Prisoner voting Bill
January 2011
Another extraordinary members’ bill, under the name of National back-bench List MP Paul Quinn, appeared later in the year. This reversed the 1993 Act (passed by a National Government) which allowed prisoners serving less than 3 years to vote. This Act had been passed because New Zealand had produced its own Bill of Rights and also signed up to the United Nations International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. It was clear that a total ban on all prisoners voting was in contravention of both these legal documents. The Attorney-General’s report on this Bill duly made these points in no uncertain terms.
Like many, we had not taken the Bill very seriously. As the issue in itself is not a core concern of ours, we did not submit to the select committee (although one of our Board members did so as an individual). Virtually all submissions were strongly against the Bill, mostly for Bill of Rights constitutional reasons. Imagine our surprise when the Government (National and of course ACT, led by the former unlamented ACT MP David Garrett) happily supported it, and ensured that it was quickly pushed through, with minimal debate. We wrote to the PM, asking for it to be a free vote, but in vain. We have emphasised that our opposition to the Bill is not based on any strong views about which prisoners should or should not have the vote, but on the Government’s appalling actions in totally over-riding the whole Bill of Rights process. They clearly do not take either that or the select committee process remotely seriously, which bodes ill for minority groups such as ourselves. In fact, this bill proved to be a real textbook case of how NOT to proceed over such issues. A detailed breakdown of the whole process appeared in our December 2010 newsletter: http://www.rainbowwellington.org.nz/newsletters.asp?year=2010&month=DecemberIssues.asp#godzone .