Justice Committee looking at ending taxpayers paying for election ads

Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.
In 2020, the Government legislated to allow people to enrol or update their enrolment on polling day. These votes are counted as special votes.
New Zealanders may no longer be able to enrol to vote on polling day, after MPs on a parliamentary committee asked the Government to consider changing a 2020 rule change allowing polling day enrolments.

The Government is considering this recommendation, along with 64 others, which have emerged from the Parliamentary
Justice Committee’s inquiry into the 2023 election.

The committee conducts an inquiry and publishes a report after each general and local body election. MPs typically make dozens of recommendations, many of which are never accepted.
The committee published its report on the 2023 election last week, which included a number of recommendations, such as either relaxing or more strictly enforcing rules around publishing or posting election-related material on social media on polling day, modernising the enrolment system to make it easier for people to digitally update their details and register to vote, and even allowing the Prime Minister, in consultation with the Leader of the Opposition, to withdraw the writ for the general election during a state of emergency that might impact the election. In that case, the election could be delayed by up to three months.
These recommendations were all made with the support of the committee as a whole, while other recommendations were made by a simple majority, usually meaning the governing members.
Recommendations made by the National-Act-NZ First majority of the committee included asking the Government to consider changing the cut-off date for enrolments and updates to enrolment details to a date prior to polling day and asking the Government to consider scrapping the $4 million broadcasting allocation, a pool of public money divided among political parties to spend on advertising during the campaign.
Other parties submitted “differing views.” The Greens said the Government should lower the voting age to 16, while Labour suggested the Government should “explore ways to lower the voting age.”
This would be accompanied by increasing the cap on election expenses, with parties or candidates allowed to purchase as much broadcasting as they wish under the cap.
The report was also fairly critical of the Electoral Commission’s decision to use Manurewa Marae as a polling place, describing the decision as “unwise.” Te Pāti Māori candidate, now MP, Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp, was formerly the chief executive of the marae.
The committee unanimously recommended that the commission “better monitor the connection of polling sites to particular candidates or political movements and views, and avoid booths on premises that have direct connections with candidates or parties.” The committee also called on the commission to “consider stronger restrictions on polling booth sites, for example, requiring them to be policy- and viewpoint-neutral.”
In 2020, the Government legislated to allow people to enrol or update their enrolment on polling day. These votes are counted as special votes.
A regulatory impact statement from 2020 estimated that these special votes took 10 times longer to count than ordinary votes, a factor that contributed to the slow count in the 2023 election, when more than 500,000 special votes were cast.
Approximately 110,000 people either enrolled or updated their enrolment details on election day, over 3% of the total vote cast.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said earlier this year that the Government would look at potentially changing this rule. He did not comment on this story, citing the fact that the report was still under consideration. Labour’s justice spokesman Duncan Webb did not respond to requests for comment.
The committee found that submitters were critical of the amount of time it took to count votes in 2023 and unanimously recommended that the Electoral Commission begin a modernisation process to make it easier to enrol and update enrolments, primarily by updating the technology the commission uses.
The majority on the committee asked the Government to consider changing the cut-off date for enrolments so that it was prior to polling day, which would likely reduce the number of special votes cast.
The Green Party’s MP on the committee, Celia Wade-Brown, who is also the party’s spokeswoman for electoral reform, called this proposal “voter suppression”.
“It’s vulnerable voters who will be disenfranchised,” she said.
“It’s people who move a lot, students, and those with less settled addresses who will be the most affected,” she added.
Act’s Todd Stephenson, who also sat on the committee, said that particular recommendation responded to the fact that same-day enrolment had a “significant administrative burden and slows down the count”.
He said that while people “should be able to enrol after the writ is issued [which starts the process for holding an election],” this should not extend right up to polling day.
At each election, parties are given a slice of more than $4 million of public money to spend on purchasing broadcast ads.
Stephenson successfully gained a majority on the committee, though not the committee as a whole, to consider scrapping this rule and moving to a system where parties pay for broadcast ads themselves, using money they raise, primarily from donations.
“Act has long argued that taxpayers shouldn’t be giving money to political parties for broadcasting,” he said.
He also wanted to see the broadcasting allocation scrapped and replaced with a higher cap on the amount of money parties can spend during the campaign period.
Brown described this idea as “most unreasonable”.
Instead, she suggested prohibiting businesses from donating to political parties, restricting donations to those who had registered to vote.
“That would level the playing field,” she said.
The committee also examined the rules around people who attempt to disrupt an election – a growing concern in New Zealand and globally.
The Electoral Commission told the committee it already had plans to “work with relevant agencies before the next election to mitigate risks that have been identified as less likely but more consequential”.
Currently, if people attempt to “intentionally” disrupt an election, the country can only respond where a criminal threshold has been met, taking into account the rights of freedom of expression and freedom of political thought.
The committee recommended that the Government consider legislating to make seeking to disrupt an election a specific offence with its own thresholds and penalties.
Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the Press Gallery since 2018.
Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.