Standing Orders

I move, That the amendments to the Standing Orders set out in Part 2 of the report of the Standing Orders Committee on the Review of Standing Orders be adopted, with effect from the day after the dissolution or expiration of the present Parliament. Today’s debate, of course, completes the standard triennial review of the Standing Orders, looking at the procedures and practices of the House and how they can work more effectively. This year’s recommendations cover changes to rules and practices in a number of key areas, including a reorganisation of the House’s select committees, a change to the way the House debates international treaties, and a number of suggestions for improving the lawmaking process.

I would like to begin by making the observation that many overseas parliaments do not in fact review their rules regularly. While a specific issue may lead to a review or a rule change, I believe that our process illustrates real value in frequently making improvements based on cross-party consensus.

One of the underlying themes to emerge from the review of the Standing Orders is the growing status of the Business Committee, notably since the review of the Standing Orders in 2011, as a way, a mechanism, or a process by which the Government and other parties can make the best use of House time to advance measures with broad-based support. I entirely welcome this. The National Government thinks it is an excellent development that is allowing the Parliament to evolve and to innovate in its processes, and to be more relevant to its members and also to New Zealanders.

Further to this, the Standing Orders Committee noted that there are many ways for the Business Committee to promote better lawmaking: rewarding the use of inclusive and robust pre-legislative processes by the Government, refereeing Supplementary Order Papers to select committees, and arranging the Committee stage of bills. As we have seen during the 51st Parliament—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: You mean referring, not refereeing.

—referring, sure—the efficient use of available House time and mechanisms such as extended sittings have seen a relatively low use of urgency. I note that there is significant potential to consider other types of business through extended sittings, including other non-controversial bills and special debate. I hope to see greater and more varied use of the procedure in the future. I would note, in that regard, that over the last month we have used extended sittings to good effect, I think, literally every single week, and that is allowing Parliament to do more and to progress more of the programme that the Government has. I think that is good for everyone.

I welcome the Clerk’s intention to produce a Business Committee handbook, to help both committee members and members generally to make the most of the Business Committee’s powers to innovate. That is an important point because, of course, it will not just be the members of the committee; it will be all members of the House who will be able to put forward ways of doing things in relation to particular bills, but also more broadly, potentially.

Further to this, can I also add my appreciation to the members of the Business Committee for their constructive engagement this term. I think it has been, in my experience both as deputy leader and now as leader, very constructive. It is one of those things that people outside, of course, do not see, but it is, in some ways, Parliament at its best. That does not mean that everything gets through it, but we work constructively together across the parties, and that has been a good balance of Government progressing its programme, but also members of other parties getting to do and say things that are important to them. I think, for example, of the debate on climate change as a very good example, and I note the contribution that the member Kennedy Graham made to progressing that.

I am pleased that the Standing Orders Committee gave more formal consideration around the procedures for the Committee of the whole House stage of bills. It was during this Parliament that a precedent from the 1960s was drawn upon to seek leave for debate on two interconnected bills to be taken together as cognate bills, which has since been used to facilitate legislation on which there is broad agreement. Many of the suggestions agreed to by the committee will aid us in ensuring that the House functions as an effective legislature. These include—and I will not go through all of them—that the structure of bills should not be formally linked to the arrangements for debate, arranging for the Committee stage to consider a bill as a whole, establishing a practice of determining themes for debate during the Committee stage of a bill, removing the limit on the number of speeches for individual members in the Committee stage of a bill, and requiring amendments to be lodged at least 24 hours before the Committee stage commences.

All of those things, I think, are good, and show that the Business Committee—and, ultimately Parliament—is working together and evolving to stay relevant to members, but also to the wider public. I look forward to these arrangements being trialled frequently during the 52nd Parliament, with a view—as the report makes clear—to them becoming the default position and rules in the future.

However, I recognise that the review of the Standing Orders is also a balancing act requiring give and take between Government and non-Government parties. In this vein, can I once again thank all members of not only the Business Committee but the Standing Orders Committee for their diligence and time throughout this process. With those comments, I commend the report to the House.

From the time that the committee deliberated on this report until about 10 days ago, I anticipated that this would be, effectively, my valedictory speech. How times have changed.

This is the worst and the least ambitious review of the Standing Orders I have ever seen.

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Oh, what a joke. What a bad joke from a bitter old man. What a joke.

Well, it is better to be a slightly bitter, slightly elderly person than a lazy Minister who did not read the submissions to the committee and who had to read a speech in the House today. He clearly had not read through the speech, which someone else had written, and he could not even tell the difference between “referring” and “refereeing”. He is the laziest member of the Standing Orders Committee that I have ever seen, and he put Mr Speaker in an awful position as the chair of the committee, because Mr Speaker had to consistently remind him of the different objectives of the executive and of the Parliament. Mr Speaker had to explain the differences to Mr Bridges time and time again. In the end, of course, Mr Bridges reminded me of Dr Gromyko—“Dr No”. To every positive suggestion put forward by submitters, Simon Bridges said no. That is why later this year they will either reconvene the Standing Orders Committee or pass sessional orders to make many of the improvements that were suggested by the submitters and were ignored by the committee.

Some of the things that are very important involve making this place more family friendly. Some of them, I accept, are administrative; they are in the hands of the Speaker and of the Parliamentary Service and of the Office of the Clerk. There are some that will involve changes to the Standing Orders, and some of them will involve changes to electoral law. I think we can learn a lot from some of the European MMP Parliaments as to ways of having temporary replacements for members who are on family leave. I look forward later this year to sitting in that Chair and having the brand new baby Prime and the yet-to-be born baby Allan coming up and giving me a cuddle, because we have become more family friendly in this House and we will be more welcoming of children here.

On the question of the prayer, the committee says that there will be consultation; it recommends consultation. I think there should be too. I think it should be brief. The current parliamentary prayer is not appropriate for the type of Parliament we have become and I think it is important that we change it, and soon.

Under Labour, select committees will go back to being creatures of the Parliament and not rubber stamps for the executive. There will be many more Opposition majorities and Opposition chairs of committees so that they can work through the legislation and give a proper parliamentary opinion rather than being a place for people who are greasing up to the executive in order to try to be Ministers going forward. We have had too much of a history of that recently—people who do not do their jobs as chairs of select committees because they want to become Ministers—

💬 Dr David Clark: Tell us what you really think.

Well—the next point I want to make is that this Parliament and the last couple of parliaments have had very poor pre-legislative scrutiny. We want to encourage Governments to do better consultation. We want to get back to having things like green papers and white papers. We want draft bills available with reasonable periods. We think the Government should be rewarded for doing the right thing. We are already doing quite well with having our extended sittings, but one of the things that we should be doing is saying that if a Government does the right thing before the legislation is introduced, then it should have the right to go to an extended sitting without having to have permission and without the select committees being shut down. So if Governments do the right thing they get an easier track through the House, with the non-relevant committees also sitting.

I think there should be a trade-off. I think we do not need, now, urgency in its normal form within this Parliament. If we get a proper track working then I think we should save urgency for items that are actually an emergency, where we do have to do something in a hurry: natural disasters, maybe urgent revenue changes, sales tax changes, or similar things. I think for that there should be a 75 percent majority. The Government should be able to convince the Parliament—a supermajority of the Parliament—that in fact there is something that is very urgent rather than using urgency as a lazy approach to avoid proper scrutiny in select committees and to try to do a bit of catch-up when the Government has not been working well.

That sort of approach would put a bit of pressure on Oppositions. If there really was an emergency—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: When I was in Opposition under you guys—

Well, the member will not be in Opposition under us because he is—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Was, was.

He was, and, Mr Deputy Speaker, I think that in that time we had not done our wonderful changes to be able to go back and sit on Wednesday and Thursday morning through extended sittings—something that the current Mr Deputy Speaker has been in the Chair for and has guided the House through really well. I think it should not be reserved only for Treaty bills and other non-contentious issues; my view is that Parliament could make a lot more progress and be a much better place if, while members are here and not sitting on select committees, they could be nutting out the nuts and bolts, especially of the Committee stage, and make some real progress. We need to have, also, some better systems for sending urgent legislation off to select committees.

So I want to finish how I started. This is an exceptionally disappointing report. There have been many submitters who came to the committee who have indicated that they felt their submissions were a waste of time and that Ministers on the committee had not read their submissions, and clearly had not read their submissions when they were being heard. As a result of that, this has been an opportunity wasted. But I just want to make it absolutely clear that those big ideas will be picked up in November.

Kia ora, Mr Deputy Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to speak on this, the adoption of the Standing Orders Committee’s report. One of the problems identified in the committee was how much of parliamentary jargon is totally misunderstood by the public of New Zealand. When we talk about the Standing Orders, all we are talking about, basically, is the rules of Parliament, and I agree with part of the jargon-busting recommendations of the report—let us call them the rules of Parliament instead of the Standing Orders.

Look, the report notes we have got terms such as Supplementary Order Paper, which no one has a clue what it means. We should call it what it is—an amendment paper. We have got other things—cognate bills. No one knows what they are. Let us just call them what they are, associated bills. A personal bugbear is when the Speaker rises and says: “Does this stand part?”. It makes no common sense that, actually, what the Speaker is saying is “Should this be included?”. Why can a modern Speaker in the future with future non-jargon rules not say exactly that?

Also, I have never in my time in Parliament seen such a blistering speech from the Hon Trevor Mallard in response to the Leader of the House, Simon Bridges.

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Well, you haven’t been here long enough then.

I have been here for three terms, Mr Bridges, and I have been through this committee myself a few times. The fact is that it was outstanding and incredible—the allegations—and I guess we saw the proof in the pudding with the Minister’s speech, which was basically read verbatim, and I question whether in fact he wrote that at all. Maybe he could go to the House and update us.

But the fact is that this is a chance—one that happens only every 3 years, every triennium—to update Parliament’s rules. It is a fantastic opportunity to modernise this, and I think I agree with the Hon Trevor Mallard that we have not taken that opportunity. Sure, there is a little bit of tinkering, a few changes around the margins, but not the substantive transformational change that could modernise this House. We see a million New Zealanders who do not vote. So many hundreds of thousands never tune into this House or see the relevance in their daily lives. I have got a vision that this House could be more open, more relevant to New Zealanders. We could modernise it so people can not only participate in politics in the Parliament, but partake in their democracy, and that is exactly what we should be debating.

Some of the changes we support—the intent of consulting and making it a more family-friendly Parliament. It is something that is sorely needed. It is something that I have experienced as a father who has raised two kids in this House over my parliamentary career—the challenges you have as a father. We have seen the challenges, particularly for mothers in terms of young babies and feeding. We have made some improvements but—as you can see with the former Green MP Holly Walker’s book outlining the challenges she faced as a young mum and a member of Parliament—this House does need to up its game to support families and make sure that this, the House of Representatives, is, in fact, representative of all New Zealanders, including young mums and young dads.

In terms of the select committee changes, these are pretty rational in terms of reorganisation and minimising the numbers. It makes sense to put the Law and Order Committee and the Justice and Electoral Committee together. A key change, and this flows on from the Standing Orders review of the last Parliament, was the new expectation that select committees will comment and report on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act section 7 reports. We get this information, and it is important that it is actually included in the report and, I think, debated by members, because it is crucially important that parliamentarians discuss issues of human rights as we consider legislation.

Now, the area that I am particularly passionate about is the broadcasting rules. I entered Parliament at about the same time as this new rule was brought in that video footage from Parliament could not be used to satirise, ridicule, or denigrate MPs. The irony is that this rule—this law change—came in at about the same time that the internet and YouTube were taking off. The whole point of the internet is that people can create content. They can mash together content. They can use existing footage and content, and repurpose it, not just to have a laugh—though, there is a lot of good quality content out there. But this is a democratic principle that goes back thousands of years to ancient Greece of the importance of the public to be able to satirise those in positons of power.

So, I believe this has had a chilling effect on the public democratic discourse in the country. The fact that people could have been brought in front of the Speaker and had a complaint laid against them because they had grabbed a bit of footage from the Parliament’s YouTube channel and repurposed it, or had a bit of a laugh and added commentary, is, frankly, out of date and anti-democratic. So this is an incredibly positive step forward. Look, I urge the public to get involved and to satirise their parliamentarians—their decision makers. It is an important part of our democracy, and that is also why we need to update our copyright legislation. This was one barrier against it; our current Copyright Act is another.

So there is huge room for improvement, as the Hon Trevor Mallard talked about—a huge number of issues that we could have addressed, but we have not in this report because it is tinkering in a few marginal changes. Urgency is a particularly important one. All members in this House would have seen legislation passed under urgency when it did not have to happen that way. It should happen only in extraordinary circumstances, and I personally would support that recommendation for a 75 percent majority.

But the biggest thing is that technology is fundamentally changing the way that the public is interacting with politicians and their democracy—all of this is ignored in the report. We should be having the conversation that was recently opened by Max Rashbrooke in his recent report into how democracy is changing and how we can open up access to political debate. We should be having the debate about how we can use new technology; how we could get the public to crowdsource legislation, as is happening in other countries; how we could update and modernise our referendum and petition laws to allow people to harness the power of the internet—basically, how we can, as a representative body, actually more actively, transparently, and openly represent the people of New Zealand so that their views can be heard in this House. We could be a pioneering country in terms of the opening up of our democracy by utilising new technologies as part of our political decision-making and legislative process. There is a huge amount of work that we could be doing.

Look, let us have that conversation next term. We could be one of the most modern, open, and transparent Parliaments in the world. It is not going to happen as a result of this report—despite some of the positive changes—but I am really excited about having that conversation next term about how we can have an open, transparent, and modern parliamentary democracy in New Zealand. Kia ora, Mr Deputy Speaker.

New Zealand First will vote in favour of the motion, because some progress is better than none. This has been a long process, it has been a very interesting process, and it has been one that, I think you could say, has resulted in slow progress towards many of the things that a lot of us would have liked to see. But slow progress is better than none. The other thing that struck me about it was the, I think, unusually large number of submissions from members of the public. They were very interesting, because it shows how the public sees the Parliament and how it works. So for that reason I was particularly interested in hearing those people and reading what they wrote. I appreciate their input, and it is a little bit sad that some of their better ideas have not been incorporated.

I would have to say that I agree with Trevor Mallard when he said that the reason for progress being much slower than it should have been is that the Government members, and, in particular, Simon—yes, yes, Simon Bridges over there—said no so many times. He is the “all-no-ing” Minister—not the “k-n-o-w-i-n-g” type; just the “n-o-ing” type of Minister—who said no far too often, mostly because he actually did not understand, or want to understand, the reason why some of the better ideas were being put forward, and I think that is very sad. We need consensus on this committee to make progress, and he threw his weight around a little bit and made sure that not enough progress was made. I think that really is sad, and I would like to see that change in the future.

However, I would have to say that the main thrust of New Zealand First’s approach to this was to see that there were changes made as far as the standing committees were concerned. I am pleased to say that I think we got about 95 percent of what we sought. So we are pretty happy with that, but there is one exception to that, and that is why I say 95 percent. That one exception is—and I want to particularly emphasise it—that the Government was very intransigent when it came to the question of the allocation of chairmanships of standing committees. It was an absolute, total no, when that approach is utterly inconsistent with the principle of proportionality, which has been used in other parts of the very same report—

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Don’t worry, Denis, we can make you a chair next time.

—when it comes to allocation of members to committees, in particular. Now, Mr Bridges has just been interjecting with some more of his negative nonsense, and that is to be expected. That is what he is basically there for, and he did a good job of that, so I have to congratulate the “all-no-ing” Minister for his input as far as that is concerned. But I did want to go through the rest of the report as far as the standing committees are concerned, because there have been some major changes, which we at New Zealand First very much approve of.

First of all, we approve of the reduction in the number of standing committees from 13 to 12 and we approve of the subject areas, which have been rearranged as well. I think that this is a more rational grouping of subject areas than we have had before. It actually brings it significantly up to date and allows for better integration of those subject areas with each other, and I will come to that again in just a moment.

The other important issue, as far as this is concerned, was the number of members who would be allocated to the standing committees, and with 96 seats overall to be provided, it means eight per committee. That is the right number. It is difficult to decide what is too big and what is too small. It is important that they not be too large, because then their effectiveness would be reduced, and yet, at the same time, they need to be representative. The allocation will be on a proportional basis, unlike the committee chairs, Mr Bridges, but nevertheless, as far as the committee membership is concerned, it will be on a proportional basis, and that is good to see. It does mean, of course, that with 120 members, even taking the Ministers out of that consideration, there may be some members who will miss out on a standing committee. But, of course, they could still substitute in or substitute permanently or temporarily for other members, so that is not such a big consideration.

Turning to the grouping of the subjects in the standing committees, for us this was quite a big issue, because we actually found it quite difficult in the current term of Parliament to be properly represented at some of those committees, and to have the right people there at the right time. I think this grouping will make that much better. So the first one is the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, which will, as always, be a busy committee that straddles everything from business development, Crown minerals, innovation, broadcasting, communications, and so on—very wide ranging. When it comes to the second one, the Education and Workforce Committee, this is a very important change, because in the same standing committee it puts industrial relations and also education, training, employment, and immigration. These things are actually very closely linked. The most important link there is between education and training, on the one hand, and the workforce, on the other. We in New Zealand First think it is very important in the future that there be more attention paid to the streaming of people through the education system into appropriate workforce positions, with the appropriate qualifications.

The Environment Committee is the third, and that includes, of course, the very important issue of climate change. So that is going to be a busy committee as well. The Finance and Expenditure Committee is No. 4. No. 5 is the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. No. 6 is the Governance and Administration Committee, which will now include local government, which is currently inappropriately placed elsewhere, and I think it will be much better placed in the Governance and Administration Committee. Its current grouping—the Local Government and Environment Committee—might have had some genuine relationships with each other, but I think it is much better placed on that committee.

No. 7 is the Health Committee, and it is always going to be very busy. It is such a huge area to cover, with health. In the Justice Committee there have been some major changes with the grouping of constitutional and electoral matters, and also human rights, justice, and the courts, but now also crime and criminal law, police, and corrections. Grouping those into the same committee is very intelligent, because it actually means that the whole field will be covered, and it will not be piecemeal between a number of other committees. So it is very, very welcome to see that happening.

The Māori Affairs Committee will continue to stand alone. It has always been a busy committee, and I think it is going to be busy for years to come. The Primary Production Committee has the usual things in it, but now it has got racing in it as well. There was some discussion about where racing should go. It could have gone in a number of different committees, but I think it is probably quite well placed there in the Primary Production Committee. No. 11 is the Social Services and Community Committee, and, finally, No. 12 is the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and that is going to be, of course, a very busy committee as well. So they are all going to be busy but now with better integration of the different purposes for which each committee will do its work. Industrial relations will no longer be grouped with transport and instead it goes up and into the Education and Workforce Committee, where I think it is much better situated.

We in New Zealand First, as I have said, are very happy with what we particularly wanted to achieve, which was a reorganisation of the standing committees, and we have seen that. We have seen a better grouping of the subjects for those committees. It will mean that we will all be able to work much more efficiently and effectively in those committees. For small parties, in particular, this will be a much better set-up.

There are many other subjects that one could cover. Obviously, I will not have time to do so. The only other one that I could perhaps mention is the recommendation for international treaties. I think that is a good step forward, so that now there is a process for debating those, and in return the first reading of the bill will be taken without debate. So the Government will not be losing any time, but the Parliament will be more democratic and the public will be better informed for that process. We will be voting in favour.

Motion agreed to.