Standing Orders — Adoption of Amendments

In accordance with the determination of the Business Committee, I move, That the House adopt the amendments to the Standing Orders set out in Appendix A of the report of the Standing Orders Committee on the Review of Standing Orders 2026, with effect from the day after the dissolution or expiration of the present Parliament.

As we close out the 54th Parliament, we come to a debate held at the end of every term, one that I suspect only the deepest Parliament nerds will ever pay close attention to. Each term, the Standing Orders Committee needs to consider how Parliament operates and the rules it uses to keep things working well. It is an incredibly collaborative process, and I want to thank all of the members of Parliament who sat on the committee and worked through the changes before us. I also want to thank and acknowledge you, Mr Speaker, for presiding over the committee and ensuring the Standing Orders review was run in an efficient and considered way so that final decisions were not rushed. I also want to acknowledge the Clerk, Dr David Wilson, and his staff, particularly David Bagnall, for the tremendous amount of work that they have put into this report.

We discussed many issues during this process. I want to speak briefly about urgency, which was raised at length in submissions. I think a lot of people misunderstand urgency. A bill being included in an urgency motion does not in itself mean it is bypassing scrutiny or has been poorly drafted. In this Parliament, urgency has largely been used as overtime. Only 10 bills skipped select committee this term, outside the first 100-day plan and the normal Budget urgency. Part of the reason urgency has been used in that way is this is the first three-party coalition Government, which has placed additional pressure on legislative priorities. Bills have also, in general, taken significantly longer at the committee of the whole House stage than in previous Parliaments. I do want to note that the committee has agreed to changes that I think will encourage a better use of urgency, including requiring Ministers to explain why they need to bypass select committee, and I hope that will help demonstrate that when urgency is used, it is for good reason.

By far the biggest change we have agreed to is the establishment of the Legislative Scrutiny Committee which will act as a kind of second Chamber for the House. This committee will be able to take the place of the committee of the Whole House for non-controversial bills that would not normally receive high priority in any Government’s programme. The committee will be chaired by the Deputy Speaker and will not have a Government majority. The intention is that almost everything referred to it will be broadly supported, so that votes are rare. The Standing Orders Committee has thought carefully about how the legislative scrutiny would examine legislation and what would be referred to it, but thought experiments do not enact legislation, so it is important that we see that it is tested once the new Parliament begins.

There were other changes agreed by the committee that should make Parliament a better place for the public to engage with. I personally am particularly pleased to see a change requiring MPs who are on the parliamentary precinct to attend select committee meetings in person during sitting weeks, rather than by joining from Zoom from their parliamentary office. For many people, making a submission is the only time in their life that they directly engage with Parliament. People travel from all over the country to come here and to make an oral submission, often only for 10 minutes. It is incumbent on us as elected members of Parliament to give them the respect they deserve by being physically present and listening to them in person.

Similarly, just as a Minister will need to explain why a bill may be skipping select committee entirely, there will now also be a requirement for a Minister to give a reason if they choose to refer a bill to a select committee for less than six months. This is not necessarily to discourage that practice, because there will be cases when it’s needed, but it does put the justification on the record and will help members of the public understand why the Government has made that decision. It is another step towards increasing transparency in the legislative process.

There were many other changes agreed by the committee, and I’m sure other speakers in this debate will address some of them. These include making the pecuniary interests register clearer and fairer, looking at how select committees can use modern technology such as artificial intelligence to help manage the sometimes overrun submissions process, and further refining scrutiny weeks for the next Parliament. I’m incredibly proud of the work that we have done to make the next Parliament just that bit better, both for elected members but, more importantly, for the members of the public we are here to serve.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, on this final sitting day of the 54th Parliament. I want to begin by acknowledging the members of the Standing Orders Committee, and you, Mr Speaker, for chairing that committee; the Clerk of the House, Dr David Wilson; David Bagnall, Principal Clerk; and all of the officials and the specialist advisers that we were afforded the opportunity to have with us, who have worked through this process of this review.

Now, uncharitably, Standing Orders can sound like the somewhat boring machinery behind Parliament rather than the substance of what Parliament actually does, but they do matter, and they matter enormously. They determine who gets heard; they determine who can object to who gets heard. They determine all sorts of things that happen in this place. It’s about how the Government gets scrutinised. It’s how much opportunity the public has to participate in these processes, and, ultimately, it is determinative of how carefully this House makes law.

So changes to the rules of Parliament shouldn’t simply be imposed by whichever Government happens to have the numbers, or whichever party happens to have the numbers at any particular time. The committee works on the basis of overwhelming support across parties, because the legitimacy of the rules that make this place work depends on all of us having confidence in those rules.

The committee has tried to do two things at once—and I agree with many of the points made by the Hon Louise Upston. These are to make Parliament work more effectively while protecting proper scrutiny and democratic participation. The first and probably the most significant proposal is the creation of this new Legislative Scrutiny Committee. The Standing Orders Committee, at least, was trying to deal with what is a very real problem, increasing pressure on House time and on select committees, while still protecting what should be proper scrutiny of legislation. The Parliament has seen a very substantial use of urgency this term. The committee heard directly about the consequences of going through legislation at pace, going through the lawmaking process too quickly, less scrutiny, fewer opportunities for members to influence legislation, less public participation, and legislation sometimes bypassing or receiving a truncated select committee process, which is very important in terms of appropriate consideration.

The legislative scrutiny committee is an attempt to respond to that very pressure and to do things in a slightly different—or, hopefully, slightly better—way for appropriate, largely non-controversial legislation, of which there is certainly some. It would provide another place for that level of detailed scrutiny to occur. It’s a new place where we could examine legislative quality, consider bills, question Ministers—still in public—and have some cases, undertake a detailed consideration that would otherwise happen in the committee of the whole House stage. The point is not to just reduce scrutiny in order to save time—and it’s really important to emphasise that—it is to free up House time whilst still preserving scrutiny, and in doing so, hopefully, reduce some of the pressures which have led to an overuse of urgency.

Urgency—it would be remiss not to comment. Urgency is, of course, a legitimate parliamentary tool. It’s used by Governments of all stripes. But it should not become the routine answer to pressure on legislative programmes. Those are about choices, and Governments make choices about what occupies this House’s time. The Government devoted a significant amount of time—this House’s time and select committee time—to the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill this term, which went through a huge select committee process and was ultimately defeated. It also progressed several bills, including things like the English Language Bill, through all stages this year, some of which many people considered completely unnecessary. When Governments say there is not enough House time, it is also fair to ask how that time has been prioritised.

Now, the second point follows directly from that. Where urgency is still used, we do also need to make sure that there’s a greater accountability for bypassing that scrutiny. Under these proposed changes, a bill read for the first time under urgency would still go to a select committee process unless the member in charge specifically requested that it skip that stage and therefore has to, with some particularity, explain why that is warranted. That’s a modest but important safeguard and we’re yet to see how that will play out in reality but we hope that that works well. If a Government wants to remove an important stage of the parliamentary and public scrutiny, it is only fair and reasonable that they should at least have to explain why.

One of the other important parts of the work of the Standing Orders Committee was, as always, looking at financial scrutiny. One of Parliament’s most fundamental constitutional roles is holding the executive to account for the money it spends. The scrutiny weeks were introduced following the previous Standing Orders review, in which they established a parliamentary calendar. This Standing Orders Committee has received the feedback from that and decided that those changes shouldn’t be overruled. They worked well. There were some select committees that said that it definitely seemed to improve that process, so we are continuing with that.

Finally, this report, as said, is also about modernising Parliament without losing sight of what Parliament’s for, and that includes some modernisation of processing submissions, given that sometimes, depending on the nature of what’s passing through this House, it can engage and exercise the community quite vigorously. We do need to have much more modern ways of dealing with what could be a huge submission process, and seeking stronger processes around international treaties, changes to public engagement, and clearer rules also for committees. Technology changes, workloads change, Governments change—even—but the underlying purpose of this place doesn’t. It’s important that Parliament needs enough time, enough information, and enough independence to scrutinise the executive so that ultimately we can make good law. I commend this report to the House.

💬 SPEAKER: Ricardo Menéndez March. This is a split call.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I also want to commend the Clerk, officials, and, actually, our Green Party staffers who supported myself and Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan here, and a special shout-out goes to Raewyn Tate and James Coad for their assistance in our participation in this report.

Looking at the amendments that we’re proposing to make, I wanted to actually begin by giving a shout-out to one of my colleagues—that is, the person next to me, Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan—because I actually think that if you look at the amendments on page 43, there’s one that I think is the “Lawrence Amendment”, which is the one on grouping of amendments. Few people, I think, in this Chamber have been able to produce as many amendments like my colleague Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan. That speaks, in my view, of both an ability to actually go through a piece of legislation well outside his remit of portfolios and actually be able to look at ways of improving it. He has supported colleagues to draft amendments. In my view, it has created a bit of a conundrum where now we have spent considerable amount of time voting for individual amendments.

Amendment 23 allows for amendments to be grouped not just by individual members but by members of political parties. I do hope that Chairpeople who are reading out amendments and choose to group those do make good and responsible use of this new amendment and provision to adequately explain why these were grouped, because we cautiously support this amendment—as we do think that ultimately it is in the interest of all Governments to be able to progress legislative agendas and members to have a right to try and improve legislation—but I do not think that this amendment would have happened if it wasn’t for the contributions of my colleague. I know that he has been asked by other colleagues across the House as to whether he has used AI to draft amendments, and I think that may speak more perhaps to the tactics that other political parties have used to draft them, rather than Lawrence. I can assure you he has never used AI.

But if we look at some of the other amendments, including amendment 19 on the legislative scrutiny committee, I think this will be one that we are also supportive of, particularly because I think that this will address the reality that Governments want to progress legislation that particularly draws public attention while dealing with non-contentious bills in a way that doesn’t use more of the House’s time. I think it’s particularly good to see the Deputy Speaker chairing this committee. I think that will elevate the Deputy Speaker’s roles as well. I think it’s good to have that committee giving the ability of all members to be able to be there and participate. One of the tensions, I think, that this committee will create will be particularly for smaller political parties who may have to juggle, for example, the ability for this committee to sit after 6 p.m., and the reality that smaller political parties will have to juggle having less members to, for example, contribute on bills during the evening, while perhaps also trying to participate in these committees. I think it’ll be good to really test how that works.

Testing how these new amendments will work is really important because we have also made improvements and changes to how things like scrutiny week work. Scrutiny week was a feature of the last Standing Orders review—one that I think was really welcomed. It’s really good to see the amendment to enable, for example, in-depth reviews to occur beyond just one meeting. One of the challenges I think, in the annual reviews has been the tension between Opposition parties and Government members on the length of those reviews. While, initially, I think there was a lot of good faith, in my view, of giving large agencies like the Ministry of Social Development adequate time, that time has actually, for some agencies’ or Ministers’ sessions, been sort of trimmed down. That is really concerning because I think scrutiny week should afford the time of non-executive members to actually scrutinise how decisions by the executive are made.

I don’t want to remark on the use of urgency, and particularly the Leader of the House’s remarks that your urgency was not used to bypass scrutiny. I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think any member can really say that when there is urgency, there is adequate scrutiny. When we have had urgency, we often rely on massively redacted regulatory impact statements, at times—no input from stakeholders and experts. While we may have a committee of the whole House stage, I don’t think that actually is a good replacement for the reality that we still need to hear from the public. While there are amendments here that seek to improve and better justify the use of urgency, we remain concerned about the precedent that this term of Parliament and this Government have set over its use. But overall, we really support this report. We commend everybody who’s worked on it, and I think this will, hopefully, lead to improvements in our democratic processes.

Mr Speaker, thank you. I rise to give my final speech in the 54th Parliament on the Standing Orders report.

Now, I think one of the things that’s really important, as my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March said, is the importance of the Standing Orders, but also the Standing Orders reviews—one of the most important documents that we have here in the New Zealand Parliament. This particular report is important in the sense that not only does it introduce a few elements but, also, some tidy-ups, which are much needed.

With that, I do want to thank you, Mr Speaker, as the chairperson of the Standing Orders Committee and thank you, Dr David Wilson, as Clerk of the House, and everyone at the Office of the Clerk for helping us through this, and everyone in all political parties who took part in the Standing Orders review to get us to where we are.

There are a few things I do want to touch on, further from what my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March has said. Most importantly, the legislative scrutiny committee is something that is going to be introduced in the new Parliament, and I think that is going to be something that we’re looking forward to seeing how it’s going to work in practice. As my colleague said, it is going to be chaired by the Deputy Speaker and, with that, it’s also going to have equal membership between Government and Opposition party members, just to ensure that whatever does happen within the legislative scrutiny committee is able to have the same transparency but, also, the same robustness as what we do here in this particular House.

I note that the legislative scrutiny committee could take part in or replace what is considered the select committee stage between the first and second readings, as well as, for some bills, even committee of the whole House, between the second and third readings, with the approval of the Business Committee. I think that’s really important, when we’re looking at how that is going to be working in practice—ensuring a level of oversight by the Business Committee.

It was mentioned previously, I think, by the Leader of the House that there are some elements in the report around the use of artificial intelligence (AI). This is something that we are approaching in an incredibly cautious way with how AI can be or could be used in terms of looking at some of the submissions. I think one of the things that the committee and the report is very clear on is to ensure that there is still a high degree of oversight in terms of how and when that could be used, and the committee must still be asked permission in order to undertake that, noting that we have seen in select committees a significant increase in submissions in this term of Parliament, particularly on the Justice Committee. With this, there has been some allowance that has been given in the analysis—or the expediency when it comes to analysis—of some of the submissions. Again, this is something that I think is important and prudent for the 55th Parliament and the future Standing Orders Committee and select committees in general to keep an eye on.

A couple of other things I want to touch on is, number one, some of the changes to the omnibus bill and some of the changes to the way that we look at minor updates. This is specifically to Standing Order 267. I think it’s also an important ability for any Government to be able to include more minor amendments or the allowance to have more minor amendments—again, pending the approval from Business Committee—incorporated as part of an omnibus bill, particularly when minor amendments affect more than two principal Acts.

Something that’s very important to me and very dear to me is some of the adjustments to international treaty examinations in Standing Order 405. The reason I say that is because, currently, as part of our dualist system, international treaties can be signed up to by any Government and that includes trade agreements, and then it goes through a trade examination process by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. But then the agreement has already been signed, and there’s very little ability to truly really examine the agreement when any Government has already signed up to the agreement. Of course, it only becomes domestic legislation if there is an ensuing domestic law. While we didn’t get everything we want to see in terms of, I guess, the specific ability for Parliament to scrutinise any executive branch of the Government around international treaty examination, the review does allow the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee greater power in conducting some of those analyses, including some of the abilities to have briefings, etc.

Finally, in terms of the ongoing tidy-ups of how we now conduct the financial scrutiny with the introduction of scrutiny weeks under this Parliament, I do want to thank our previous Green Party MP, Jan Logie, for some of the work that she has done in getting this new system up and running. It’s something that we are continuously improving on. With that, we commend the report to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, I rise to speak on the review of Standing Orders. Again, just like my colleagues across the House, I want to thank you, Mr Speaker, for chairing the Standing Orders Committee, and to the Clerk of the House and his team. It’s not a very easy task to get consensus across all of the different political parties, but that’s exactly what we did do in these in this Standing Orders review. I think it was a great process, taking the time—and I think you commented, Mr Speaker, that we started a bit earlier in this Parliament, so we took a bit more time to get to work through the different issues, which was good.

I also want to thank, actually, submitters. This is just like any other select committee, where submitters were able to make submissions on the Standing Orders. I just want to thank the people that took the time to do that. They’re actually set out in Appendix C of the report, so if you want to have a look, you can.

I’m just going to use my time to talk about a couple of areas which I think were really useful. I want to suggest to incoming MPs that they actually take the time to read the report in the new Parliament, because that’s where it’s going to be most useful. We did spend quite a lot of time on select committees and, actually, in the report, it talks about what is the purpose of a select committee. I think a lot of discussion has been because of the large number of submissions that a lot of select committees, including the Justice Committee, got in this Parliament. We’re actually outlining, now, in the Standing Orders what is the purpose of the select committee process. Again, it really is to try and result in high-quality legislation.

So it’s really providing—and, again, that’s why it’d be important for MPs in the next Parliament to read this: it provides a bit of an outline as to what is the objective of the select committee process so that when select committees are going through legislation and getting submissions and deciding who’s going to submit, they can say, “Well, are the submitters we’re going to be hearing from actually going to help us deliver high-quality legislation—yes or no—or are there other reasons?” So, again, just to say you don’t actually have to hear from every submitter and actually think about the value of the submissions on a particular bill and what it might add. I think there’s some really good material in the report around that; making sure that when you are hearing from submitters, it’s actually aligned to that purpose. Again, I think that’s going to be useful for the next select committee members.

The other one, and Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan talked about this is, is just talking about some issues around omnibus bills, but particularly regulatory systems bills. We saw quite a few of those in this Parliament, as we’ve seen in other Parliaments, but they’re being now specifically called out as a type of omnibus bill that can be used. They are really important bills, regulatory systems bills, because they do keep our statute book up to date. I think that was a really good discussion.

The other one, again, is around scrutiny week. This is the first Parliament that has had two weeks set aside for different types of scrutiny. I don’t have anything to compare it with, because it’s my first term, but, again, I think just acknowledging some of the learnings from this Parliament around scrutiny weeks—what can be improved or done differently. That provides some really good guidance for select committees.

The only other two things I’m going to call out were just around petitions. We actually had a sessional order in this Parliament around highly discriminatory content in petitions to Parliament. We don’t want to be hosting or allowing petitions that do have highly discriminatory content, so we had a sessional order, which has now been put into Standing Orders. I think that process we worked really well, and I want to thank both the Clerk and the Petitions Committee for bringing that process to us, and seeing how that worked and how that’s now being put into Standing Orders.

Finally, I just want to draw people’s attention to Appendix B, which is a really helpful table which talks about Parliament’s workload. You can actually look, over quite a number of Parliaments—I think we’ve got seven set out there—at the number of hours we’ve spent on sittings, different extended hours, committee of the whole House, petitions; everything. It’s a really good resource. You can actually see how this Parliament has compared to others: the number of bills—everything. Again, I think that’s a really useful piece of the report, and I think it’ll be used by people. So, with that, obviously, I want to commend this to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the review of the Standing Orders 2026 carried out by the Standing Orders Committee.

Obviously, we’ve got a number of recommendations in front of us today. Some of those I will touch on briefly, but, firstly, I just thank you for your leadership, for chairing the committee, for your wise words as we went through a number of different submissions on different issues; to the Office of the Clerk and to Dr David Wilson for your reports, that were always timely and very well informed. Obviously, transitioning now from the 54th Parliament, what we’re sitting in today, into the 55th Parliament, my reflection with the Standing Orders is that this is something that has, over many Parliaments, been refined, and what we’re doing here is just, as the Leader of the House did mention, making this a better process, making this place a better place for the 55th Parliament. As we did see last week, there are still times where we get caught off guard, when we were in urgency last week, and there’s going to be continual need to refine these Standing Orders every Parliament. It is something that we just keep refining as we go forward.

The select committee, if we go back, actually first sat on 30 July 2025, so it has been a very long process, but starting early has been able to give us, I think, a better result than trying to put it into such a short period of time. We received 86 submissions, we received 27 oral submissions to the select committee, and the report back also takes into account the three petitions that the select committee had in front of it.

The most major change in front of us to the House is the Legislative Scrutiny Committee. That’s something that is going to be new for the 55th Parliament. From all parties involved, we’ve come to the conclusion that that is the best thing to trial in the 55th Parliament. It is there for those non-controversial bills, stuff that otherwise might not be prioritised, and pieces of legislation that Parliament struggles to get to with the workload that we do have. This Legislative Scrutiny Committee no doubt will need some refining. It is something new, but I think we all struggle in this House, from time to time, with some of the processes through the committee of the whole House, the hours that are spent, often on legislation that we all agree on. This opportunity to trial this new Legislative Scrutiny Committee is, I think, something that will see a lot more legislation passed but also the more important pieces of legislation actually debated in this Chamber.

Also, around the scrutiny weeks, there is some clarity around Estimates and making sure that Ministers are available around Estimates—not so much around the annual reviews—and also that question in scrutiny weeks of making sure that the business that is conducted in those weeks is actually scrutiny and not other business in front of the committee.

An important part, also, was the select committee having a purpose statement. That purpose statement—I think it’s on page 17—actually sets out that the primary purpose of considering a bill is to ensure that, if the bill is passed, it results in high-quality legislation. Why I bring that to the attention of the House is that we’ve received a massive amount of submissions on bills in this term of Parliament. I think it’s, like, 700,000 submissions; 39 bills have attracted over 1,000 submissions. What that actually relates to is, in the past 30 years of the House sitting with legislation, 1.4 million submissions in 30 years, but 700,000 of those have been in this term of Parliament. With the amount of submissions being received through select committee, having a purpose statement—it is not practical any more to hear from everybody, but it is actually making that quality of legislation.

One part important to New Zealand First, that we did comment on through a submission, was members’ attire—how members actually present themselves in this House. There is a statement here, and something that you did circulate, Mr Speaker, during this term of Parliament, about how the expectation is, obviously, set by the whips and, obviously, our leaders, but, importantly, in the Standing Orders now it does include that men must wear jackets, women must have covered shoulders, T-shirts are not acceptable, and clothing that conveys a graphic or message is not acceptable. I think that, from New Zealand First’s point of view, we’d probably like to see something a little bit stronger, but it is in the right direction.

💬 Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Winston likes things that are a bit stronger.

The other thing—thank you, Chris, for that. The other part to that is, on page 147, what was alluded to by the last speaker, Todd Stephenson: the combined statistics, and the work that this Parliament has done was up to something like 1,773 hours of Parliament’s time, counting the committee of the whole House time. It’s the busiest Parliament that there has ever been, so those statistics going forward are only going to increase, and the numbers that are included there are only up to 11 September. Obviously, with the urgency debates last week, that time frame will push well over 1,800 hours.

On all that, it was really a pleasure to be part of that select committee—learnt a lot—and I commend the report to the House.

💬 SPEAKER: Before I put the question, I just want to put on record thanks to Dr David Wilson for being so generous with his time and guidance to members, but also to David Bagnall, who was a key adviser to that committee, for his work. This report is the result of a very collaborative process, and I have no problem saying that the question is that the motion be agreed to.

Motion agreed to.