Naming and Suspension of Member

I invite Chlöe Swarbrick to withdraw and apologise for an offensive comment made in the House yesterday.

I won’t be doing that, Mr Speaker.

Then the member will leave the House.

Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Point of order, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: No, the member will leave the House. Sorry, there’s not a point of order at this point. Is the member refusing to leave the House? I therefore name Chlöe Swarbrick.

The member will leave the House.

Chlöe Swarbrick withdrew from the Chamber.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I have two points of order, but I think perhaps the first is the one that most urgently needs to be addressed, which is as to what the House has just voted on. The Standing Orders are actually quite specific about a motion to suspend a member and the words that you need to use, as Speaker, in order to do so. You haven’t, I believe, followed the requirements of the Standing Orders, so I wonder whether you could indicate to us what the motion that the House just voted on actually was, because if it was the one that you spoke, it doesn’t have the effect that you think it does.

Well, in that case, I’ll put it again that Chlöe Swarbrick be suspended from the service of the House.

My apologies to the House for getting that wrong in the pedantics of the words that were required. It’s not a usual thing for a matter like this to happen.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I’ve been in the House quite a long time, and there have been plenty of instances where members have been ejected from the Chamber for the rest of the day for doing exactly what Chlöe Swarbrick did. There is not a single instance where a member has been asked to withdraw and apologise the following sitting day and then named for not doing that. There has only been one instance that I can recall where a member was subsequently asked to withdraw a comment, and that was the Rt Hon John Key when he said that members of the Opposition supported rapists and murderers. At the time, he received a standing ovation from the National Party. That was a very controversial matter, and it was at least a week later that the Speaker asked him to withdraw and apologise in order to restore order in the House, which had been lost.

I think the naming of a member for something they had done the day before is not something that has ever happened in the House before. I wonder whether you can reflect on what precedent or Standing Order you’re relying on in asking Chlöe Swarbrick to apologise for something the day before, because I did check the Speakers’ Rulings, and Jonathan Hunt back in 2001 specifically ruled that where a member refused to apologise and was ordered to leave the Chamber by the Speaker, the matter is at an end at that point. So that has been the established practice of the House since 2001, and I wonder if you could indicate why that has changed.

Because the Standing Orders Committee met in July of 2017 and brought down a new Speaker’s ruling, Speaker’s ruling 23/1. I refer the member to that.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you so much. In relation to Speaker’s ruling 23/1, which is what the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins was speaking about, there’s a line that says, “Where an incident may have a continued impact on the House’s ability to deal with its business, the Speaker can address the matter.” Is it your view that this meets that threshold?

If that’s how the member wants to take it, but if you think about the comment that was made, 68 members of this House were accused of being spineless. There has never been a time when personal insults like that delivered inside a speech were accepted by this House, and I’m not about to start accepting it.

Mr Speaker, I’ve been in this House when a Prime Minister accused the Opposition of “getting some guts”—it was a serious accusation; nothing happened—and then, worse, I’ve heard the “c” word being accepted as language that can be used in this House. My personal view is that I don’t agree with a thing that Chlöe Swarbrick said at all, but this is a robust House where people have a right to express their views as passionately as they may, within certain rules, and I do not think that eviction was warranted. That’s my position.

Hon Members: Point of order.

Well, let me just respond to that before I take the multitude of points of order that people want to raise. The first is that there are considerable efforts being made at the moment across the Parliamentary Service to deal with what might be described as cyberbullying, and, essentially, what it comes down to is a question of: what standard does the House want to set for itself? I’ve decided that there are two things that can be looked at. One is that if there are interjections across the House and they are reactionary—and there was one of those yesterday—then that is not as egregious as someone taking their speaking time to include a gratuitous insult inside a speech. That is, in my opinion, from this point on—while I’m in the Chair—unacceptable.

I take the point the member makes about the House being a robust place—it most certainly is. But if members are going to be disrespectful of one another in such a demonstrable way, then how on earth can we be upset about members of the public taking a similar approach to dealing with MPs?

Point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you very much, sir. Specifically, around how this House approaches this matter in future, we recognise that Speakers have the ability themselves to set new rulings, and, in doing so, they often refer to Standing Orders, which dictate the rules in which you, as Speaker, operate. Now, there is only one Standing Order that deals with this disorderly conduct—Standing Order 90—and in that Standing Order, it makes very clear that you, as Speaker, have the ability to withdraw a member from the House for up to one day.

Now, yesterday, you suspended a member for the rest of the sitting week. It was then clarified that if the member did not apologise, they would be suspended again. We’ve gone from a situation where Standing Order 90 was not followed by you and then we’ve moved on to a situation where you have proposed to the House that a member be named. Now, the difference is that a member being withdrawn is highly disorderly and being named is grossly disorderly, and I can’t see how a member could be deemed to have gone from being highly disorderly to grossly disorderly by complying with a rule that you set that was not consistent with the Standing Orders.

Well, I don’t agree with you that it wasn’t consistent with the Standing Orders. The bit that was inconsistent was what I actually said, which was to leave the House for the week. What I left out is—I probably should have said “could be”, but I accept that there were no bounds for that. But the fact that someone is asked to leave the House for a comment that has caused offence, and they do so for that day, does not mean that the offence has gone away. That can be a new thing written into the Speakers’ rulings, if that’s what it takes. But, in the end, my job is to make sure that this House is a House of Representatives but that it deals respectfully with each other, and there is a huge difference between the sort of commentary that you get by way of interjection—which should be rare and has become far too frequent—and a comment that is inside a speech delivered deliberately to the House.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Point of order.

SPEAKER: Well, I’ll hear his commentary to that point.

In regard to your reference to Speaker’s ruling 23/1, it does indeed give you, as Speaker, the ability to approach a matter retrospectively, but what you’ve just indicated now is that Speaker’s ruling 21/1 is no longer in place. What the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins outlined, quite clearly—and this is the only Speaker’s ruling in reference to a situation like this—was that once a member left the Chamber, “the matter is at an end”. Now, in that instance that it’s referring to, it was around Phillida Bunkle, and it was almost exactly the situation that played out yesterday. Now, can you be very clear for the House that your ruling now is in direct contrast to this, and that Speaker’s ruling 21/1, despite being in the Speakers’ rulings, is no longer relevant?

Well, it’s interesting. You may point out a contradiction inside the Speakers’ rulings. Speaker’s ruling 23/1 was brought down by the Standing Orders Committee, so it was clearly considered, and if there had been a contradiction, I’m sure they would have recognised it at the time.

Thank you so much, Mr Speaker. Having just heard the conversation, particularly the Rt Hon Winston Peters’ comments, where he was commenting that that does not meet the threshold, I do want to ask whether there is a procedural way in which, potentially, that vote could be recast, seeing as we have just heard a Government party disagree with the way that things occurred?

I’m not aware of one.

Hon Kieran McAnulty: You’ve already put it twice.

SPEAKER: No, I didn’t put it twice. Your letter made it very clear that it hadn’t been put.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I was on the Standing Orders Committee when the ruling that you’ve just relied on was made. I supported that ruling being made, and I actually do support the underlying, I guess, tone of the ruling that you’re trying to make today around the need to increase the tone of some of the language in the House and the broader effect that has on the public tone of debate around politics. My concern here is that we seem to have gone from one extreme to another very quickly, only involving one member and not all members. There’s some very inflammatory language that’s used around the House quite a lot, and one member seems to have been singled out for that.

The ruling that you mentioned was made in reference to the Rt Hon John Key’s very inflammatory comments during that speech. He was not asked to withdraw and apologise for that at the time, nor was he asked to leave the Chamber; in fact, he got a standing ovation from the then Government members of the House. What then happened was that almost all Opposition members left the House because the Speaker refused to intervene, and it was on that basis that the Speaker subsequently came back to the House and asked him to withdraw and apologise some time later. The disorder in the House was the justification for doing so, in the sense that the Speaker was trying to restore order in the House.

The ruling that you just mentioned that the Standing Orders Committee made specifically states that the threshold should be very, very high for that type of action. There was no disorder in the House once Chlöe Swarbrick had left yesterday, nor was there any today. The very high threshold that was envisaged by the Standing Orders Committee at the time certainly does not appear to have been met in this instance.

Well, that’s something that I have to make a judgment on. Can I just say that the special debate was allowed yesterday because this is an important matter—no question about that. It’s also a matter that there was very little division across the House about the need for something to be done—no question about that. The question arose about what should be done and how should it be done.

For people who have a view that this is a massive problem for the world to deal with and that we should be part of it, but who don’t necessarily agree with the steps that were being proposed by others in the House, it becomes, I think, unacceptable, when people who have participated in a debate with predominantly the same opinion held on all sides of the House, when there is then some insult offered to part of the House because they are not prepared to follow a particular course of action. That, I think, in the context of that debate, was completely unacceptable, and—I’ve got to be quite straight up with you—I personally found it deeply offensive.

Speaking to the point of order, Mr Speaker. With respect, I think that this is outrageous. I ask you, with respect, to reconsider this, given that you have kicked me out twice for calling another member a liar, and then I’ve been out of the House for less than 30 minutes and you gave a direction that I could come back into the House.

We need some clarity on this. This is incredibly unfair that I can call another member a liar, rightfully get kicked out of the House, and asked to come back into the House within half an hour, with no apology required. So—

Hon Chris Bishop: You apologised.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: I did not apologise. I did not apologise and I would never apologise—

SPEAKER: We’re not having—

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: —thank you very much, and I’ll be happy to repeat what I said again, if you like, Mr Bishop.

SPEAKER: Just a minute.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: But I’d ask you to consider this, Mr Speaker—

Hon Member: He’s joking about it now.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: No, it’s not a laughing matter.

No, well, don’t exacerbate the crime in hindsight, is all I would say, and there is a point where things change.

Hon David Seymour: Point of order.

SPEAKER: I’m speaking.

Hon David Seymour: Oh yeah, yeah—I’ll wait.

SPEAKER: Well, sit down. There’s a point where things change, and I’ve reached the conclusion that we had so many threats and other stuff being directed at members of Parliament that if we don’t change behaviour in here, nothing will change outside. So that is part of my rationale as well, and I made that very clear to the Business Committee yesterday.

Mr Speaker, I hesitate to prolong this, but I think it’s important that when you ruled that the member should leave for the week, she said, “Gladly.” She herself has accepted it, and you can’t have the theatrics of doing that and then complain about the ruling.

OK—very good.

Ricardo Menéndez March: New point of order.

SPEAKER: No. Look, we are going to close this down. I’ll hear one more point of order—Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I understand the need for you to make a ruling on what you find offensive. As the Hon Winston Peters has alluded to, there were many of us that were offended by the “cunt” word, but what I do want to be able to assure is that “spineless” is a word and it looks like the ruling is political suppression. We do need to make sure that what the member was doing was speaking out about human rights, and we do not want to be a House that’s making decisions that are suppressing an opinion on the rights of Palestinians. That’s what the debate was about—

Sorry, that’s not a point in this discussion. There is no question—no question—in the heads of almost everybody in this House that there is a tragedy of humanity taking place in Gaza at the present time, and, in my opinion, most of the House would agree with that. But then to take it further and say that unless there is agreement over a member’s bill, then members are acting in a spineless fashion, that’s not acceptable. I won’t accept it. The last one, Ricardo Menéndez March.