, Lawrence Yule, where we know that sort of thing.

💬 Chris Bishop: I remember—that’s right.

Even Chris Bishop, probably through some new nostalgia movement, has heard about it.

💬 Chris Bishop: Ron remembers him.

Yeah, yeah—I think there’s a few of us in this House who will remember that one. But, I mean, if something does go wrong, you need to really be able to address it pretty swiftly, and I think that failing to count one in 10 New Zealanders—Statistics New Zealand to this day remains a bit tight-lipped about why these results have been so long delayed, so it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? That was touted as being the big proof and something that would be easily achievable, and it was not.

So at a local government level, I wonder what the fallout would be if you had local body elections online and something went wrong. How much of a setback would that be to the online—

💬 Chris Bishop: Imagine if Ron Mark got elected.

Well, if there are old ballot papers in the Carterton area, for example, and Ron Mark’s name was there, or if people thought it was—if there was a man in a big, tall hat standing in the area—perhaps he might find himself with greatness thrust upon him, and the mayoralty of Carterton would await him again.

💬 Chris Bishop: Back again.

Back again—the third time lucky. But, putting aside the levity of this, I think that fundamental public confidence is what we need in our electoral system, and inertia, the name recognition factor—all of these things don’t work terrifically well when you’re trying to encourage people to see the relevance and the point of costing your vote for one person over another.

Of course, it’s very easy once you get to Government elections because we’re all so colourful and interesting and we’re personalities who are well-known, etc. So the voter turnout does tend to be a bit higher, but we can’t take anything for granted, and I think that one of these days, online voting will be something that we can have trust and confidence in, but I’m not sure that I have trust and confidence in what this minor “Super Minor Bill” is doing to encourage people and to reform local electoral matters. But, having said that, I commend the bill to the House.

This is a split call—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Well, I’m really not quite sure where the National Party are on this one, because on the one hand they say “We’re not going far enough. It’s too small.”, and on the other hand they’re saying, “Don’t do it at all because we don’t have confidence in the system.” It does seem to me that the National Party wouldn’t try anything with that kind of attitude, because we know—and we’ve heard the Hon Maggie Barry just say that she sees in the future that online voting will be a thing.

Well, I’ve got an idea: let’s adopt this bill because we can test it. We can find a test group, we can find a test location, and we can run it, and that’s exactly what this bill allows us to do. It allows us to actually find a cohort of people and see what two things are—the best way to run online or electronic voting—and also to look at the statistics of those people and see where the greatest uptake of online voting is so that we’ve got some better design principles going forward.

So this is the kind of legislation that we absolutely need to increase participation in a very, very important area of local body politics. At the moment, we have a participation issue. People are disengaged, and this is one way in which to say, “Here it is. It’s right in front of you. You don’t need to leave your home. You don’t have to go through what”—frankly, for some people—“is an unfamiliar process of going through lots of paper forms.” It’s time for voting—and for the National Party—to move into the 21st century, where online voting and online behaviour is the norm.

Now, we know what the statistics are. We know that there’s work to be done in this area, but we are not shying away from it. So that’s why this is a good piece of legislation and a well-designed piece of legislation with appropriate safeguards there and an ability to run an appropriate test. We can learn from it, and then let’s roll it out. Let’s get wider participation in our local body elections so that we can have better democracy everywhere for everyone. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

Chris Bishop—five minutes.

Well, that was a passionate speech by Dr Webb for what’s fundamentally quite a boring bill. I’ve got to say—I want to go on the record and say I am a deep online voting sceptic and I have to say I find the passion with which people who express support for online voting slightly strange.

Firstly, I think this idea that online voting will be the cure-all for our democratic defects in local democracy misunderstands the problem entirely. The reason people do not vote is not that it’s particularly difficult—it’s very easy to vote in local body elections; you simply fill out a piece of paper and chuck it in the mail—the reason they don’t vote is local body politicians don’t do enough to encourage them to get out to vote. They’ve got a three-week period—or 2½ weeks, three weeks—in which they can vote. Lots of people don’t vote, and, frankly, people who stand for local bodies need to do a better job of encouraging people to actually vote.

Secondly, I have to say anyone who has studied the issue of online voting is extremely worried about the safety and the security of online voting. Dr Webb didn’t have the advantage of being on the Justice Committee in the last Parliament—Justice and Electoral Committee as it then was—but I did and we conducted an inquiry into the 2014 general election and we had a number of submissions in relation to online voting. And I’ve got to say it is frightening—frightening—how easy it is to hack some of the systems that are used. I’m not saying that nefarious people out there are going to hack, you know, the Onslow-Western ward of the Wellington City Council if they decide to go forward with this online voting trial like the bill provides—although you know, given the quality of the candidates in their ward, maybe they will. But I’m not saying people will be doing that, but, you know, it is actually incredibly easy to hack online voting systems and I think that is a danger to our democracy.

And the third thing is online voting, I believe, trivialises democracy. Once it is as easy to vote in a local body election or, God forbid, a general election, when it is as easy as, you know, liking something on Facebook or participating in an online Facebook poll or a Twitter poll or all of the silly things that people who spend too much time on social media get up to, I think that will trivialise what actually is a fundamentally important part of the type of society we live in. And I think there will be a trivialisation of local democracy with online voting. I understand the desire to make it as easy as possible but I think there are serious safety concerns. I think it will trivialise the process and I think it misdiagnoses the problem.

With all that being said, the National Party is supportive of this legislation. We are deeply sceptical. I’m not the only one deeply sceptical about it. I know many of my colleagues on this side of the House are deeply sceptical about online voting. But let’s have a trial. You know, if it works in, you know, the Onehunga ward of the Auckland Council, well, maybe we’ll have a go later on, but I doubt it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and look, it’s a pleasure to speak on anything to do with local government and I want to just support the Minister of Local Government here for this fantastic bit of work. There have been a lot of negative nasty words said about this but I know in reality it’s just a whole lot of flip-flopping. One minute, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it, literally.”, and then in 2016 the online trial was pulled. Then there’s some debate on that side of the Houses as to “Is this good? I think it is. I don’t know.”—a lot of blah and suddenly they’re all in support again. So there’s no intention in this bill to flip-flop; it’s pretty clear.

And I just want to correct something too because it talks about—and if you look at the bill, in two parts, thanks to the hard-working Justice Committee for their fast-moving work on this—it talks about giving explicit provisions for local authorities, councils to conduct trials of new voting methods, so it doesn’t actually just say “online”. And I think we’ve been obsessed with that and there is some obsession with this online stuff when really, if you look at the intention of the bill, it wants improved participation.

We know it’s not the silver bullet. We know that in the urban centres getting anything more than around 40 percent is difficult—it’s been acknowledged; the history shows us that. But I think it’s more about saying that we know postal voting—for those that understand that and you know with only 40 percent, that’s four out of 10 people in this room voted—meant filling out a form that arrived in your letterbox, finding a letterbox or a post office, one that was open, to actually post it back, and then wait for the result. And what this really says is “Look, let’s try something different. Let’s try new things.” and that’s really the intention and I think anyone who criticises that is really undermining democracy here because—

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh!

Thank you, “Mr Hutt South”. But what we’re really looking at here is permission, is giving those local authorities that represent local views a localised way of implementing an improved democracy for their local area. Look how many times I said “local” then; so many times I’ve lost count. And that’s the essence of this bill.

I also think that local authorities have asked for better information and in Part 2 it certainly talks about that in terms of those local authorities who want to make or produce a better effort at promoting their elections because it will sit with the councils now to do that task. They will now be able to get their information to do that.

I think this is a lot more far reaching. It may not be as super-duper as what some want, but I know that in terms of legislation every little bit counts and this is going to ensure improved civic participation. I want to thank the Minister for that. I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.

I rise to speak on this, the third reading, of the Local Electoral Matters Bill. Let me start by saying that local elections do matter. If we needed any better evidence of that then we would look to Wellington and the debacle we are currently experiencing with our buses; where every day dozens of buses are cancelled, or late, or overcrowded because of the poor governance provided by our regional council. So that’s why it’s very important that people vote at local elections—isn’t it, Paul? I’m sure you would agree, Mr Eagle, the member for Rongotai, that people should look very carefully at who they vote for at local election time.

So National rises to support this bill because, essentially, we’re a constructive party, and we want to see good things happening. But let’s be careful about the claims that are made for this bill because the previous speaker claimed that to have any queries about this bill was to stand against democracy itself. I think that that’s a rather large claim, because the concerns that we have with online voting are valid. You only need look at the census debacle we’ve all witnessed recently to know that going online doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. In fact, there is the potential to disenfranchise large numbers of people. So it’s appropriate that this bill includes consultation mechanisms to make sure that anyone wanting to move to an online voting scheme has to consult appropriately. And also I would argue it’s a good step that the change can be trialled in a smaller way so that if there is any debacle it’s less widespread than it might have been across a city.

But I think, really, other speakers have done a good job of talking about what this bill does, but I just also want to talk about what this bill doesn’t do. I think it is very instructive about this Government and its agenda that we are here tonight debating the Local Electoral Matters Bill, which allows us to trial online voting in a ward rather than across a district, a very minor change to electoral law, when, in fact, this country faces major challenges and major opportunities and this legislation goes nowhere near any of those. This is a very minor bill and speaks to that Government’s lack of agenda. National is constructive. We support it, but, my goodness me, we hope to see some more interesting legislation in the future and more constructive legislation in the future. Thank you.

It gives me pleasure to draw a close to this long debate. It seems to be a matter that’s been round some time.

💬 Chris Bishop: This’ll be pretty terrible.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Order! The member Chris Bishop, go back to your seat. The member will stand, withdraw, and apologise. He knows very well members do not walk around the Chamber interjecting.

💬 Chris Bishop: I withdraw and apologise, Mr Assistant Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

As this debate draws to a close I can’t help but draw a cynical smile at the efforts of the previous speaker who, of course, is following along the steps of the perennially outraged Dr Smith in being outraged by the local transport system, which seems to be giving her something of a pedestal, so, as a result, should be, in fact, very much in favour of local bodies. When, in fact, it was the peak-top model introduced by the previous Government that must—

💬 Chris Bishop: What are you doing? Being a lazy member.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Order! Order! Chris Bishop, do not bring me into the debate. When you use the personal pronoun “you” you are bringing the Speaker into the debate.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, on the third attempt to get some common sense into this debate.

I think we all, as MPs, have quite a bit of contact in our electorates with member-based organisations, most of which have democratic processes to elect. It would be a rare organisation in our electorates that doesn’t lament the apathy of the members when it comes to electoral time. And, of course, that apathy tends to extend to the local body elections. We’ve had many speakers talking here tonight on apathy that 2016 resulted in a 42 per cent turnout in local body elections, the highest actually 52 percent, and again in the perennially outraged Dr Nick Smith’s Nelson.

But I actually have another interpretation of that. What I’ve found, as someone who was in charge of a member-based organisation, is that actually apathy is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that—we’ve only got to see what happens when members are outraged. We’ve had some discussion earlier on about Wellington with the local transport. I think we’ll probably find this year that there will be a somewhat higher turnout in this election in Wellington, simply because of the matters that have been raised previously.

So I think introducing another method—and often when we as elected members go back, we’re told that, “Well, you haven’t really got a mandate because so many people turned out; it’s such a small turnout.” whatever place we are. Actually, what it does do, by ensuring we do introduce another electoral method, albeit in local bodies this year—what we’re actually doing is testing that method. So, again, we’re ensuring that those who may be apathetic—may be, actually, quite happy with the system that they are operating in—can actually, when they do complain, when they come forward and say, “Look, we couldn’t. We wanted to participate.”—actually, you did have another chance. You had the opportunity to take part in the postal ballot. You had the opportunity to take part in electronic voting.

So, actually, this is another opportunity to test the, I suppose, apathy, or test, actually, the willingness to participate, which is a slightly different thing, in the democratic process. It is a relatively minor change, but what it does is, again, allow us to just ensure that those who will later on object, those later on who’ll test and challenge the democratic process—they have now another method by which they can vote.

So going back to my premise, I believe that, actually, as long as we provide the systems to vote, if people choose not to take them, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What is more important is they have the opportunities. I don’t think this will necessarily result in a huge voter turnout, but what it does do is just provide that further opportunity, and, if you like, refuse an excuse for people not to vote. So I commend this bill to this House.

Bill read a third time.