The Government has set aside $25 million for a referendum on four-year parliamentary terms, pencilled in to run alongside next year’s election.
The Cabinet has agreed in principle to holding the referendum, but a final decision is expected in early September, when a select committee report on the related legislation is due.
If it goes ahead, the vote will take place on considerably shorter funds than the $33.057m officials originally budgeted for.
Ministry of Justice documents released to the Herald under the provisions of the OIA show Finance Minister Nicola Willis insisted the original costings be pared some 25% to $25m.
The funding is split across both the current fiscal year and fiscal 25/26.
Willis’ spokesman directed the Herald’s questions to Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith.
In a statement, Goldsmith said he is satisfied the “allocated funding of $25m would enable the Electoral Commission and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to appropriately implement any referendum and information programme”.
He said no decision has been made on whether the legislation required for a referendum on four-year terms – The Term of Parliament (Enabling four-year Term) Legislation Amendment Bill – will proceed beyond select committee stage.
Several parties close to the matter suggested to the Herald that both the limited budget and the limited capacity of the Electoral Commission, in light of significant electoral change the Government is also pursuing, mean a referendum is very unlikely to go ahead in 2026.
In addition, the amendment bill in its current form is complicated and too messy to underpin a clean referendum question.
The Act Party and the New Zealand First Party coalition agreements with the National Party agree that the legislation for four-year parliamentary terms should reach first reading and select committee stage respectively.
Neither specify that a referendum must be held in 2026, though the Act Party is particularly keen on this option.
The work and expense of any referendum would be divided across the Electoral Commission, the independent Crown entity responsible for running parliamentary elections and referendums, and the MoJ.
A spokeswoman for the commission told the Herald the agency is already building the possibility of a referendum into its general election planning and has started to incur costs.
She said that so far, these costs are low and can be absorbed through the business as usual budget; the funding “pre-commitment” in the Budget has not yet been drawn down.
The $25m cost breaks down to $6.227m to develop and deliver a public information campaign (the job of the MoJ) and $18.773m for the Electoral Commission to conduct a binding referendum.
The budget was based, at least in part, on the $25.4m cost of delivering two referendums at the 2020 election – on euthanasia and cannabis legalisation.
MoJ civil and constitutional general manager Kathy Brightwell said that for the 2020 referendums, the Electoral Commission received $18.4m and the MoJ ran the public information campaign for $7m. She said some additional funding was also provided because of disruption related to the pandemic and the change of the election date.
The Herald requested the cost for each of the 2020 referendums, but Brightwell declined; she said the funding was combined because implementation was concurrent.
The budget documents recently released under the OIA also provide some detail about the 2020 costs.
A January 2025 letter to Willis from Goldsmith noted the Electoral Commission was able to use Covid-19 funds and existing paper stocks to keep the referendum costs low in 2020; Goldsmith also cited a “different delivery model” and “significant inflationary cost increase since 2020″.
“Revised service levels for the 2026 general election mean that there is no ability to absorb these additional costs again,” Goldsmith wrote, then plumping for a budget bid reduced from the original $33.057m figure to $26.217m, but which appears to have left Willis unmoved.
The public would need to be sufficiently well informed about any plan for four-year parliamentary terms and its implications for a referendum result to be credible. To undertake a public information campaign, the MoJ would likely deploy some existing staff and also hire in specialist expertise.
For the 2020 referendums, MoJ’s annual review documents show the agency signed a one-year, $3m contract with advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi to deliver “public information across the referendums”.
That work ranged from producing a mass-media advertising and information campaign to surveying the population to gauge baseline awareness of the related issues and convening focus groups.
In addition, an official website provided explanatory material. Information, including through a mailout campaign, was also disseminated in a range of translations and formats aimed at accessibility.
The MoJ used the web addresses www.referendum.govt.nz and www.referendums.govt.nz, both under the purview of the Department of Internal Affairs. (In 2019, the MoJ also took out dozens of additional domain names, including: www.referendums.geek.nz, www.referenda.nz, www.referendum.kiwi; it continues to pay $817 annually to retain 21 of these.)
The MoJ documents released to the Herald redact important figures, but they suggest that over half of the $8.057m sliced from the original referendum budget came from reduced spending on advertising and public information for both the Electoral Commission and the MoJ (much of the balance appears to have been reduced contingency provisions).
“This may result in lower reach for the information programme. The target aim for the programme is to reach 85% of eligible voters. Any significant reduction in reach may mean lower awareness, lower participation and lower confidence in the referendum,” officials warned.
They also cited concern for “reduced knowledge of the referendum topic, and how to vote in the referendum”, which could increase polling wait times, they said.
The Electoral Commission’s job is tied to the nuts and bolts of holding an election, and it would also be responsible for letting voters know a referendum was being held for communicating and how to enrol and vote.
The Government is also pursuing a series of Electoral Act changes, including scrapping same-day enrolment to vote on election day, and the commission will already have a big job in 2026 accommodating and communicating this.
The spokeswoman said that in preparing for a referendum the commission must consider and plan for: “printing referendum voting papers, employing more people to issue votes, training for staff, bigger voting places to accommodate more issuing points, and headquarters large enough to securely hold referendum as well as voting papers”.
As it’s currently anticipated, the wording of the referendum question that arises from the amendment bill is unwieldy: “Yes, I support the Term of Parliament (Enabling four-year Term) Legislation Amendment Bill coming into force” and “No, I do not support the [Term of Parliament (Enabling four-year Term) Legislation Amendment Bill] coming into force”.
However, many observers think the bill, if it survives, is likely to change; this could allow for a cleaner question.
Professor Andrew Geddis is a specialist in election law and constitutional matters at the University of Otago’s Faculty of Law.
He estimated general cross-party support for four-year parliamentary terms, notwithstanding differences of opinion on the details, mean the matter is likely to go to a referendum.
However, he also thought the select committee will likely recommend that the bill is simplified considerably, such that it provides for four-year parliamentary terms, possibly in much the same way current legislation provides for three-year terms.
The bill currently contains provisions aimed at offsetting the additional power a four-year term would hand to governments. Chiefly, it provides for greater power to accrue to Opposition parties through select committees.
Geddis said the committee may recommend that these power-balancing provisions be removed from the legislation altogether and provided for through convention rather than statute in Parliament’s Standing Orders.
If the Government agreed, this could pave the way for a much cleaner referendum question, along the lines of: I do/I do not support four-year parliamentary terms.
Kate MacNamara is a South Island-based journalist with a focus on policy, public spending and investigations. She spent a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to New Zealand. She joined theHeraldin 2020.