Inquiry into the 2002 General Election — Consideration of Report of Justice and Electoral Committee

I move, That the House take note of the report of the Justice and Electoral Committee on the Inquiry into the 2002 General Election. This is a rare and welcome opportunity for a select committee to present to the House a significant report that, in this case, took 19 hours and the work of a team of expert advisers to prepare. Over the last 15 months, the Justice and Electoral Committee has worked on its review of the 2002 general election. This is one of those brief moments, amongst the cauldron of legislative and set-piece debates in the House, when the unique work of a select committee floats to the surface.

Darren Hughes: It’s historic.

TIM BARNETT: I say to Mr Hughes that it is historic indeed, and it is for a brief moment that I will speak about it.

The Justice and Electoral Committee mainly deals with justice issues, but since 1999 it has covered the Local Electoral Act, the famous electoral integrity legislation, and the electoral amendment legislation. This is its second report into an election.

After the review of the 1999 election, 87 changes were made to the way the election of 2002 operated. That election was, by all accounts, the most smoothly administered general election we had had for many years. As part of the committee’s inquiry, it reviewed some of the factors by which elections can be compared. The notable aspects of the 2002 election were that the enrolment level was up 3 percent to 94.2 percent of eligible voters, the turnout was down from 85 percent to 77 percent, the turnout was significantly down among people on the Māori roll, the number of early votes cast—because the election was in a winter holiday period—went up from 5.22 percent to 6.45 percent, and so forth. Overall, indications were that the 2002 election was extremely well administered.

The committee’s inquiry has come up with three recommendations, and it awaits the response on those from the Government in the next couple of weeks. Those recommendations are: firstly, that there be a fundamental review of the law relating to parliamentary elections; secondly, that the recommendations of the committee from the 1996 and 1999 elections relating to electoral broadcasting be put into effect in time for the election next year; and thirdly, that a package of extra items also be acted on.

In terms of the fundamental review, the committee identified a whole variety of issues, including electoral organisational structure, State funding, disclosure of party donations, taxation status of political parties, and various other items, which are sitting there ready to be reviewed. The committee would like to have had that job done at this stage, and I am sure that Mr Donald will refer to that later, but we are content to say that it is a major task that needs to happen over the next short period.

The second package of our recommendations basically repeats the unfinished business of the 1996 and 1999 election reviews. One problem with the process of having select committees look at elections is that not all that they recommend is ever enacted in this busy place, the Chamber of our Parliament. Those recommendations are about anomalies concerning electoral broadcasting—making the administration of those rules easier for the Electoral Commission, and recognising that both elections and broadcasting are dynamic fields in which changes are made from time to time.

The third recommendation relates to a whole package of new items. These are mainly additional broadcasting matters that came up through the last election, but they also include such things as national guidelines on electoral hoardings—a matter of great interest to many people in this House—and party access to the electronic lists of non-voters, so that political parties can encourage higher turnout. As well, there is the recommendation that all electoral broadcasting on television funded from the public purse be captioned, so that people who are deaf or hearing-impaired can access those broadcasts. The committee also recommended that the amount of money in the Budget for electoral broadcasting be significantly increased to $3.212 million, an increase of about 50 percent, in recognition that funding has not gone up in the last 10 years.

An important role of a select committee is to conduct these reviews of electoral law. As I said, the committee has flagged the urgent need for a fundamental review of the Electoral Act. One example of the difficulties being created was the issue last year concerning citizenship and electoral law. That was an example of how complex and convoluted that legislation has become, and I certainly urge the Government to take up this recommendation.

In a sense, it is at the core of our democracy that people representing eight different political parties can meet together over a period of 15 months and discuss a whole variety of electoral issues, can agree on an awful lot, and can disagree on a few. That is all part of democracy, and that is how we deal with the bread and butter of our activities as professional politicians. I commend the report to the House.

It is an unusually warm evening, and I seek leave for members who so wish to be able to remove their jackets for the remainder of the evening.

Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is.

ROD DONALD: I thank fellow members! I am delighted that we are having this debate this evening. The Inquiry into the 2002 General Election is an important report that normally would not have seen the light of day in the House, because members’ bills would have taken up the available time. I believe that this is an unintended insult to select committee members who toil over reports such as this, and I think we should remedy this deficiency by setting aside time to debate select committee orders. That is exactly why the Green Party supported the Clerk of the House, David McGee, in his proposal to the Standing Orders Committee last year to establish a dedicated time each week to debate select committee reports.

I am very sorry that the Standing Orders Committee did not adopt that recommendation, because this report is not the only one worthy of debate. If members look at the Order Paper this evening, they will see that we could also have debated the Finance and Expenditure Committee’s report on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s Monetary Policy Statement, the Health Committee’s inquiry into hospital-acquired infection, and even the Social Services Committee’s briefing on the work of Parentline. All of that is important work undertaken by select committees that deserves not only to end up on the Order Paper, but to have the chance to be debated before the full Parliament.

I am looking forward to the National Party’s contribution to tonight’s debate. I believe that its campaign at the last election was quite extraordinary. Despite National being the party that created MMP by legislating for it in 1993—and I congratulate the party on honouring its 1990 election commitment—it failed MMP 101. I am always interested to hear what National members have to say on how we should run elections. I had something in common with Mr Tisch at the general election inquiry, but I am afraid the majority on the committee defeated the Greens on some of the changes we were trying to achieve.

So I am both pleased and disappointed in the outcome of this inquiry. My pleasure remains on hold, however, until the recommendations in the report, especially the limited ones on reforming the broadcasting rules, become law. That is because I was on the review of the 1996 election, and we made exactly the same recommendations. A bill was introduced into Parliament; it went right through the select committee process and was reported back to Parliament, and, if my memory is correct, it was carried over at the 1999 election, but then was quietly discharged by the Labour Government. So I urge this Labour Government to get on with progressing the amendments to the Broadcasting Act this year, in order to save the Electoral Commission the unnecessary work next year that the current rules require it to carry out.

Like Mr Barnett, I support the recommendation of the committee to increase broadcasting funding for the 2005 election to $3.2 million. That fund has not increased since 1990, so an increase is long overdue. But more money is a poor substitute for introducing proper State funding for political parties. So to that end, I have to support the first recommendation of the committee, which is to undertake a fundamental review of the law relating to parliamentary elections, and that that review be completed and any changes be in place for the 2008 election. That, at least, I hope will be a step in the right direction, but I urge Tim Barnett, the chair of the select committee, to ensure that it gets started on that work.

Again, a review is still a poor substitute for some action. The action we needed was a range of initiatives, which happen to be outlined in the Green Party minority view in this report. The first concern we have is that the committee chose not to address the glaring need to improve the donation disclosure regime. The current rules on anonymous donations are, quite frankly, inadequate and lack any look-through provisions for front organisations, such as the National Party’s Free Enterprise Trust. That makes a mockery of the existing regime, and clearly points to the need for greater transparency to give the public confidence that political parties are not beholden to their funders. That means we need a limit on anonymous donations—say, $250—and above that, every donation has to be declared.

The second failing of the committee was its refusal to grapple with the State funding issue that I mentioned before. The 1986 royal commission recommended such a step in concert with the introduction of proportional representation, and our nearest neighbour, Australia, has had a robust system in place for many years. It would not have been difficult for the select committee to propose a framework that could operate either alongside, or as a replacement for, the present regime. What is certain is the need for change to ensure that the public is well informed about the policies and candidates of the parties. What is also certain is that what we have now is a disaster. One has only to look at the allocations at the last election to see that. National received $1.45 per vote, United Future received 55c per vote, and the rest of us were somewhere in the middle. The allocation system was arbitrary rather than fair.

The third disappointment that the Green Party has is that the select committee did not properly address—or even report on—the arguments for and against the removal of political party representatives on the Electoral Commission and the Representation Commission. I look forward to my colleague Richard Prebble supporting me on that point, because it is patently unfair, in an MMP Parliament with seven parties, for only two of them to be represented on those bodies. It should be noted that in the Electoral Commission’s own submission to the 1996 election inquiry, the commission itself recommended that all political party representatives be removed. In the Representation Commission’s 1995 report, it stated that it is difficult for the commission to maintain a reputation of independence in relation to an alleged leak of provisional boundaries by a political party representative on the commission.

At least, I hope, those matters will be addressed when the review of the electoral organisation structure takes place, and at least that review, I hope, will look at combining the Chief Electoral Office and the Electoral Commission into one body that is statutorily independent from the Government of the day.

Another matter the select committee did not address—and it therefore failed to complete its task—was the issue of entrenchment, because some sections of the Electoral Act currently enjoy protection, while other fundamental sections remain subject to amendment by a simple majority. In particular, I refer to section 45, which defines the Māori seats. Whether one believes that they should exist or not, they should enjoy the same protection that the general seats have under sections 35 and 36. Equally, section 168, which defines the method of voting, is entrenched, but the much more crucial section 191, which defines how many seats there are and how the party votes are applied, and determines what the party vote threshold is, is not entrenched. Those matters deserve to be addressed, as does the ongoing problem with tolerance.

I believe that the tolerance needs to be increased to plus or minus 10 percent. There is absolutely no reason to maintain the current level of tolerance when it is the party vote that determines the number of seats each party wins, not the electorate votes. There are some very good arguments for increasing the tolerance in paragraphs 66 and 67 of the report.

Finally, I would like to finish, as we come to the celebration of the 150th year of this Parliament, with my concern that we desperately need to adopt a programme of civics education in our schools in this country. I believe our democracy is in danger because our young people, in particular, think this place is irrelevant to them. According to the New Zealand Election Study survey at the last election, 38 percent of under-29-year-olds did not bother to vote, and that contributed to the turn-out dropping from 85 percent in 1999 to 77 percent in 2002. I believe it is the responsibility of all of us in this House to reverse that trend and to improve the turn-out. I doubt that we will improve our behaviour, as a way of encouraging more young people to vote, but at least we can adopt and implement a civics education programme in schools to try to point out the positive features of our representative democracy.

Let me, in bipartisan spirit, start off by saying that there are some matters raised by Mr Rod Donald of the Green Party that I do agree with. The first is that this is an important report; it ought to be debated, and I think the other major parties should look at it. Secondly, I do agree with him that having representatives from two political parties on the Electoral Commission, and broadcasting, is fundamentally wrong, and it does compromise those organisations. I say to the House that it is a fact that prior to the boundaries being drawn after the 1996 election, I drew for my staff the most unfavourable boundaries that could be technically possible for Wellington Central, and said that that would be what the so-called independent commission would draw up. When it came out, I was slightly wrong. There was a little bit of the electorate that could have been put in to make the boundaries even more unfavourable for me. There was a considerable amount of appeals from people in Wellington Central, and the only change that the Electoral Commission made was to move to the boundaries that were the most adverse possible to me. I know that the civil servants claim they were unbiased. Rubbish! It is mathematically impossible to do that, and, of course, we know that the same thing was done to the Social Credit Party. One of the reasons why first past the post became discredited was because the two major parties were able to influence the drawing of boundaries in this country. I say that those political representatives should not be on the commission.

The next point that is clearly unfair concerns State funding. Per vote, the ACT party gets the lowest amount, election after election.

Rod Donald: Not last time.

Hon RICHARD PREBBLE: I think we were the lowest, again. Of course, the National Party ended up with $1.40, and that is because the system is biased in favour of the two major parties. They receive the bulk of television time, and then by law other political parties are not able to buy any advertising time. What is interesting is that with nations similar to ourselves that have written constitutions—like Australia, Canada, and the United States—when our types of broadcasting laws have been passed by their Parliaments, the courts every time—I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. A Minister is trying to hold a loud conversation in my ear.

In Australia, Canada, and the United States, New Zealand - type broadcasting laws have been struck down. Why? First, they are an affront to the principle of free speech. By law we are refusing to allow certain opinions to be broadcast, and secondly, in a free society, people ought to be able to spend their own money to advocate their views. We as a Parliament are saying that they cannot. That works very much to the detriment of my political party.

I shall run through some other points that I do not think have been looked at. The Labour Government has spent a fortune to put people on the roll. In a free society, that would be the duty of the citizen. Is it worthwhile? No it is not. While the number of people on the roll went up, and in parts of New Zealand, people were chasing citizens around the streets to try to get them enrolled, it did not result in more people voting. It is a monstrous waste of taxpayers’ money. The fact is that the Government is prepared to spend that money, because the Labour Party thinks that it is to its electoral advantage. I am disappointed that the select committee— [Interruption] The Minister who is now interjecting should go back to playing her ukulele. The select committee has not given us any sort of report on whether that is a good use of taxpayers’ money.

I now turn to another point that the committee, in my view, has not—[Interruption] That Minister was elected on her name, not for any work she has done. She also said that she would solve Auckland’s traffic woes. They seem to be going about as fast as she is.

Hon David Benson-Pope: You were going to save Rail.

Hon Judith Tizard: That’s right. You were to save Rail.

Hon RICHARD PREBBLE: I most certainly did. It is still there if the Minister would like to look. That Minister wants to spend taxpayers’ money on ukuleles, but is not prepared to speak on why she is sending silly invitations to people to sing with her, with a ukulele. I have better things to do. That Minister is being paid by the taxpayer to be a Minister, gets a Minister’s car, and thinks that is a ground for her to interject. However, I shall turn to the question.

Dail Jones: What’s she ever done to earn a Minister’s salary?

Hon RICHARD PREBBLE: Nothing, in my view. I tell the House that with regard to appeals for State funding for political parties, if the select committee had examined the matters properly and added up all the State funding, I believe I am right in saying that there is no other country that has more State funding than New Zealand. I know that that is an unpopular thing to say to MPs, because they always want to maintain that that is not the case. In fact, unlike Britain, once the election is on, members of Parliament are still able to fly around the country, use their telephones, and their full postal privileges. All those matters would be added up and included in a party’s expenditure in any transparent system, but they are not.

Then when we have a discussion on donations, we find that the donation list is most extraordinary. It is quite possible for an organisation to give full-time organisers and cars to a political party, but that never has to be recorded. In fact, that does go on, and we all know that the Labour Party is the biggest beneficiary of that. [Interruption] The member raised the subject of Auckland Central. When I was the member for Auckland Central two full-time trade unionists and a car turned up to work for me. I did not have to put that down, because there was nowhere in the return for that. When the Green Party talks about transparency—if we are to have that, and that is what we ought to do—in my view if a trade union wants to use its union funds to support a political party, so be it. In a free society, it should. However, we should not have the trade union - supported party then saying “It’s perfectly OK for us to be funded and for us to receive 10, 20, 60 cars, or whatever it is, from the trade union movement and full-time organisers, but oh dear, those people who are supported by business interests in New Zealand ought to be required to make a full report of their accounts.”

I think the donation rules are a nonsense. Personally, I believe in freedom. If people want to contribute their own money to political parties, that is their business and not the business of others, many of whom have never given a dollar, or done anything to help in any election ever.

Finally, while the committee has called for the Government to do a review of the Electoral Act, frankly I do not trust it to do that. If it is anything like this report, the changes that will be recommended will be partisan and designed to help a particular political party. With regard to elections we ought to try to make sure that they are free, open, and people are able to have free speech. We ought to allow all citizens to have access to the airwaves. Countries that have restrictions on airwaves used to be part of the Communist bloc. We now have some of the most restrictive, anti - free speech electoral laws in the world and they have been put together for the simple reason of creating a handicap system in favour of the two major parties. The sooner they are done away with, the better.

I begin by expressing United Future’s congratulations to the Electoral Commission, the Chief Electoral Office, and the Electoral Enrolment Centre on the very good outcome of the 2002 election in terms of the way it was run. There was certainly a dramatic improvement in addressing the causes of concern from the previous election, and those institutions did a fine job.

The inquiry into the general election that always takes place afterwards is an opportunity to relook at our electoral system, and to consider changes that could improve it. This year we considered two primary areas in particular. One was the area of donations to political parties and the other was the funding of political parties. In respect of donations to political parties, issues such as the threshold for disclosure of donations, limits on the amount that can be donated, and the vexed problem of anonymous donations were all looked at, at length. In the end, the Justice and Electoral Committee decided not to take on the hard issues, but simply recommended them for further inquiry. That was a little bit of a fizzer after we had begun what seemed to be quite a promising trek on a pretty meaty inquiry.

The anonymous donation situation is really problematic. I note that in the last general election a large proportion of donations made to political parties—in fact, 44.4 percent overall—were anonymous. In National’s case, the sum of donations made anonymously was $200,000 out of $529,000, which is 38 percent. In Labour’s case, it was $380,000 out of $672,000, which is 57 percent, and ACT and United Future had similar figures, at 56 percent and 53 percent, respectively. Clearly, all parties take advantage of the fact that donations can be made anonymously.

Central to this issue is the question of what influence donations have on parties, and on Governments’ policies and decisions. I must say that the evidence was very scant in terms of donations having much influence at all. Clearly, parties have policies upfront that will attract certain funding—funding for Labour from unions because of its employee-centred policies, and for National from members of the Business Roundtable because of its high-income-earner - supporting policies. But there is not a lot of evidence that donations from individuals in particular influence Government decisions. Perhaps the closest we got to a suggestion of that was the sale of New Zealand Rail to Fay Richwhite and Co., for what many regarded as a very conservative price. However, if there is any influence, then it is certainly not in the realm of $100, $1,000, or even $10,000 donations.

That brings me to the second concern, which is the difficulty of policing regulations about anonymous donations, and donations generally, and the difficulty of being able to find out who has made anonymous donations and how they have done that. The use of third parties such as trusts has become quite prevalent, so that one can even have a donation that is overt but that has come from a trust that in turn has received it from third parties who remain anonymous. Direct deposits into a bank account often mean that the party does not even know whom the money has come from.

United Future proposes we take a higher threshold of donations—and we suggested $50,000 as a rough suggestion—a threshold that would be meaningful and below which, clearly in terms of common sense, there is unlikely to be much in the way of influence, and propose we rigorously enforce that threshold. We suggest there should be a bar to intermediaries, and there should be a declaration by donors of sums above $50,000 as to the source of their funds. We would also ban anonymous donations above $1,000, to prohibit the multithousand dollar donations getting above something like a $50,000 threshold. That certainly is the way we think the direction should go—that is, when it comes to donations we would keep the threshold high and rigorously enforce it. That is the only way we can effectively address that issue.

Over the last few weeks I have had the privilege of travelling to Europe, Scandinavia, and the USA, to observe some of the electoral systems operating there. I was keen to see the direction of the proportional systems in Europe and what that might mean for New Zealand. Some quite interesting factors emerged, only one or two of which I can refer to tonight but, in Europe, clearly the proportional systems have proven that the proportional system is less stable than the Westminster, democratic-type tradition.

There are many Governments that do not last the full term, and generally in Europe that term is a 4-year period. Norway, for example, with one of the oldest proportional systems, has a system very similar to that of New Zealand, but with multi-representative electorates and with some allocation still on a proportional basis. As Norway has developed its system it has seen a closing of percentages among political parties, so that it now has two parties, Conservative and Labour, that get 20 to 25 percent of the vote; three parties, the Christian Democratic party, which is family centred, the Progress party, which is a populist party, and the Socialist party, which is a left party, that get 10 to 15 percent of the vote—and the parallels can be seen—and then two smaller parties, Centre and Liberal, that get about 5 percent of the vote. That means Norway tends to have three to four parties in a Government coalition. Currently, the conservative Christian Democratic - Liberal Government, with a Christian Democrat as the Prime Minister, has 62 of the 165 seats and relies on the Progress party’s—that is, the centrist party’s—26 votes to make a majority. One can easily understand the instability of that system. After the last election, the coalition of the time lasted only 2½ years.

There are clear signals for New Zealand that as we move further away from a first-past-the-post, two-party dominated system, we may face the same sort of instability. But the message from Norway was that the instability was a price for a greater breadth of representation. Its people saw that most parties had a similarity in terms of central policies that meant there were not dramatic swings of policy, and they saw that as a good price to pay in order to have that representation. I also spoke with ministry officials who admitted that it effectively caused a lot of uncertainty for them as projects were scrapped when there were changes of government and new emphases were brought in. So it was not all sweet in terms of the way that the Government ran.

The instability was different in Estonia and Latvia. Since their independence from Russia in 1991 they have found profound and very positive change in their democratic structure. In their election in 2002 there was a groundswell against political corruption, and currently in both countries two-thirds of the MPs standing in the last election have lost their seats. So they have a very inexperienced Parliament. In discussions we had with the President of Estonia he admitted, having had a huge amount of experience in the constitutional reforms in that country, that the inexperience of the Parliament was showing in some of the legislation it brought in. One of the parties in government there is the Latvia’s First Party, a family centred, centrist party that was formed in May 2002 and elected with nine MPs in October 2002. That party has close similarities to United Future, and is evidence that there is a rise of family-focused parties in all the European countries. Even in Russia there is a party called the Party of Life—that is, a family-centred, centrist party that is part of the United Russia majority in the Duma, which is the equivalent to our own House of Representatives.

The is that in the rise of family-focused parties is happening quite rapidly. As I pointed out, in Latvia there was a sudden rise of that party, so I think that the rise of United Future in the last election was more than simply a factor of a worm or a single debate. The fact that in the last 2 weeks before the last election we went from 1 percent to 7 percent was indicative of a move we can see internationally towards centrist, family-based parties. The increasingly rapid support for them in Europe is a key to the development of those countries.

The other thing I noticed was that there was some envy in the larger countries for our unicameral system. In the United States, and also in Russia, it takes at least 6 months to get legislation through the system, because there are the executive, the Senate, and the House of Representatives to contest with. That means that legislation is well considered, whereas in this House the rapid changes in legislation we are able to make are not always positive. We should not be concerned, therefore, about taking time over legislation in order to get it right.

The select committee process is central to that, and is a vital part of our electoral system. We have a very good system. There are areas such as the donation area that can be addressed, but we still have an evolving system. We have only had three elections under MMP. I think there is much we can be grateful for in our system when we compare it with systems overseas.

I always enjoy hearing about other electoral systems, and I thank the member for that. I, too, have travelled to some of these places.

Hon Richard Prebble: Tell us about them!

LINDSAY TISCH: No, it is not a travelogue tonight, but I say to Murray Smith that we find some commonality when we see how other countries operate and make comparisons with what we have here.

I want to comment briefly on the inquiry, as a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee, and I refer the House to page 9 of the report, which talks about a fundamental review of the Electoral Act of 1993. It is our view that major changes need to be made, and we cannot make significant changes in the 3-year cycle. Tim Barnett and I have talked about this before. That is why National supports this inquiry in its entirety. The report states that any substantive changes need some time. We cannot rush these things, and we cannot hope to get the best results by making some minor changes for the 2005 election. We need to think through the issues. The comments that have been made by other speakers, including Richard Prebble and Rod Donald, have raised valid points, and I take them on board. Let us get it right, and let us take the time to do it. That is why we support the recommendations in this review being done for the 2008 election. We cannot hope to do these things properly on an ad hoc basis.

If we were to go back to previous reports that have been done, we would see that that was exactly what they have commented. On page 6 of this report there is a very good comment from the 2001 report of the Government’s Election Framework Taskforce about the election cycle. The last sentence of the paragraph quoted there states that the result of the reviews and whatever held over time is “an Electoral Act riddled with ad hoc fixes and additions, and very limited capacity in the system to consider the overall effect of the changes being made.” That probably summarises very succinctly the issues we currently have with the legislation.

I want to mention two important parts, one of which certainly affects me as an electorate MP for a rural area—and, on looking around the Chamber, I see I am the only one here at the moment who represents a large rural area. I refer to clause 64 on page 25 of the report, under the heading “Tolerance level between electoral boundaries”. It is a huge concern when major changes are made. At the last election the electorate of Karapiro disappeared and became Piako. Barbara Stewart knows a lot about it, because she comes from this area, as well. The old Karapiro electorate was made up of a community of interest. It was centred on Te Awamutu, Cambridge, Matamata—where I live—Morrinsville, and Te Aroha. It changed completely, with Te Awamutu going to the King Country electorate. That electorate extends from halfway between Cambridge and Te Awamutu to way south of the mountain, to the area where Shane Ardern comes from. There is no community of interest. Even the geographic boundaries, which in the past would have defined the electorate boundary, are nonsensical. The new electorate of Piako encompasses Cambridge, Matamata, Morrinsville, and Te Aroha, and heads around the north of Hamilton, on the outskirts, to take in Horotiu, Taupiri, Ngāruawāhia, and Huntly. Those groups have absolutely no community of interest. There is no likelihood, ever, that they will have any affiliation with those areas in the southern part of the Waikato.

Clause 64 of the report refers to the tolerance level. It states: “New Zealand’s plus or minus 5 percent level is relatively low by international standards.” When we compare that with Australia, we see that its level is plus or minus 10 percent. Canada, France, and Germany have a level of between plus or minus 20 percent, and the United Kingdom has a level of between plus or minus 10 and 20 percent. There are some very good examples now around the world—and Rod Donald acknowledges that. Do we have to have the same tolerance level at every election? My view is that, no, we do not. Constituency MPs could probably service their electorates better if the Representation Commission recognised geographic areas, as opposed to it being just a numbers game.

That is one of the points I certainly would be interested in pursuing later on, when the committee is set up. I hope the Government actually does set it up—a point that was made earlier. Of course, time runs out fast, and we would certainly want to make sure that all efforts were made to have it in place. The minor changes for 2005 have been acknowledged, but the bigger picture is the changes for 2008.

The second major point I want to refer to is the electoral organisation structure. To my mind it is an absolute nonsense that we have so many different organisations controlling the way we have elections. We have the Chief Electoral Office, which is responsible for the conduct of elections and referenda, the registration and supervision of candidates, and receiving returns on donations and expenses. It is a stand-alone operation. In addition, we have the Electoral Enrolment Centre, which is responsible for all electoral enrolment activity, and is part of the business unit of New Zealand Post. We then have the Electoral Commission, which is responsible for the functions associated with the registration and regulation of political parties, and receiving their returns on donations. That is the third group responsible for running elections. Previous reports have said that there needs to be one integrated body that has an overview of how elections are run.

Certainly, we would be interested in being part of the establishment of a committee that looks at the long-term effects and how elections will be run in the future. With those comments, I want to say that National will be supporting this report.

New Zealand First supports the report back. I would like to commend the officials, who worked extremely hard on this report with, I think, a great degree of patience over time, because we seemed to be forever making alterations to the final recommendations. I listened with some interest to Murray Smith’s description of his tour of Europe. I could give an example of how delighted people were to be part of a military coup, how useful and important the military coup was, and how better off the people were as a result of that military coup. But I am sure the House does not want to hear my deliberations on my tour, so I leave the matter there.

Motion agreed to.

The House adjourned at 9.36 p.m.