Standing Orders — Sessional

I call on Government—

Sorry, Mr Speaker—that’s me, Mr Speaker, and I apologise. I’ll just find the appropriate piece of paper. I seek leave to move a motion regarding a change to Parliament’s sessional orders in how it deals with COVID19 orders.

💬 SPEAKER: Is there any objection to course of action being followed? There is none.

I move, That the House amend the rules relating to the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020, adopted by the House as a sessional order on 8 December 2020, by replacing the definition of COVID-19 order in rule 1 (Interpretation) with: “COVID-19 order has the meaning given to it by section 5(1) of the Act.”

The purpose of this is very clear. Yesterday, Parliament amended the COVID-19 Response Act. The current sessional orders deal with the COVID-19 response orders made under the Act as it existed prior to yesterday. We need to amend the sessional orders that we have put in place to ensure that the new order-making provisions inserted by the Act yesterday are now covered by those sessional orders. So this will ensure that those orders, particularly related to vaccination requirements, are subject to the same process. Under that process, they’re tabled in the House. They are then referred to the Regulations Review Committee. The Regulations Review Committee scrutinise those. They report them back to the House, and the House then confirms them by way of a motion in the House.

So it’s a minor technical amendment to ensure that the rules of the Parliament keep pace with the changing nature of the legislation, but I think that that scrutiny function has served the Parliament very, very well. I think that the Regulations Review Committee have done a very thorough job of scrutinising the orders that have been made under that Act and have often prompted changes to some of the orders that have been made under that Act for the better, and certainly have prompted changes sometimes in the process of the way some of those orders have been made as well, which, again, I think has been useful. I think the debates that we have had in the House around confirming those orders has also been important for the purposes of transparency and accountability. So making sure that those existing provisions apply to the new order-making powers, I think, is very important, and hence that’s why I’ve moved the motion.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Just, in the spirit of coming towards the end of the parliamentary year, a bouquet and a brickbat for the Leader of the House and also the Minister for COVID-19 Response. I suppose the brickbat, to start with the negative first, is that this is an untidy process, with the Leader of the House having to seek leave to amend the sessional order. It really could have been flagged in advance. We’ll support it, of course, but I think the process is an untidy one. This really should have been envisaged as a result of the—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: You can’t do it until the bill is passed.

Yeah, I know you can’t do it until the bill is passed, but it could have been flagged up to the Opposition, or, indeed, placed on the Order Paper of the House. I acknowledge it can’t be done until the bill is passed, but I think it reflects the hurry with which the vaccinations legislation was passed yesterday in Parliament. It feels like a long time ago, but it was indeed only yesterday.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: A few other things have happened since then.

Yeah, yeah—well, we’ve had an announcement about managed isolation and quarantine, and if you want me to get into that, I’d be really happy to get into that, but the Speaker will pull me up for going away from the motion. So that’s the brickbat, and I think it is an untidy process.

But I just want to finish by the bouquet, which is that the Minister is right that the Regulations Review Committee works very diligently and conscientiously under the stewardship of Chris Penk, with his inimitable legal mind, and, may I say, also some very good contributions by legally trained people from the Government, including Rachel Brooking and Vanushi Walters. They do an excellent job on the committee, and it’s one of those committees, actually, which genuinely operates in a relatively bipartisan way.

One could argue that it’s a shame there are not more select committees that genuinely put aside the party politics and just get into the nitty-gritty of legislation. Some would argue that the Regulations Review Committee is more appropriate for that, being focused on legality, but it’d be nice if some more committees actually exercised their constitutional job of holding the executive to account. But the committee does a good job, and I think, over time, as the Minister has said, the process of having the orders made and then referred to the committee and then confirmed by the House has proven to be a pretty good one.

I just want to finally finish up by flagging that we in the Opposition will be really diligently going through the orders in relation to vaccination. The Leader of the House made mention of the variety of orders that are going to come down the line as a result of this new legislation we passed yesterday, and one of the consequences of that legislation yesterday is very broad powers for the Government—in fact, some legal scholars would say far too broad—and there are going to be real issues as to whether or not the orders are vires the empowering Act, whether or not the orders are actually allowed to be made pursuant to the Act.

So the orders are going to set up the whole traffic light framework. They’re going to set up the vaccine mandates for the private sector and the use of vaccine certificates across broad swaths of the New Zealand economy, and I’ve got to say that that is going to be a tricky job to do via public health orders. The drafting has to be absolutely pitch perfect. The Minister is right that there’s been a bit of back and forth and some have been changed, and I just want to flag—and I’m sure Chris Penk would agree—that we will be invigilating those orders very closely indeed to make sure they comply with the rule of law. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I rise briefly, on behalf of the Greens, to support this motion. We’re just really happy that this item just shows that this motion comes to this space because it just needed a little bit more work to make sure it was fit for purpose. We hope that the willingness to address this issue will mean that the Government will reconsider their earlier decision, and they will now be very excited to have a post-enactment review by the Health Committee of the COVID-19 response vaccination legislation that we passed yesterday.

Again, I shout out to the Regulations Review Committee and the hard work that they do, and advocating always for the Health Committee, with the incredible expertise that we have on there, that will help this process and the orders and regulations that will flow from it. Kia ora.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise very briefly on behalf of the ACT Party to support the motion that’s been brought by the Minister for COVID-19 Response today. But I also have to just state the issue that the ACT Party has, which is that we shouldn’t be in this position. The problem that we have is not any fault of any member of staff of the House of Representatives that we have had to move this motion today. They work very hard, they’re very diligent, and they’re very methodical, and I have a lot of respect for the legal drafters and the people who work in this building. The issue that we have is that this problem came about because of a rushed law, and we wouldn’t have problems like this if we had proper scrutiny and proper time so that people who are diligent can have the time to do their jobs to the best possible level.

This is just one of the most recent problems that we’ve faced. I know that under other forms of COVID legislation, there have been, I mean, a few areas that have needed to be tidied up post the fact, and we would just say that New Zealand deserves to have a properly functioning democracy. We’re happy that this has been brought to our attention so that we can rectify the issue quickly, but it also goes to show how scary it could be if people weren’t doing their jobs and checking to make sure that things are in place that do need to be in place, because we do, in the middle of a pandemic, need to have a properly functioning democracy and scrutiny of lawmaking.

Motion agreed to.