Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2)

It is not unusual in debates of this type for people to stand up and suggest all sorts of other names for a bill, suggesting they might be adopted by the committee as more appropriate to describe the bill. I don’t think that’s necessary in this case. It is an amendment, albeit that these amendments are somewhat minor and probably missed the point of what is most in front of the public at the present time. But what does strike us as a little strange is the bill coming into effect—it’s unclear: does it come into effect with the Royal assent, with these other parts delayed until 1 January or 1 April? So it says, “this Act, except sections 15 and 16, comes into force on 1 January 2020”, so that’s when the assent is given to it. The assent is given before that, but it’s effective from that date. I take it that’s the—thank you for the nod from the Minister.

Well, that gives quite a few days, potentially, for people to round up anonymous donations. Now, I stand here as part of a party that declares those donations. Most parties in here do; one, apparently, doesn’t. It just seems odd that Cabinet decided to allow—given that this bill will probably pass today, 3 December—some 27 days or so, perhaps 25 days when we take out statutories, three weeks, to go out and round up a swag of anonymous donations and to load them into the kitty. Now, you know, the Minister’s got a very interesting look on his face. I don’t know that he wouldn’t have thought about this, but it seems to me that that is odd. So we would like to know the reason for that gap. The Governor-General is in New Zealand; it would be possible to have this bill signed this afternoon, in fact. Even if the Clerk says, well, they want a couple of days to tidy it up, it’s not unusual for bills to go up in their rough state to get the assent, particularly bills that are done under urgency. So it has to be a public question that should be answered: why has there been urgency afforded to give effect to the lowering of the threshold for anonymous donations, when, in fact, there is a three-week—at least—window where those anonymous donations can go through under the current arrangements?

The next bit’s unclear also. Why would you have clauses 15 and 16, which relate to the issue we were just talking of before, I believe it was the residency of the general secretary—I’ll stand corrected on that. But perhaps it would be a good idea for the Minister to briefly tell us why those two clauses, particularly, are left out. In here it’s the party secretary, and the meaning of the word “party secretary”. Why do we have to wait until April for those to become effective in the law? Is there a need for, perhaps, one of the Government parties to sort out its arrangements in the three and a half months that they’re going to have—nearly four months, actually, from this point—to reach the 1 April deadline? That’s somewhat inexplicable. If there is a simple explanation, then I think it would be useful for the Minister to give that explanation to the committee.

The next part of this, of course, is to agree that this bill amends the Electoral Act 1993. Well, I think it would be inappropriate for us to all agree to vote for this—bar one—and then not to agree to this part. But it would be interesting to hear from the Minister what his intentions are for the wider consideration of the Electoral Act. Will this bill before the House today, under urgency, be the last Electoral Amendment Bill prior to the 2020 election? That is a pretty crucial point in my view.

So there are three things. Could we know, from the Minister, why there’s this three-week gap where there seems to be a moratorium on compliance with the new law, that will be passed today, for the receipt of anonymous donations? Why do we have to wait until 1 April for there to be compliance on the residential impost on whoever is secretary of the party? And, finally, what’s the process from here?

I thank the member Gerry Brownlee for that contribution. Look, the commencement is as you would expect, because particularly in relation to the obligations on party general secretaries, it allows time for both the Electoral Commission to prepare any guidance on the application of the new provisions but also on party general secretaries to ensure that they have systems and processes in place ready to go. They may well have to get some endorsement from their respective governing boards, which they might have to do in a reasonably hasty period of time at a busy time of the year. Look, if there are members who think that between now and 31 December they can hustle around and cobble together some foreign donations compliant with the current law, fill their boots, I suppose—but I doubt whether that’s going to be practically possible.

The next question was about the 1 April residential requirement. Again, that is just a reasonable time for both the residential requirement and the advertising requirement. In the event there are arrangements in place where a party doesn’t comply with those things or there is advertising booked that has not yet had a promoted statement put on it, there is time to rectify that to get through the busy Christmas and New Year period in a reasonable time to get various houses in order.

The final question was: what is the process from here? There is one other piece of legislation that commenced before, the Electoral Amendment Bill—(No 1)—which has already started. It’s working its way through the process. That is the one that creates a better chance for more people to cast their vote—particularly, for example, the 19,000 on election day in 2017 who turned up to a ballot booth, weren’t on the roll, and could not enrol. So those changes are still making their way through the House, subject to, obviously, the dictates of this House. I reasonably expect that bill to be passed in the early part of next year so that by the time we get to the election—and certainly the regulated period—all rules applying to next year’s election will be known and understood, the information out there, parties fully compliant, candidates fully compliant, and we will have a very happy 2020 general election.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to pick up on a couple of those themes as originally raised by my colleague the Hon Gerry Brownlee, and which the Minister of Justice, Andrew Little, has touched on as well, just looking at the date on which most of the Act will come into force being 1 January. With respect, I’m not sure that I heard a good answer in relation to the immediate effect, essentially, that the Act could come into force with. I don’t think that anything that is needed to be arranged by way of special arrangement needs to take as long as all the way into the New Year. So a mechanism might be something like “immediately come into force” or perhaps “two days after the time that the Act comes into force.”

But it also would have been available to the Minister to specify a particular calendar date. I mean, maybe some time in this month—it could even be tomorrow, whatever tomorrow might be. I’m just looking around for a calendar. Well, actually, that’s interesting—the calendar says 3 December, but in the real world it’s 4 December, because we’re still in urgency. So I guess we could say 5 December would be perhaps the day it would come in. Ordinarily, of course, you wouldn’t take the risk of putting a particular calendar date, because you don’t know when a bit of legislation’s going to pass, except that when you put the House into urgency to go through all stages—even in the circumstance where, almost exactly to the minute, it’s 24 hours since the Opposition first became aware of the bill—then you do have the luxury of knowing the point at which it will be passed.

So it is that I would suggest to the Minister that even at this late stage it’s not too late. If we’re going to do the urgent thing, we might as well really do it properly, and let’s be as urgent as possible about it, if that seems to be the mood of the House overall, even if not on this side in terms of the extremeness of the urgency. Well, having passed it and having bypassed the ability ourselves to sort of cut ourselves off at the knees in terms of having a reasonable process for the scrutiny of the thing, then we might as well have it applying as soon as reasonably possible—which I would suggest is tomorrow.

Mr Brownlee makes a good point about the availability of the Governor-General to sign things into law. I can confirm—having worked in the viceregal household, admittedly a couple of Governors-General ago—these things can be pretty easily managed, particularly if the aide-de-camp is so efficient at taking faxes off hotel reception, as at least one was in the distant past.

So, anyway, that’s as to date regarding all the exceptions except for sections 15 and 16, but as for those two, I suppose that it’s possible that certain arrangements have to be made in relation to the party secretary living in New Zealand. But nearly four months seems pretty generous for that, and I don’t know what sorts of arrangements need to be made; a sort of pretty grand way of saying that you’ve got to sort of live here or you don’t. I suppose a board might be expected to re-designate someone else or sort of appoint someone. But four months to do that in the context of something that’s supposedly so urgent that we can’t take more than 24 hours to consider it from start to finish does seem pretty luxurious or at least not in keeping with the extent of urgency which we’ve seen passing the substantive parts of it.

As for the Facebook ads, well, I sort of do take the point that it might be that a little bit of lag time is needed for advertising that’s already booked and locked in. But, really, nearly four months to allow an advertising campaign to run through—I’m pretty confident that there will be a lot more political issues that we can criticise the Government about between now and 1 April. We’ll be rebooking ads, no doubt, and for New Zealanders too who want to be participating in the electoral process, and the Government as well, to be fair, you know, they’ll have their own particular issues that they want to promote. I expect that there probably won’t be a lot of ads that are still running then that are running now that can have this sort of no man’s land of being unaddressed and unnamed with the true name, as the legislation says.

So I wonder if we could sort of have a bit of a shorter period on that one, maybe encourage people to unbook the ads if they’re offensive—or, actually, really, just simply add a name and address, because that’s the only requirement that’s changing, that’s the only sort of operative bit within the legislation to bring it in line. I won’t go back into that detail because we’ve talked about the fact that it will bring into line the online world with the non-online world, and that’s sort of a worthwhile thing, but it shouldn’t take so long in an online environment, which, among its virtues, is so quick to react, and can be. So we would suggest that there’s no reason that that couldn’t come into force much sooner than 1 April 2020, seeing as we’re doing this thing with such indecent haste in the first place.

Clause 1 agreed to.

Clause 2 agreed to.

Clause 3 agreed to.

House resumed.

The Chairperson reported the Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2) without amendment.

Report adopted.

Third Reading