Monday, November 25, 2019

Erasing the infamy

Last year, the Supreme Court confirmed that National's prisoner voting ban - a law so shoddily passed that it brought Parliament into disrepute - breached the Bill of Rights Act. This year, the Waitangi Tribunal added that it also breached the Treaty of Waitangi. And now, the government has finally got the message and will reverse it:

Justice Minister Andrew Little has revealed some prisoners will be allowed to vote in next year's general election.

People sentenced to less than three years in prison will have their voting rights restored.

This will return the law to the way it was pre-2010, before the National-led government removed voting rights from all sentenced prisoners.

"We plan to make this change in an Electoral Amendment Bill before the next election, so that people sentenced to less than three years imprisonment can participate in the 2020 election," Little said.

Which is good, and what should happen when the courts find Parliament has breached its duty to follow the Treaty and the BORA. At the same time, it raises a number of questions. Most obviously, why they're not going the whole way, and restoring voting rights to every prisoner, rather than just going back to the status quo ante? Because the arguments for short-term prisoners being able to vote apply just as powerfully to long-term ones. But Labour is the government of half-measures, so I guess that's all we'll ever get from them.

And while we're at it, if the government is willing to use the Electoral Amendment Bill - pitched as an administrative tidy-up - to do this, why won't it also use it to reform the electoral finance regime and impose greater transparency? Or begin the process to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote? Both have powerful democratic arguments in their favour, and have also been demanded by submitters on the Bill. Or is the unjust status quo all we can ever expect from Labour?