I am listening to the Minister reading out a list of the things that the commission is obliged to do by law anyway, so why he has to restate them in this paper,
I do not know. The clear advice to the Committee and to the Speaker’s Committee was that if certain items were identified as priorities for the commission, other things would per se be of lesser priority. For example, overseas voter registration is a priority, but the registration of voters in this country, where 8 million people are not on the register, is not listed as a priority. This skews the work of the Electoral Commission, whether the Minister likes it or not.