Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Just to recap on this bill, the big question is: do criminal offenders—indeed should they—have the right to vote? On this side of the House we say no way. On the other side of the House they say yes, but there is a little caveat. Now, this particular topic—looking back in Hansard and the history books of this Parliament—has been debated since the 1970s. Indeed, the National MP in the last John Key - Bill English National-led Government Paul Quinn—he proposed the change and indeed it went through and now we find ourselves back debating this very important topic now. Now, this bill received something like 2,500 submissions, and it meant that because the Government’s got their foot on the throttle, they see that they may indeed need these 1,900 votes that they might get—or potentially may not get.

💬 Hon Andrew Little: 78 percent in favour.

I hear Mr Little chiming in from the back. He’s obviously woken up and he’s very passionate about screwing electoral law reform to satisfy the election result. We don’t think that’s fair. And I’ll tell the Minister of Justice why we don’t think it’s fair.

Why does this particular piece of legislation have to be rushed through? Why does it have to be rushed through, Mr Little?

💬 Hon Andrew Little: There’s Mr 22 percent right there.

Mr Little can’t answer a decent question. We know he has a habit of not doing that and getting fired up. That was a straightforward question. And the next question to the Minister is: why did the Justice Committee have to meet through COVID lockdown with all these Zoom sessions? Why? Why the urgency?

💬 Hon Andrew Little: It wasn’t a day off. Everybody else worked. Every other MP worked.

Well—it wasn’t a day off. Well, he should go and say that to the thousand people a day that are joining the dole queue. Yeah, well, they’re now staring down the barrel of actually hanging out for the Government to create jobs. Now, is this particular bill going to create jobs? No, this is not going to create jobs. What this is going to mean is that 1,900 prisoners will be given the ability to vote in this general election. We don’t think that’s fair when you think about the fact that these are serious offenders. What about the victims in all of this? They are lost and forgotten. This gives criminals the right to vote when we think they should be serving their time and they have had their freedoms taken away from them—and one of those is voting. We think—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

It’s a shame that the Opposition continue to play politics for the sake of politics, because they know that this is the right thing to do. The Supreme Court and the Waitangi Tribunal have said that it was an outlandish mistake that the Opposition made in 2010 revoking the rights of those prisoners that would be released during that particular term to determine who would govern them. So therefore it is with great pride—and I acknowledge the Minister of Justice, Andrew Little, for his work—that I can commend this bill to the House.