Act most keen to court expat voters

By ANNE BESTON and HELEN TUNNAH

Parties will chase the overseas vote for next month's election, but there will be no stampede to follow Act leader Richard Prebble to foreign shores.

Mr Prebble was vote-chasing in Hong Kong this week, and his deputy, Ken Shirley, will campaign in London next month. MP Stephen Franks has already hit the hustings in Sydney.

The Greens also plan to send candidates, not MPs, to London and Sydney, but the two major parties, Labour and National, say the actual rewards from global vote-gathering are unclear.

Mr Prebble said there were up to 600,000 New Zealanders overseas and 250,000 potential voters, but statistics show few expatriates bother to vote.

Last election, only 11,400 took part in the poll. Traditionally, the Electoral Enrolment Centre says only 18,000 to 20,000 New Zealanders overseas bother to even enrol.

It is not compulsory for New Zealanders living abroad to enrol, and there are restrictions on who can vote.

Permanent residents must return to New Zealand once a year and a citizen once every three years to be eligible.

However Act, battling modest poll ratings, believes law changes could significantly boost the expatriates who will vote in the July 27 election.

Potential voters can now enrol and download voting forms online. Voters here and overseas need only re-enrol if their details have changed, which should increase overall numbers.

Mr Prebble said yesterday that his party received a high number of the overseas votes last election - 13 per cent of the total - and aimed to contact 100,000 voters by e-mail this campaign.

Labour president Mike Williams said his party had courted the overseas vote for years through Labour's London branch and the Australian Labor Party. "We're away ahead of old Richard on that one I'm afraid."

National's campaign director Alan Johnston was sceptical about the value of sending MPs overseas to vote chase.

"It's about allocating scarce resources. Potentially there might be a quarter of a million votes, but accessing them is pretty difficult."

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