Electoral Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Electoral Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: I move, That the Electoral Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Effective democracy relies on well-run elections, and, after each election, we examine what’s working well and what can be improved, and many aspects of our electoral system are in good working order and have been for many, many years. There were some lessons learnt at the last election around some of the processes and the matters in terms of ensuring that votes were not missed, and mistakes were made, and a very thorough inquiry was made of all that. Some changes have been made to the way that the Electoral Commission operates, and I have great confidence in the refreshed board to do that.

One area that has been coming under particular strain has been the timeliness of the vote. It now takes a week longer to get the official results after an election than it did prior to 2020—it used to take two weeks; now it’s three weeks, and that’s an extra week of uncertainty for New Zealanders. It’s quite often the case in an MMP environment that coalition negotiations don’t start until after the final vote is confirmed, so that extends the period of uncertainty for New Zealanders. The advice that we’ve received from the Electoral Commission was that if we continued under the current arrangements where more and more people were having special votes, which take a lot longer to process, then that delay in the count would extend further.

That’s why the Government has decided to close enrolments 13 days before the election day, which is the day before early voting starts, which is clarified by this bill as 12 days before the election day. I’ve been aware of some debate about whether it would make a difference to the timeliness of the vote. I can tell the House that based on the commission’s latest forecasts, which were provided to the Justice Committee, if we didn’t have this new enrolment deadline, it’s highly likely that the count would take up to 23 days at the next election, which would mean there’s a chance of missing the legal deadline for the return of the writ, and so we’d be extending towards four weeks. That would continue to increase because of predictions of more and more special votes. That is why we’re intervening.

Voting is a right, but it’s also a responsibility, and it is part of the law and has been a law for a very long time that enrolling is compulsory in this country. New Zealanders are expected to enrol once they’re 18 and update those enrolments if they move house. What we’re suggesting is that they need to be enrolled 13 days before the election in order to reduce pressure on the vote.

The problem that we’d had was that one of the primary functions of the Electoral Commission is to ensure that people are enrolled to do what they are obliged to do legally. However, of course, changes had been made so that people could enrol on election day itself, by the previous Labour Government. Now, then, of course, it immediately means that the Electoral Commission is sending a mixed message; they’re saying, on the one hand, you need to enrol, but, on the other hand, they’re saying, “But by the way, you don’t need to bother because you can enrol when you turn up to vote.”, and more and more people were getting the second message, and we’d had many people enrolling on election day, having special votes, and taking longer to have the count.

Now, I’m sure there will be many, many speeches from the other side saying that the end of the world will occur and our democracy is at an end, and I just simply make the point that this is a reasonable expectation in democracy. If you live over in Australia, you need to be enrolled 26 days, on average, before the election, and democracy hasn’t collapsed over there. We’ve got more than a year for people to get enrolled. We’ve got every confidence that with a good, clear campaign, which the Electoral Commission is well funded to do, people will have every opportunity to get enrolled well before writ day, which is the goal. You want to be enrolled before writ day, and then you don’t have to have a special vote.

It’s not the only enrolment change that we’re making to speed up the count; we’re also making a concerted effort to turn the ship around and address the trends of later enrolments with more special votes. We’ll be able to allow the Electoral Commission to update addresses and details on the electoral rolls automatically and to begin processing special votes earlier where they can. It will remove unnecessary information from the electoral rolls to make it easier to keep them up to date and to allow people to be contacted digitally about their enrolment status.

Restoring real consequences for crime is also very important to this Government and the bill will ban sentenced prisoners from voting as well. Currently, if you’re in prison for three years, you lose the vote, and this bill extends that to all convicted prisoners. Following a recommendation from the Justice Committee, it will apply only to crimes committed after the commencement of this Act, and, over time, more sentenced prisoners will be captured by the ban. I intend to lodge an Amendment Paper to modify the related settings for people suspected or convicted of a criminal offence who are detained in a hospital or secure facility under mental health grounds instead of prison. The bill currently would allow all people in these circumstances to enrol and vote.

Hon Rachel Brooking: “Oh, you might not vote for National, so we’d better detain you and not let you vote”—that is terrible.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: If you were to listen, this Amendment Paper will retain the current settings—the current settings—where detained people will be disqualified from enrolling once they have been detained for more than three years. If members on the other side are very upset about that, that is the law that was in place when they were in Government, and that’s what we’re going to be retaining.

The bill also makes a wide range of other changes to make sure our electoral system is sustainable and up to date. Many of these changes were recommended by the Justice Committee, following its review of the 2023 election.

I’d like to thank those members of the public who took time to make their submissions to the Justice Committee. I also mentioned earlier that the committee has recommended amending the bill around prisoners sentenced to fewer than three years. The ban only applies to crimes committed after the bill commences. The change aims to resolve an inconsistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. All prisoners sentenced to three years or more remain disqualified, as they currently are under the Electoral Act.

The committee also made some recommendations to clarify and refine a few proposals in the bill. For example, voter disqualification has been extended to include 17-year-olds who may be provisionally enrolled. This change will ensure that they cannot be enrolled when they turn 18 if they are serving a prison sentence, but it will likewise ensure that they’ll be supported to enrol if they choose to do so when they’re released. And the committee also clarified how automatic enrolment updates would apply to people on the dormant roll and made changes to ensure a consistent and efficient application of the Māori electoral option for out-of-cycle local elections.

The committee also raised some matters it considers worth exploring in the future: whether it would be possible to expand automatic updates to include new enrolments, and, of course, there are some complications around that, given we have a general roll and a Māori roll, but that’s worth considering down the line.

We want to see a system that’s efficient and effective and continues to hold the trust of New Zealanders as a very important part of our functioning democracy. This bill moves us in the direction. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Out of all the unethical, shady, and dishonest things this Government has done, I think this one is possibly the worst. It is stopping people from voting in the next general election.

Democracy is the safeguard against power being concentrated in the hands of a few. Let me repeat that: democracy is important because it is the safeguard of being concentrated in the hands of a few—and that’s what this bill is actually doing. Democracy is the guarantee that Government remains accountable to the people it serves.

Christopher Luxon wants to stop people from enrolling early, during, or on election day; something that over 100,000 New Zealanders did in the last general election. We know, now, that when this legislation passes, voters will be refused access to the ballot box or have their votes disallowed because they did not appropriately update their enrolment details before voting commenced. This creates a very real risk that the legitimacy of our elections is undermined.

We know that it’s going to be a tight election, and clearly the Government do too, because they’re screwing the scrum to tilt the field in their direction and that’s not fair. We know from the Electoral Commission, that gave advice to the Justice Committee—and this is really important; the Electoral Commission told the Justice Committee that even with all the changes present in the bill, there will be no difference between the time it took to count the votes at the previous election and the time it will take in the next election. That is advice received from the Electoral Commission at the Justice Committee. That begs the question: why is this bill being passed now?

Let’s talk about who this is going to affect. It affects someone who’s just lost their job in the cuts that this Government has instigated and all the businesses that have gone under; someone who lost their job and has had to move home, it’ll affect them; someone who can’t afford the rent and has had to move and change their address and details, it’ll affect them; single parents; young people enrolling for the first time and being able to vote, it’ll affect them; Māori and Pasifika, we know, are disproportionately affected; and all of those people who are so focused on being able to earn enough money to afford food every week, it’ll affect those people too. The very people who have suffered the most at the hands of this bad Government’s bad decisions are the same people who are going to be hit again by being punished further and prevented from voting.

The Deputy Prime Minister of the Government has called these people “dropkicks”. He’s on the record as calling people who can’t enrol before the period required “dropkicks”. People who are surviving every single day under this Government just to pay the bills, to feed their children, and to get by in an environment where unemployment is high, where prices are soaring—they are absolutely compromised under this bill.

We will be looking into those communities, and we’ll be doing everything we can to mobilise that vote, because do you know what? When I speak to people out in my community, they are angry. They are damn angry that they have been hurt time and time again by this Government. When they learn that the very Government that has hurt them is now taking away their power to vote them out, that incites anger. We will be harnessing that anger in the upcoming election to vote out this Government and their unethical lawmaking.

We should be encouraging democracy more, strengthening our democracy by encouraging people to vote. Those young people, the first time they’re getting out, we should be making it easier and easier to instil good ethics in them about why democracy is important. The more votes we have, the more people engage in our democracy, the healthier our system is—not by handing it out to a few and stopping the rest from voting. We’ve, hopefully, moved on over the years to be more enlightened and to know these things, but this is such a step backwards into the dark ages to stop people having a voice, to stop people having their say. To somehow disguise it as efficiency is just absolutely ridiculous.

We are deeply concerned that many people will not be able to vote in the next election because of the bill being passed today. Politicians all have a role in our own communities to make it easier for people to vote, so they understand when the time starts and so they understand what to do. By introducing new rules, by saying, “13 days, if your details aren’t up to date, you’re not able to vote.”— trying to communicate that to all of those people before the election date is virtually impossible. When the Electoral Commission came before the Justice Committee and we asked those questions, we got confirmation that it will be an incredibly difficult task to communicate these changes ahead of the general election.

New Zealanders should not lose their right to vote just because they are late to enrol. That’s what this bill is doing. It is saying that if you don’t get in there and enrol, you lose your right to vote. My issue with that is: whose right is it to take away another person’s right to vote? That is a fundamental right that this bill should not be able to take away. This Government is far more concerned with administrative convenience than a free, fair, and accessible democracy, and that is a crying shame. The right to vote is absolutely fundamental and it is enshrined in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Every New Zealand citizen who is of age has that right to vote.

It is absolutely despicable for a Government to introduce a proposal which would take that right away from working Kiwis—from people in New Zealand who are doing it tough and doing the best they can to be having their right to vote taken away. The Government’s own Attorney-General has been very clear that the proposal for the 13-day registration appears to constitute an unjustified limit on section 12 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Their own Attorney-General has said this is compromising our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

The accepted starting point is the fundamental importance of the right to vote within a liberal democracy. We hear much from that side of the of the House about one person, one vote when we’re talking about the interface with indigenous rights—very strong with the one person, one vote ideology that’s basis is in liberal democratic thought, but not when it comes to all New Zealanders in every part of our country having the ability to go and vote and make that as easy as possible. That is being stifled, and it is suppressing democracy and that’s the truth of it.

We know that 91,000 New Zealanders registered to vote during the voting period at the last election and nearly 134,000 changed electoral districts during that same time frame. That amounts to 231,000 people who will be impacted by this change. That’s about 8 percent of the voting public at the last election. That is the real concern: that we have a Government who knows it’s going to be a tight election. We have a Government who’s changing the rules, who’s actually shifting the goalposts and tilting it in their favour. It is the very people that have been marginalised the most by their bad choices and their bad decisions that will be most severely impacted by this anti-democratic legislation. It is absolutely concerning that disenfranchising hard-working New Zealanders will only serve the big end of town, and they know it and that’s why they’re doing it.

The Government’s justification for this change, as we heard from the Minister who spoke earlier, is that it will increase the speed of results. But that does not justify the cost of disenfranchising potentially tens of thousands of New Zealanders. More to the point, as I’ve already stated, we’ve had the advice that it will not make a lick of difference in the speed of doing this.

What price do we put on our democracy? What is the price? Is it a day? Is it two days? Is it $1,000? Is it $2,000? What price do you put on having someone who’s turned 18, who hasn’t enrolled, turning up to the ballot box on election day, wanting to vote in their first general election, and being told by an Electoral Commission official that they are unable to vote because the law was changed by the Government and they are now unable to vote because their details weren’t up to date on time? Bureaucracy is preventing democracy and that’s what this bill is, sadly, doing.

I’m really interested to hear the lengthy debates we are sure to hear from that side of the House, justifying how they think it is right to take away someone’s right to vote, why they think that that’s a good thing to do, and how they think this is going to further New Zealand as a country and make us a stronger, more cohesive, profitable, and absolutely fantastic country in the future by showing some people in our community that they can’t vote.

I think this is a sad little bill. I will conclude on the same note that I started on: I believe that out of all the unethical, shady, and dishonest things that this Government has done, this is number one.

The Electoral Amendment Bill is an unapologetic, blatant attack on democracy. I would have thought that, in this House, one of our main jobs is to uphold democracy. When we are talking about democracy, what are we even talking about? We are talking about the power of people; that is what democracy is supposed to be. Not the power of a few people, but the power of the many. That is what we are supposed to be encouraging in this House, where we have a legitimate Government that has been elected by a fair representation of people and where we have done our job to encourage engagement rather than discourage engagement with our democratic processes. The only way to be legitimate and to be able to make the decisions that we do in this House every day is to have that consent. To have that consent means upholding everything that we possibly can across all of our systems to ensure, as my colleague the previous speaker, the Hon Ginny Andersen, just put on to the floor, that we are actually encouraging and celebrating every part of people turning up to have their say in select committees, and at the ballot box on voting days and voting periods.

At this time, voter cynicism or, if you like, people losing faith and trust in political processes, is at an absolute high, especially—especially—when they feel that they’re not being listened to. We have just had, for example, fast-track legislation where thousands of New Zealanders from around the country of all backgrounds and experiences and skills and whakapapa came into this House, put forward their heartfelt and highly skilled analysis and thoughts on what they think about regulatory standards laws and fast-track laws—overwhelming opposition to this Government’s bills and laws—and what did this Government do? It did not listen to them at all.

Because of various things, and there is such a long list of those sorts of examples, why would we expect—why would we expect?—to hold on to the encouragement of people feeling that they are part of this system? Right now, we should be doing everything we can to increase and improve engagement. This bill is about discouraging engagement. They are trying to put up a pretence and a guise that it is about improving the system. It’s nothing of the sort. There are other ways of improving the system, and the Electoral Commission and other agencies put forward those understandings and solutions; things like: how about properly resourcing the Electoral Commission to be able to do a better job, to be able to make voting more accessible across communities because there is not equity across communities? There has never been accessible equity across communities for voting; all sorts of barriers stand in the way. That’s what we should be doing. Instead, in this House, this bill is about making it harder to engage in the system.

Now, what happens when we are discouraging people from exercising their fundamental right? It undermines representative democracy. What the bill does, as we know—and two of the most important things that I wanted to pick up on—is it makes it harder for people to vote, by moving the enrolment deadline from election day to before advanced voting starts. We already know that that change in our law—I think it was in the last term of Government—actually saw a whole lot of people willing to participate and give legitimacy and consent to any Government of the day, to have their say and to be part of deciding what is governed in this place. Now we are going to lose a whole lot of people who thought that it was actually fair and as it should be to turn up and vote.

This Government can try all they like to pretend that they are trying to improve the system. They are not doing that; this is an unapologetic, blatant attack on some parts of communities—against voting. The evidence and the advice, the official advice, and the Electoral Commission and the Human Rights Commission have been very clear on who exactly that is going to impact on in a negative way—Māori and Asian people and Pasifika people and young people and people who rent, just as a starting point.

This Government is sending a very clear message to who it thinks matters when it comes to considering their views and opinions. But we already know this because, as I mentioned, we’ve already seen this Government completely override and disregard people’s submissions and people’s opinions and thoughts and expert skills on the matters that are passed by this Government. So its impacts—yes, they are about blocking certain people and communities from voting, but what it is really about is wanting to uphold an economic system that continues to privilege the already wealthy, continues to uphold an economic system that exploits people and our environment for corporate greed. That is what this is really about: privileging people who, more likely, will vote to uphold an economic system that wants to benefit the few. That is exactly—they know this; they have seen it around the world—what this bill is about. We heard that in their submission.

We heard from the agencies who seek to uphold democratic engagement and democratic integrity to not put these changes in place. And, yes, people in prison: this is a right, this is not a privilege, to vote. Everyone should be able to vote, including, yes, people in prison, full stop. The Greens are clear and strong-throated about this being a right for the people of New Zealand: to vote. Again—again—this is another blatant attempt to uphold an economic system and decisions that privilege the few. That is why they are putting this through.

Dr David Wilson: With rights come responsibilities. It’s simple.

Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON: The real solutions for encouraging—OK, let’s take on the “simple” bit. I did have that written down, this whole thing about “Oh, it’s simple, it’s easy.” This is quite typical from this Government, who want to pretend that we do not have inequity and oppressions in this country and that we haven’t had discrepancies and discriminations in this country for nearly 200 years, at least, and certainly around the world; whether it be people who struggle with stability, with stable housing, with employment, with health issues, with literacy issues, with losing faith and trust in the system.

How about people in prison? We’ve just seen a massive—massive—royal commission of inquiry be very clear that there are far too many people in prison who are victims of State abuse; now this Government wants to punish people again who have been victims of State abuse. Not only is it enough to have violence imposed on entire generations, largely representing Māori and Pasifika people, but, once again, this Government wants to remove their right to vote.

As we can see, the opposite side have—well, it’s not that they have no understanding of inequity, of dispossession, of who has power and who doesn’t; they totally understand it and that is why they are making these changes. I want us to be very clear about what the actual agenda and motivation is behind stopping more people from wanting to engage in legitimising any Government of the day.

Look, we’ve canvassed—but I’ll put on the Hansard record just for the sake of it—that the advice received by this Government, from its own agencies and from the expert agencies, all said this is dumb; this should not be what any Government should be doing.

Carl Bates: Where did they say that?

Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON: They’ve all said—OK, they’ve all inferred this in their advice, in their submissions, in their reports and analysis and research. They’ve said: “Don’t do this. Do not stop prisoners from voting. Do not stop people who have not yet registered from voting. This is bad. This is wrong.” This Government does not care about expert advice or research or evidence or the sentiment of its own country; that’s what this Government does not care about.

We are very clear: let’s make it 16. We should be encouraging young people to get the culture of voting earlier. Let’s make it 16. Let’s resource the Electoral Commission properly so that they can actually improve the systems. Let’s make sure that we’ve got civic education in our schools so that people know that they have a right to engage in the system from a very early age. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Epsom electorate, the ACT Party, and the Government in support of the Electoral Amendment Bill. I just want to break down the three things that we’ve heard in this debate so far from the Opposition. The first is that someone is going to have taken away their right to vote; the second is that the Government is doing this in a selfish or capricious way; and the third is that that will, somehow, disproportionately affect some New Zealanders more than others.

Well, let’s just break those down. Nobody’s right is being taken away, because there are rules you have to follow in order to vote. Any electoral system in the world requires people to follow rules before they can vote. One of the rules we have in New Zealand is that you must be enrolled, and, in fact, under the Electoral Act, it is a requirement if you’re over 18 to enrol, to vote continuously, and to keep your address updated. The simple fact is that people already have the obligation to do this.

The second argument that is being made is that, somehow, the Government is acting capriciously or selfishly. It’s only three years ago that many of the people on that side of the House making speeches today unilaterally—without support from the Opposition—passed a law that would require the disclosure of donations at a much different threshold than had been done previously, to, effectively, dox people who supported a party but didn’t want to be publicly revealed for doing so. When it was revealed that that change would disproportionately affect the parties that they were about to campaign against, did they say, “Oh, we’re sorry, this is being done through venal motivations.”? No, they did not. They said, “It’s all about transparency.” Well, they can’t have it both ways.

Finally, they say that this change is going to disproportionately affect some voters more than others—that, somehow, some voters are not capable of doing the very simple task of going to the Electoral Commission website or going to one of the many kiosks the Electoral Commission sets up, and making sure that their electoral details are up to date so that they can live in a democracy and have a benefit from that. That is strange that these people actually tell us that their own voters are incapable of carrying out a procedure that is simpler than ordering a pizza, and yet—

Hon Mark Mitchell: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I just want to make the point that this side of the House has been listening respectfully to the speeches from the other side. Anyone at home trying to listen to that speech at the moment will not be able to hear it.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Point taken. Just to note that interjections do need to be rare, infrequent, and short, so if I could ask members not to indulge in sustained barraging, that would support the House, and it would be appreciated.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Thank you, Mr Speaker, and can I add there’s another condition: that they shouldn’t only be rare and short but, preferably, witty. So there’s a number of ways that they’re failing.

Thank you for the member’s intervention, but, frankly, there’s a bigger question at play here. Democracy comes from the words “demos” and “kratos” in Greek: “people power”. There’s an assumption that, somehow, the people don’t have any obligations to show up and make sure they are enrolled. They’ve got three years to do it; they should have done it already, according to the current law. The people don’t have the power to make sure they are enrolled, but, somehow, they’re going to be responsible citizens and cast thoughtful and informed votes to make our democracy work. If you think about it for just a second, that does not wash, but maybe it’s a poor reflection on the voters of the people who are barracking on the other side. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House.

Francisco Hernandez: Four minutes!

Oh, you want me to do more than four minutes, do you, Green Party? OK. Look, what a load of made-up histrionics that we have heard from the Opposition. They’re telling us that we are trying to stop people voting. As the Hon David Seymour has just said, it is an obligation—a legal obligation—to enrol to vote if you are over 18, which means that what they’re saying is that all these people are actually breaking the law if they’re not enrolled.

Ricardo Menéndez March: It’s not a legal obligation.

ANDY FOSTER: Well, that’s, effectively, what it is. It says it’s a legal obligation, so they’re breaking the law if they’re not enrolled or not registered. What do we get over months and months and months before we actually get to an election? We are reminded of the election coming up. We’re sent a document which says, “Are you in the right place? Is this your right name? Is this the job you’ve got?”, and you have the opportunity to send that back and say, “No, correct these details.”—that’s fine; that’s great. But you get that reminder a long, long time in advance before the election, so there are plenty of opportunities to do that.

Secondly, if you are 17, you’re able to register to vote. Now, it doesn’t mean you can vote, but what it means is that the moment you turn 18, then you’ll get put on the roll, so it’s easy to do that.

But what have we become? We seem to have become a “just in time”—we know we’ve got a bit of a “just in time” economy; now it’s “just in time” voting. So what are we seeing? We’re seeing that in 2026, the Electoral Commission has said, according to the work that was done by the select committee, 776,000 people, they’re expecting, will be casting special votes. In 2029, they expect that to go up to 905,000 if we don’t make any changes, and it’ll be over a million in 2032.

Now, given that we had only 2.8 million people choose to vote in 2023, we’re getting now to over a third of the people choosing to vote. What’s going to happen on election day is we’re going to end up in the situation of going, “We don’t actually know what the result is.”—we don’t actually know what the result is. That is not terribly helpful. If people have to enrol early to vote on time, at least we’ve got a better chance of knowing what the result is going to be.

Now, I ask you, if you were looking at a sports match—just think about the All Blacks. We get to full time and we say, “Well, here’s the score at the moment. We still don’t know who’s won because we’ve got a whole lot of special points to count.” That’s, effectively, what we’ve got. Think about some of the mayoral elections that have been held recently. On election day, you’re saying, “We don’t actually know what the result is. It’s moderately close. We don’t know what the result is. You’re provisionally the person that’s won it, but a few days down the track, maybe you’re not the person that’s won it.” We’re seeing that time and time again. That is not a good way of running any system.

The advice we’re getting is that we are actually wrecking our own electoral system by allowing so many people to, effectively, enrol on the day, and that is slowing the whole process up. One of the things we want to get out of our electoral system is we want to get a result on the day so that we can actually get on with knowing who our Government is and forming a Government so we can actually get on and do the business of governing, because we’ve only got a three-year term. I think that’s really, really important.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about is another change that has been recommended here. It is the issue around treating and making sure that we are clearer about treating. I noticed that, on this side of the House, nothing’s been said about that. Of course, in the Manurewa Marae—at the previous election, not your one—we had a real issue with that. We had a real issue with that. There were some issues there which, if you looked through what happened, clearly you were having people who have been fed, watered, encouraged within 30 metres of the polling booth, and now what this is saying quite clearly is that is not good. We want to make sure that it’s a further distance.

I just want to read you something here which was on the marae’s Facebook at the time: “Come on down to the marae āpōpō”—tomorrow—“for our rangatahi activation, a packed, full day of magic and greatness. We have hip-hop classes, karaoke, and much more. Our voting station is also open for our whānau over 14 who need to vote. Happening tomorrow, Tuesday, 3 October from 10 till 4 at our marae—hāngī, coffee, ice cream, hot doughnuts, and haircuts. Share with your whānau and come on down. #ManurewaMarae #rangatahi #voting.” That is wrong, and what this bill is about doing also is about fixing that to make sure that we don’t have that again because what we know, for all the other things in the voting system, is that buying votes is unacceptable and that’s, effectively, what this bill is in part fixing. I commend this bill to the House.

E te Mana Whakawā, tēnā koe. I rise on behalf of Te Pāti Māori to vehemently oppose the Electoral Amendment Bill. This bill is a blatant attack on the democratic rights of tangata whenua. It strikes at the heart of who gets to participate, whose voices are heard, and whose futures are shaped in this country.

Since this bill was announced, hundreds of Māori have already been deregistered or removed from the Māori roll. If the Government cannot even run a reliable enrolment system, it has no mandate to overhaul the electoral rules. To push ahead anyway is irresponsible and dangerous. Make no mistake: this is voter suppression. Even the Attorney-General, Judith Collins, has warned that these changes breach fundamental constitutional rights and could disenfranchise more than 100,000 people. That is not an accident; that is a choice, and we know exactly who will bear the brunt: rangatahi, Māori, Pasifika, and Asian communities—the communities that this Government consistently sidelines through all its policies; demographics who statistically do not vote for any of the parties in this coalition. This bill is designed to shrink the voices that challenge them.

This bill hands more power to corporations and lobbyists; by raising the donation disclosure threshold, the Government is inviting more dark money into our politics. It strengthens the hand of corporations, donors, and lobby groups—groups that have already shaped some of the most harmful decisions we’ve seen this term: fast-track approvals tied to political donors, the repeal of world-leading smoke-free policies after industry pressure, and tax rewards for landlords and property investors. This bill gives the wealthy an even bigger megaphone and pushes ordinary New Zealanders further into silence. This bill undermines the very integrity it claims to protect. If this Government truly cared about the integrity of the electoral system, they would be investigating the wrongful deregistration of voters. They would be removing barriers, not building new ones. They would be encouraging greater participation and not locking people out.

The Waitangi Tribunal, our courts, and the Independent Electoral Review have all recommended restoring the right of all prisoners to vote. The evidence is very clear and unanimous, yet this bill moves in the opposite direction. It creates another barrier between whānau and the ballot box. It limits Māori participation in the kāwanatanga space. It disproportionately harms rangatahi and Māori again.

This Government is weaponising democracy. This Government is targeting the people who are already being failed by its policies—and that is whānau who are struggling with the cost of living, workers juggling multiple jobs, and the growing number of Māori being swept into the justice system under tough-on-crime rhetoric: people who are less likely to support them; people they would rather see silenced.

When they removed Māori wards, dismantled co-governance, and introduced the Treaty principles bill, the Government claimed that they were strengthening democracy, but this bill has made it very clear for everyone to see that this coalition only cares about democracy when it can be weaponised against Māori and other underrepresented groups. The Electoral Amendment Bill confirms what we already knew to be true: this coalition only cares about democracy when it can be weaponised against us.

This bill confirms what we already knew to be true, and that is that—I’ll repeat myself—it’s a bill designed to be weaponised against Māori. They’re more than happy to strip tens of thousands of people of their voting rights to give themselves an advantage at the next election. Te Pāti Māori will not allow that; we will defend the mana of every voter and we will uphold the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We will fight for a democracy where every whānau, every hapori, and every iwi has the power to shape the future of Aotearoa. Tēnā koutou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. If voting didn’t matter, there would be no attempt by lobbyists, by extractive industries, by climate sceptics, by foreign Governments, or by organisations, like the Atlas Network, to sway its outcome. If voting didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be efforts, from America to Aotearoa, to make voting more difficult for some groups. If voting didn’t matter, this coalition Government wouldn’t be altering voting eligibility or timing. For everyone listening: your vote really matters.

Justice officials say closing enrolments ahead of advance voting could result in lower turnout, reduce confidence in the electoral system, and electoral law experts are also questioning why these changes need to stretch for the whole advance-voting period. Let me quote the Human Rights Commission: “The right to vote is a foundational right under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act … and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” The bill proposes significant limitations on the right to vote that are likely to unjustifiably restrict participation in elections and disproportionately impact groups that are already underrepresented.

The Green Party strongly opposes this bill. It undermines democracy, it doesn’t reduce the dangers of bribery and corruption, and it contravenes the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The Independent Electoral Review into the 2023 general election made several good recommendations; Minister Goldsmith and this coalition Government have ignored most of them. Do they know better or do they just want to tilt the playing field? A recent Green petition against this bill has over 5,000 signatures and will be presented to the House next week. There are also ActionStation petitions. The public are not missing this attack on democracy. More than 80 percent of submitters oppose this bill as currently drafted. That is overwhelming public opposition. These amendments were not part of any pre-election policy, so there is no mandate for these changes.

The Asian Legal Network coined an excellent phrase, “temporal gerrymandering”. Gerrymandering is usually manipulating the boundaries to advantage certain groups, typically the elites. But the changes in this bill manipulate time, not space. They disadvantage the impoverished, the people that don’t live in the same house for four or five years, the people who are thrown out by their landlords, who can’t afford the rents. The advice that we had in the Justice Committee is that this bill does disadvantage the young, Pasifika, and Māori. As well as closing enrolment 13 days before election day, this bill disqualifies all sentenced prisoners detained from prison from enrolling and voting. Not only did the Attorney-General disagree with that—and I think it’s extraordinary that you will be taking Judith Collins’ vote in favour of this bill when she said that so strongly—the voting age is a huge missed opportunity. We should be going to vote at 16. The Treaty offences—that amounts to denying manaakitanga.

The Green Party believes that democracy is stronger when it’s inclusive. Together, we can counter voter suppression. We are not the 1 percent; we are the many. Enrol now.

Let me share with the House why the left are so aggrieved by this bill. It’s not because they’re worried about what this bill does to the next election; it’s because they’re worried about the overhang they’re going to lose because Te Pāti Māori’s falling apart and their votes are not going to stack up to be much at the next election. With voting comes rights and responsibilities. Responsibilities are not something the Opposition has any understanding of. I look forward to the select committee process as we move this bill through the House. Therefore, I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand in strong opposition to this bill. I’ve just been reflecting on some comments made by the Government members: Mr Seymour’s comment about the premise that responsible people always sort out their schedules and, therefore, always make their deadlines. I’m afraid I do have to point out the headlines from 2019: “David Seymour absent as gun-ban passes first reading” was one by RNZ; in November, “ACT misses climate vote, allowing bill through unanimously”. Just leaving that there, because it simply isn’t true, and, for many people, they really do struggle with issues immediately in front of them.

There is one core important value about democracy, and it’s that voters get to select their Government. The circumstance we’re in this evening is we are with a Government who wants to select its voters and that is why we are in fierce opposition to this bill. The fact of putting a bill such as this through two stages of urgency as well, in my view, is entirely inappropriate. In the previous bill, I spoke to the fact that the Parliamentary Library had shared with me that we have spent 30.4 percent of Parliament’s time this Parliament under urgency; under the previous one, it was 15.7 percent. That’s almost double. It is the fact of that percentage, but also the nature of the bills that are coming through urgency, that is massively, massively inappropriate. The Government just needs to consider that.

The other thing is that voters aren’t fooled by this. I mean, we might get hot and heated in a debate across the House, but, actually, the facts are pretty plain and simple here. There was an article that Reuters published earlier this year that said, “New Zealand introduces law that make it harder to vote”. That’s it. The wool is not being pulled over voters’ eyes; they can see exactly what’s going on now.

The next question is: “Well, what’s about to happen?” I sometimes refer to this bill as the boomerang bill because this is a bill that’s going to come straight back to this House. Reading the Attorney-General’s report is very much like reading the decision of a declaration of inconsistency case: you pass it, the people will challenge it. Mark my words: this bill is a boomerang bill; it will be coming straight back to this House.

Now, it doesn’t need to be rights-breaching. This is why we have the Attorney-General’s report. There were things that could have been changed about this bill, but the Government decided not to. The Attorney-General objected to it. The Electoral Commission also said this is not what they would recommend. They recommended a set of other changes that could have been taken on board by the Government, but they simply chose not to.

Let’s walk very, very slowly through how we got here. What’s the problem statement? The problem statement is that by 2032, we’ll have 1 million special votes and that’ll take longer to count than the statutory time frame that we currently have. It’s not a problem about 2026; it’s a problem about 2032. Our goal, or the Government’s goal, should be that we have to find a way to ensure that the vote count by 2032 is manageable within a reasonable time frame in the least restrictive way on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That is the challenge. The key question—if that’s the problem statement and that’s the goal—is: can anything be done instead of limiting the period of registration? The answer is yes. The Electoral Commission said, “Yes, there is. There’s a set of other recommendations that we would recommend so you don’t have to make this change.” You can modernise and streamline the provisions relating to personal information collected for information purposes. You can enable the Electoral Commission to use Government data to update address information on the electoral rolls—now, that’s going to happen; it’ll only happen after 2026. You can remove the mandatory postal requirements to enable the commission to contact electors digitally.

Now, a lot of this is going to happen, but the Electoral Commission can only operationalise it after 2026. Yet the Government have made a decision that they urgently, urgently need to remove the right to register. It’s very, very odd. I’d like the ask the House to take their political hats off because this is very serious. Electoral law is our most protected legislation. Any manager—and many people in this House have been managers—would assess this issue by looking at the problem statement, by looking at the goal of getting to 2032 within a reasonable time frame to ensure that the vote is counted, and looking at what steps you could take so you don’t have to take this rather dramatic step of limiting the right to register.

I want to believe you. I want to believe that it’s not your intention to stop a particular group of people from voting, but there’s a logical way to do it and you’re simply not choosing it. Eyes wide open. You should be honest about that with New Zealand. I really do hope it isn’t because of the particular voters who are going to be impacted: 97,000 people who registered for the first time during the voting period, and there were also 134,000 people who changed their details in the last voting period. That’s 231,000 people and 8 percent of voters. It’s significant. It’s not a flippant thing that we ought to be doing in this House. If there’s another option, we should take it.

Responsible managers also think about the financial cost. Now, I talked about this bill as a boomerang bill. Mark my words, it is coming back to the House. It does not come without a cost. There are two key cost lines: number one is that when the bill passes, the Electoral Commission will need to spend money implementing this process. It is not going to be cheap. It’s a systems task and it’s an education task.

What’s the other cost? Boomerang bill, declaration of inconsistency. This is a cost for Crown Law. Now, Crown Law, when we had them in front of us for scrutiny, midway through the year, told us that the number of challenges to Government decisions are going up. That comes with a cost. It’s the cost of lawyers. It’s court costs as well as the cost of the House’s time when this bill comes back to us, comes back to the Justice Committee, comes back to this House. There is an obligation to be responsible in this place, and more so—mostly so—when it concerns electoral reform.

There are strange things about this bill that I think the Government is also going to find very difficult to defend in the public. We will have a situation where a person who is found guilty of assault and sentenced to a year in prison and qualifies for home detention, if they’re sentenced to prison on voting day, they won’t be banned from voting if they’re on home detention. However, a person who has been convicted for serious sexual offending, for which a period of imprisonment of at least six years is inevitable, but who is on remand awaiting sentence on election day—that person will also not be banned from voting. I hope the Government are ready to go out and explain the logic of why some people are banned from voting and others are not.

For the members of the public, if they want to understand how grievous a breach of their rights this is, I would urge them to go back and read the Attorney-General’s report on this bill, which says, very clearly, that the Government are in breach. This boomerang bill will come back to us.

Finally, I actually wanted to make a plea to my New Zealand First colleagues. In 2019, a bill was introduced to the House which allowed voting on election day. It passed in 2020 and there were some spectacular speeches that were delivered by your colleagues in New Zealand First about the importance of protecting the right to vote and ensuring accessibility. I would ask you, New Zealand First colleagues, through Mr Speaker, to stand true to those values that you stood for on that day. You can create a splash perhaps, cross the floor, but certainly if there is one bill to cross the floor on, this is the one.

Hon David Seymour: Point of order. Mr Speaker, I’d just like to draw the House’s attention that the Hansard shows that I recorded votes on all 329 arms amendments and that I was not participating in the third reading but did participate in the first two of the zero carbon Act debates of the same year. The reason I raised this is that now that the member knows that, she’s actually knowingly misled the House and ought to withdraw it.

VANUSHI WALTERS: I’m happy to withdraw that.

Those comments are withdrawn.

Often we compare ourselves, here in New Zealand, with some of the other countries around the world—notably, Australia, for example. In Australia, you have to be enrolled weeks in advance of the election. So here’s a really good thing to say to people in New Zealand: keen to vote next year? Get yourself organised, enrol, and be organised so that when it comes time at the election to actually vote, you can have your democratic right. Don’t believe the scaremongering you hear from the other side; they are just worried that their votes are heading in the wrong direction. I commend the bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call on Helen White. [Interruption] Order! Order! I do not want members talking and shouting across the Chamber to each other. If you want to have a conversation, there’s the hallway. I call Helen White.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. What I think I heard in this debate was our Deputy Prime Minister insult all the voters who were late in the last election. That’s 231,000 people that got insulted tonight and got basically told that they were slackers and that it was their fault. That shows a deep disrespect for democracy. Democracy, and understanding it, isn’t about just saying a few Latin words and thinking you’re the cleverest cock of the walk; it’s about actually respecting a concept which has done our world proud. We are surrounded by the threat of autocracy and we should not be playing with something as important as a democratic right of as many people as we can get through that gate, because that’s what connects our community.

It’s so important to continue to make sure that as many people participate. We know—we don’t have to argue about it; we know because there are statistics to say it—that if you allow that gateway open to election day, you get a 3 to 7 percent greater turnout and you get a turnout of a lot of different people who wouldn’t otherwise vote. We also know, because we see it around the world, there’s a manipulation going on at the moment. It’s a very serious one where people actually turn people off voting deliberately. It happens in the United States, where there are some real concerns about the impediments that are put in the way to people voting. It happens, and it happens in other countries in even more extreme ways. What it does is it turns the populations of those countries off voting at all; of trusting people, like us, to make decisions.

Now, I would like to ask a question of the Government and all the people voting tonight for this: what is fair if you had the politically opposite view tonight? What would be fair? Because democracies, they’ve got to rise above the politics of the day. This can’t be an opportunity to knock off a few people voting. We’ve got to think about the long-term survival of democracy, and it’s serious out there. We are seeing dictatorships, we are seeing preferences for kings and autocracies, and what would we be doing this for at this particular time? This couldn’t be more serious.

I want to just talk for a minute about my experience in the area of Mt Albert. I was one of the people waiting for quite some time as we did recount after recount. I got out there and I doorknocked. As I went to the doors, I would often abandon my plan of which door I was going to, because people move; they move and they move and they don’t necessarily have the same address if they’re poor. I’m really glad I did that doorknocking because I won by 18 votes.

I have some faith in that voting process, and if it had gone against me, and Melissa Lee had been the MP for Mt Albert, I would have had faith that I had done my darndest and people had had the right to vote. But if, this time, a whole lot of people in various areas of Mt Albert lose their right to vote, I will not be a happy woman if I lose as a result, because I do not believe that is democracy. That would not be a democratic outcome, and it would be highly unjust to those people because 231,000 people could lose their vote—we know that—and—

Carl Bates: No one’s losing their vote. Misinformation.

HELEN WHITE: —it is not acceptable, Carl Bates, for you to tell others what they are to do and to be that judgmental of them. That is a very important thing for us to do: to be as little judgmental as we can in this situation.

I would like people to think really clearly about the consequences of what they’re doing tonight, because it is a very cynical move and you are playing with fire when you do this—absolutely playing with fire. Democracy’s on a brink in this world at the moment. This is the last thing that the New Zealand Parliament, which I am so proud of, should be doing tonight.

The Electoral Amendment Bill seeks to modernise and streamline the electoral administration to deliver a more timely election result. Having just experienced the complexities and challenges of the 2023 election, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is an interesting debate, this debate on the Electoral Amendment Bill. I have to say, from listening to all the contributions so far, that I agree very strongly with my colleague the Hon Ginny Andersen when she uses the word “despicable”. That is what this bill is. If we go back to what Andy Foster was just saying, he said at one point, “Oh, why is it that the Opposition aren’t focusing on”—to paraphrase—“the good bits of the bill?” Well, that is because there are so many bad bits, and they are not just bad; they are despicable.

We’ve heard, also from Andy Foster—he said that this is going to make the result of the election faster, but it’s not. The select committee heard about that, and I’m sure there’ll be more on this in the committee stage from those people, but that’s not—

Hon Member: It is true.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —what the case is going to be. There’s people saying “It is true.”, so I look forward to their contributions in the committee stage.

We heard from Vanushi Walters saying, “What is the mischief here?” What is it that this bill is trying to solve? I hear across the aisle there, “Oh, maybe it is speed.” Well, I hope that there is a very robust discussion about that, because that is not what I heard from the Minister speaking on the other side. What they were talking about—they were using words like “capricious” and saying that no one has the right to vote; that there are always rules. “There are always responsibilities” is what they said, and it is the responsibility of someone to enrol to vote 13 days beforehand. They said, “Well, if somebody can order a pizza on the computer, surely they can enrol to vote.”

That is a despicable thing to say. Ordering pizzas are different from enrolling to vote, and I put it to this Chamber that whilst many of us may, from time to time, use our phones and our computers to order a pizza—I’m guilty. I can do that; I’ve got a phone right here, Parliamentary Service provides it. Not everyone in this country has access to phones and computers like we do in this House—

Hon Member: You still can do it on paper.

Hon Member: Or the library.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —so it is outrageous to compare enrolling online to vote in the same way as ordering a pizza. I heard, just then, from across the House, someone say “they can go to the library”. If the library is a core service that a council is allowed to provide—I presume that that is correct. I presume—

Tom Rutherford: What about the CAB?

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —that the Government members are correct that you can go to the library—oh, I think I heard something about other community organisations that may or may not be funded by this Government, and that is possible as well. But, of course, if you have to go to a library, that is different from ordering a pizza, because if you do not have the internet, if you do not have the data, but if you have a home phone, you can ring them up. You can ring up to order a pizza. It is a bit more complicated to enrol to vote on the internet. But I do want to say to anyone listening that it is very important that everybody enrols to vote, regardless of this law—that is very important.

Hon Member: It’s a legal requirement.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: As the member opposite says, it’s a legal requirement, but it is part of our democracy that people should be engaged in the process. But what happens is that people want to have their say here. They say, “Don’t have a horrible bill about the Treaty of Waitangi.” They have huge protests about that. They say, “Don’t fast track things that are going to harm our environment.” They protest down Queen Street. And what happens? This Government does not listen to them, and so there is a whole lot of cynicism that is created in this world that is stopping people from voting, and that is a terrible thing.

Lots of people on all sides of politics will use the language such as “Oh well, it’s politicians making those decisions.” But it is not just politicians making those decisions. It is not politicians as a group; it is a type of politician. It is maybe a left-wing or a right-wing type of politician. It is a type of politician who cares about democracy and people being involved in our democracy versus those who just really are into crony capitalism. It is the difference between people who care about authoritarianism and those who don’t. The people who want to stop that from happening and those who think that maybe it’s OK. It is the difference between being cynical and caring about all of those around us.

Not all politicians are trying to do despicable things, but let me be clear: many politicians in this House, on that side of the House, are trying to do despicable things. That despicable thing is a word we’ve already heard in the House tonight, and that is they’re disenfranchising people. This is all about disenfranchising people who will not vote for them, and that is where the cynicism comes in. They know that people who believe what they were saying in the House last night, that they are all about “Yes, yes, yes”, and apparently there are no consequences for anything, people who might want to believe that, and I can see why they would want to believe that, and that they will go out and register to vote, but they also know that there are many people in this country who do not have heaps of data on their cell phones, who do not have a bank of computers in their house, who don’t work a nine-to-five job, who cannot just go and visit their MP’s office in the day that their MP might be there—and, for me, I note that this is, in real time, Thursday night, and I won’t be in my electorate tomorrow, the great electorate of Dunedin; best electorate, of course.

Hon Member: What about your staff?

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I do have great staff, and my great staff will be there, and I am lucky to have my great staff who will help, but I will not be there because we are in urgency in December passing despicable laws. There is no reason to be passing them in urgency—none whatsoever. We’ve had this with a range of laws that have been on the Order Paper and in this urgency motion. We had one to do with resource consents extensions, which might be a fine thing, but it might not. What we know about that is there was no analysis.

Then we’ve had a fast track going through at speed through a select committee—good that there was a select committee process, but then came through second reading, committee of the whole House, and third reading, all at pace for no urgent reason. We were told in the House that the consenting one was a Christmas present; meanwhile, here we are on a Thursday night debating a despicable piece of legislation that wants to disenfranchise voters. That is all that this bill is about.

We’ve heard the numbers—and they are very big—about how many people might not be able to vote because they have not enrolled 13 days before the election date. Of course, we don’t know what the election date is yet, either, but we do know that the election will be within the next 12 months. This Government wants to, under urgency now, in the calendar year of 2025, say “We’re going to change the law for 2026”, but that’s a whole different year. It is December 2025 and there will be an election before December 2026, and that is the reason—I presume—that we are all here on a Thursday night, in urgency, discussing a despicable law. Once again, I urge everybody to enrol to vote.

We’ve heard a lot about how this law is “despicable”. What I find despicable is the amount of painstaking support the Opposition, in select committee, died to tell us—almost died, figuratively speaking—about how much people in jail that are sentenced for three years or less should retain the right to vote. Three years or less: common assault, you can get three years or less; assault with intent to injure; injury with intent; male assaults female or child. This is what they were supporting. That’s what’s despicable. I commend this bill to the House.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Electoral Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Part 1 Amendments to Electoral Act 1993, and Schedule 1