Parliament Bill

We come first to Part 1. Part 1 is the debate on clauses 3 to 8, “Preliminary provisions”, and Schedule 1. The question is that Part 1 stand part. The question is that the Minister’s amendment—

Rt Hon Adrian Rurawhe: Madam Speaker? Madam Chair, rather.

CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Oh, well, I’m going to make an exception this time because there were a few people wandering around and I did not see the member who ably chaired the Parliament Bill Committee, so I’ll take a call.

Thank you, Madam Chair; I’m out of practice. I just wanted to make a brief call on Part 1 of the bill, basically to say that it’s important and correct and right that these four pieces of legislation be brought together into one new piece of legislation. The only other point that I would make—and it will become relevant later on in the debate—is that it does not include the Official Information Act. Why I say that is because several submitters made submissions on the Official Information Act to bring Parliament’s information under that as well. Those were deemed, by the committee, to be out of scope of this bill. That’s my brief introduction, Madam Chair. Thank you for the opportunity.

Kia ora, Madam Chair. As we begin the committee stage of this bill, I do look at Part 1 and the purpose, clause 3. As it says currently, “The purpose of this Act is to consolidate and modernise the law about operating and administering Parliament.” The reason I’d be interested in the Minister making a contribution is just for the public to understand what this is about, because I very much think this bill is about this place and about the people in this place and how it’s funded, and the goings-on.

We don’t want to labour the committee stage, but we do want to be seen to actually prosecute and to ask some questions to give confidence to the public so that they understand what this bill is about—and it’s not just for us as MPs finding a way, I guess, to feather our nest or to make it easy for us, but it’s to help make the system better.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is an important bill. I thank members of the Opposition, and others, for their constructive engagement on this. We had a special select committee on this, which, I think, as duly appropriate, it was well chaired by former Speaker the Rt Hon Adrian Rurawhe—and thank you for his contribution.

This is an important piece of legislation and probably one that’s a little bit overdue and one that past Governments and past parliaments have looked at. It brings together the Clerk of the House of Representatives Act 1988, the Parliamentary Service Act 2000, the Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Act 2013, and the Parliamentary Privilege Act 2014.

There are a couple of things going on there. One is that if you want to understand how Parliament operates and how it’s funded and what its powers are and all of the legislation to do with Parliament, there isn’t one place to find it; you’ve got to go and look at those four Acts. This, if it becomes law and the House approves it, will become the Parliament Act 2025 and it will be the one place. Now, people might say, “Well, bringing together legislation, that doesn’t really seem like much of a deal.”, but, actually, it’s important to the rule of law and cogency of the statute book that we don’t have random pieces of legislation that do different things but all actually relate to the same topic—or, in this case, relate to the same institutions: the very important home of our democracy.

The second thing is that some of these statutes are quite out of date. The last time we went through a serious round of kind of parliamentary reform was actually in Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s day, that great reform period of 1987 through to 1990—a bit controversial, in some respects, for some, but, from a parliamentary point of view, quite a lot was done by Sir Geoffrey back then, as Attorney-General and Minister of Justice and Leader of the House, to create, essentially, the modern-day foundations of the Parliament: the select committee system, for example. The Clerk of the House of Representatives got its own Act back in 1988 during that period. The Parliamentary Services Act 2000 is now 25 years old, as well, so it is about modernising this legislation.

In relation to the Parliamentary Privilege Act, Parliament went through an exercise soon after I became an MP—or it might have been contemporaneously when I became the MP—about responding to the judgment of Attorney-General v Leigh, from memory. There was another case as well in which it became, without boring the committee, really clear that Parliament had to reassert the traditional privileges that exist for all members of this House around freedom of speech and put into statute some common law rights that perhaps, at least arguably, contestably at law, didn’t exist or we needed to make clear that they did exist. The Parliamentary Privilege Act was a response to court judgments, and now it’s going to be a part of the Parliament Act.

There are some important changes that the Parliament Bill, this bill, makes in relation to parliamentary security, which, no doubt, we’ll get to. It also, importantly, changes the funding model, and, in particular, it gives Parliament more independence from the executive in relation to the funding of Parliament. In our Westminster system, with our fused executive and legislature, by definition, the Government governs and controls the Budget, but, actually, Parliament is its own separate institution. There’s always been a natural tension there—which, actually, to be honest, you can’t get rid of entirely—between the operation of the funding of Parliament, the legislature, its own institution, and the executive, which, by definition, is only the executive because it has control of the Parliament; if that wasn’t the case, they wouldn’t be the executive.

What this bill does is put in place a more independent process in which the House is in charge of its own budgets. There is some involvement of the executive, but it’s a step forward from the status quo, where I think most people would say it’s more biased towards the Government. That hasn’t really been a problem, to be honest—I hope both sides of the House would agree on that. It hasn’t really been a problem in practice, but there’s always the potential. Law is sometimes not about necessarily solving the problems of today; it’s about futureproofing to make sure we don’t endure problems in the future. That’s the purpose of the Parliament Bill.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 1 set out on Amendment Paper 362 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Part 1 as amended agreed to.

Part 2 Parliamentary privilege