Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): The first point the National Opposition would want to make about this bill is the very poor precedent it sets around making electoral law changes. We're an unusual country: we don't have a constitution, we don't have a second House. We should not have a system, in a country that celebrates itself as being one of the best democracies in the world, where the Government of the day by a slim majority can change the rules for the next election. And that is why we've had a longstanding precedent around the process for these sorts of changes: that they're done on a bipartisan basis. There were nine electoral amendment bills during the term of the Key-English Government. Every single one of the Government bills was consulted extensively with the Opposition. In fact, there was very substantive compromise on many of those Government bills. This is actually the fourth electoral bill from this Minister, of which there has been zero—no—consultation, at all. We only actually found out about this bill as a consequence of questioning during the annual review of financial Estimates.