We have been appalled by the NZ Electoral Commissions handling of this matter. They have placed barrier after barrier in the way of the Expatriate Partys registration. Like all other parties seeking registration, the Expats needed to have 500 members who were eligible voters. They signed up significantly more members than that. Some time after submitting their registration, the Commission demanded they provide written statements from members confirming when they were last in NZ to assess whether they were eligible voters. Such statements have not been required from the members of other parties. The Expats nevertheless complied with the request and after a frantic effort managed to gather the required number of written statements and send them to the Electoral Commission. After receiving the statements, the Commission informed the Expats that it no longer considered such statements sufficient to proceed with the Partys registration. It now demanded that the Party provide new membership forms including statements of when members were last in NZ. The Expats again complied with this request, even though it required them to get all their members to submit new membership forms and sign up new members to make up for any shortfall from existing members who did not respond in time. After a valiant effort, they managed to collect over 500 of the completed new membership forms in a matter of days. The forms were submitted to the Electoral Commission almost three weeks ago. However, yesterday the Electoral Commission informed the Expats that they had not completed processing their application by the required date (a date the Commission has known about for many months!) and that therefore the Expats would not be registered. We can only conclude that the Electoral Commission is either grossly incompetent or that it has deliberately attempted to prevent the Expats from registering. The process has been a disgrace. Oz Kiwi is an apolitical body, but we have always believed that having a party with a core policy of pushing for a resolution of the issues faced by Kiwis in Australia could only be a good thing. The Electoral Commission has effectively disenfranchised a large group of Kiwis in Australia, preventing them from voting for the party of their choice.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 01:02:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015