Parliament Bill

Members, we now come to Part 9, which is the debate on clauses 216 to 229, “Amendments to the Citizens Initiated Referenda Act 1993”. The question is that Part 9 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a number of questions about this part. I was involved in, I think, the very first attempt at a citizens initiated referendum, although I have some grave doubts about their role in a democracy. The very first one was about battery hens and about getting rid of battery cages, so we have made some progress on that issue. But I have a couple of small questions, and then perhaps a slightly larger question. Clause 219 seems perfectly sensible: that we move to internet instead of newspapers. I am unsure about clause 218 replacing section 6, section 6(2)(c), where it talks about “the contact details of the person or their representative”, and why it has an address rather than just email and phone number contacts—or maybe it needs both? Maybe we should be more specific? Back in 1993, this was the one way of raising an issue to the House of Representatives. There was no alternative. I think the bigger question now is what is the role of a citizens initiated referendum when we have petitions? Is it something that we think will continue? Are there amendments to make it easier to do, harder to do, or does it really make no difference other than some technicalities about addresses and websites rather than newspapers? Thank you.

The old citizens initiated referenda, which—

💬 Tom Rutherford: That old chestnut.

That old chestnut—that’s right. There hasn’t been that many of them, and those that we have had have not often times been—well, I was about to say they’ve been ignored, but I think that’s probably a bit unfair, actually. I was a young 16-year-old whippersnapper back in 1999 when we had the referendum that had four things to it, including hard labour, tougher sentences—I can’t remember the other—

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: The death penalty.

No, that wasn’t in it, but it may as well have been. There were four different things, and it duly passed 85 to 15, or whatever it is. It was a bit unclear what exactly people were voting on. But the general vibe was pretty clear: people wanted tougher sentences. Actually, that did lead, ultimately, to some tougher sentences from the Helen Clark Government back in 20002001—members will have different views about whether or not that was the right thing to do or not.

This is actually quite a minor change. What this does is transfer—because you need 10 percent of registered voters—the counting of that away from the Clerk to the Electoral Commission, and I think it’s pretty obvious why that’s the case. Back when we set up the citizens initiated referenda back in the 1990s—1993, I believe it was—for whatever reason, the role of both the certification and the approval of the wording and the counting was given to the Clerk. Now, the Clerk’s a great office, a great man, but their specialty expertise is not in the counting. Actually, what happens now is the Clerk goes and talks to the commission around how all that works anyway. This just formally transfers it and says, look, the responsibility for counting of the votes and working out the number of electors and the registered number of voters and all that stuff, that’s the commission’s core job. That’s literally why they exist. So that should be why it’s there.

Celia Wade-Brown asked about clause 218, replacement section 6(2)(c), I think—the contact details. I have to admit that is not something I have closely thought about, but I’m assuming that the contact details, including an address, is to make sure that those who are interested in promoting the referendum can be contacted at that. There’s probably a case to put email address in there as well. Maybe it’s a little bit old fashioned just referring to a physical address, but it will just be to make sure that it’s all in order from a promotion point of view. Maybe that’s something we can tidy up through a statutes amendment bill later on if members are willing to do that, or potentially some sort of regulatory standards bill. It’s not something I’ve given a huge amount of thought to.

I just have a couple of points. One of my personal favourite legislative tools is when you define something to mean something entirely differently. In this articulation, we are moving the counting job to the Electoral Commission. The count in new section 18(4)—that’s clause 226 of the bill—says, “The Electoral Commission must certify an indicative referendum petition under subsection (2) within 2 months of the receipt date.” One of the funny things about the Electoral Commission is that unlike the Office of the Clerk, they get busy over election periods, while the Office of the Clerk actually doesn’t have quite as much to do as usual, although they would protest that, I’m sure. Then subsection (5) says, “the 2-month period includes, in whole or in part, an election period,”. The election period is the date from writ date to the last date noted for the return of the writ. I can’t remember exactly how long that is, but it’s about three months, isn’t it? What we have is that the Electoral Commission must return it within two months, which means five months if there’s an election on—it’s one of those fantastic drafting things where two months means five months. But that’s quite a long time. I just wonder if, Minister, you’ve considered whether that’s appropriate. Now, I get the logistics of it, but I’ll be perfectly honest that when we considered who was the best counter—clearly it’s the Electoral Commission; that is their job—that now means that there’s a bit of a glitch in the system. I’d be interested to hear comments on that.

The other thing is this, and this isn’t new, but I’m not sure, given the opportunity we had, that we should have carried it over. That is because 10 percent of however many voters there are—there might be, I don’t know, 4 million; that’s 400,000. By new section 19, which is the same insertion, the commission works with the Government Statistician to, essentially, count by sample. It appears that you don’t have to count every signature. You can calculate the number of signatures that must be checked, presumably, for legitimacy by sample. Whereas, if you’ve got an election, we know that there’s a tortuous process—because the Government’s currently worried about that—of going through and checking that every voter is properly enrolled and so on and so forth. But here it appears you might check 1,000 signatures, and say three are not legitimate people, and the Government Statistician says, “That’s a decent sample; let’s just assume that three in every thousand are not legitimate.” Given that and given the importance to some people of these referenda, I’m wondering whether it’s appropriate for the Electoral Commission to not verify each signature but to simply verify a few and project that across all.

I’ll just deal with a couple of matters. I sort of made up some reasons why we needed a physical address before, but I’m advised that the reason is it’s the status quo, and the requirement for a New Zealand address is needed to ensure the petition is promoted in New Zealand. It’s just to double-check that petition promoters are New Zealand people, which I think is relatively straightforward.

In relation to Dr Duncan Webb’s point around the two-month versus five-month glitch in the system, it was probably true. But I suppose the lesson, the take-home point out of that, is don’t organise a citizens initiated referendum for election year; organise it for the off years. They’re every three years; you’ve got two out of three. It’s not too bad.

In relation to the 10 percent point, reasonable people can disagree about what the threshold should be. Most people, I think, would think 5 percent is too low and 15 percent is probably a bit too high. Is there any right answer? Probably not. Not everyone agrees we need citizens initiated referenda, but we have it, have had, for 30 years. But the status quo is that they use a sample so that we don’t have to go through the laborious process. Again, let’s put the people who are expert at that in charge of it; in relation to New Zealand, that’s the Chief Statistician. So that’s what we do. It just replicates the status quo, and to the extent we have citizens initiated referenda, I think most people agree it probably works quite well.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 9 set out on Amendment Paper 362 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Part 9 as amended agreed to.

Part 10 Amendments to other Acts, and Schedule 8