The Constitutional Lw Professor and former Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, yesterday pointed out an anomaly in what is supposed to be Parliament’s gold-standard legislation to empower itself.
The Parliament Bill is currently before a special Select Committee chaired by the former Speaker, Adrian Ruawhe and aims to simplify the legislation governing Parliament.
Sir Geoffrey applauds the concept of the Bill because he sees it as a move to help insulate ordinary MPs from the power of the Ministers.
The Bill also proposes to give Parliamentary Security Officers powers of arrest and detention.
The Committee heard a submission from Palmer yesterday afternoon.
He told the Committee the Bill appeared to have been drafted in 2021 before the anti-vax protest occupation of Parliament’s lawn.
“The occupation of Parliament, which I witnessed from my office over at the law school, was a formidable thing that went on for about three weeks and was extremely disorderly,” he said.
“By my little office where I look out, there was a tent where people were keeping their children, and they’d go off every day to the demonstration and come back.
“This is not something that, in my view, can be tolerated.
“And I’m surprised to see that there hasn’t seemed to be much discussion of any of that in the papers that I have read. “
He said the Committee needed to think carefully about how Parliament should deal with situations like that.
“That was a disgraceful thing that the Parliament should not have tolerated,” he said.
“And it was very difficult to do anything about it.
“I just think that you’ve got to look at the policy in this Bill as to whether or not that problem, if it recurred, and we live in uncertain times, then you really have to have nailed it.
“And I don’t think this bill does that.”
One possible solution could be to strengthen the law around the Contempt of Parliament.
A constitutional lawyer also appearing before the Committee, Graham Edgeler, suggested that Contempt of Parliament should be punishable as a criminal offence in the High Court, with a maximum sentence involving prison in the most serious cases.
Otherwise, he suggested that individuals could be fined $10,000 if the case was prosecuted in a court but only $1000 if it was prosecuted in Parliament.
These punitive moves would be accompanied by enhanced powers to be given to the Security Officers.
But if the Committee expected Sir Geoffrey to endorse the proposal to give them arrest and detention powers, they were to be disappointed.
“I really do not think it is appropriate to have a large number of untrained people who have very wide coercive powers of search and seizure and detention within these premises,” he said.
“Now, I would much prefer the police.
“I know that’s not possible because of the numbers of police, but I do think it would be appropriate to put two policemen in these premises whenever Parliament is sitting because that’s when the prospect of disorder is at the greatest.”
Whether just two policemen could have stopped the anti-vax mob from setting up their tents is debatable.
But Sir Geoffrey has long championed civil liberties, and it was probably to be expected that he would have reservations about setting up what would, in effect, be an independent police force.
Sir Geoffrey’s passion for civil liberties has been most frequently and forcefully expressed over the years as a concern about the excessive power of the legislative arm of Government, the Ministers who live in the Beehive.
His 1979 book, “Unbridled Power,” might almost be called the book that began Sir Robert Muldoon’s unseating with its forensic examination of the overuse of regulatory powers by the then National Government.
That same year, Palmer won the Christchurch Central by-election, and in 1983, he became deputy leader of the Labour Party and, therefore, deputy leader of the Opposition.
In that role, he directly encountered the power of the executive.
“There was a minister in charge of the Legislative department, and that minister decreed that I should not have any furniture in my office, that the Clerk of the House had recommended and he wouldn’t approve it,” he told the Committee.
But he didn’t tell the Committee that the “Minister” was the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon.
“This was overcome by the Clerk of the House Charles Littlejohn and his deputy David McGee scrambling round and finding some furniture from offices elsewhere in Parliament,” he said.
“These were the depths to which Ministerial control could reach in the New Zealand Parliament, and the change away from this executive thraldom was long overdue.”
There is no longer a Minister in Charge of the Legislative Department. It has been replaced by the Parliamentary Service, which effectively runs Parliament and services MPs, including allocating them furniture.
The Service reports to the Parliamentary Service Commission, which is comprised of the Speaker and MPs representing each of the parties in Parliament.
Palmer said the Parliament Bill was an important constitutional document because it was the first time since the 1852 New Zealand constitution was passed “where you could possibly say there was a reasonable ability to keep the executive out of the legislature.”
He conceded that the difference between the legislature and the executive was not widely understood.
He has been arguing for some time that we need more MPs because the workload on backbench MPs is too heavy to allow them to devote the time to scrutinising legislation in Select Committees that is needed.
The recent announcement by the Electoral Commission setting the size of the electorates for the next election has strengthened the argument for more MPs.
That quota has increased from 48,000 electors per electorate when MP was introduced in 1996 to 70,000 for the next election.
The size of the electorates and the small number of MPs available for Select Committees means that the Committees are under pressure to get through the work they need to do.
The Parliament Bill Select Committee is a rarity among Committees, allowing key submitters like Sir Geoffrey and others heard yesterday, including the Law Society and the constitutional lawyer Graham Edgeler, 20 minutes each.
Usually, submitters get five to ten minutes.
“I remember when the National Development Bill was in front of a select committee, I cross-examined one witness for an hour and a half,” he said.
“You couldn’t do that these days.”
Palmer said MPs had to be everywhere, in their electorates and at Parliament.
“They’ve got to read a lot of stuff. They’ve got to understand enormous amounts about public expenditure. They can’t keep up with it. They might be on two or three select committees,” he said.
He suggested that the Select Committee should use a wider lens to look at Parliament as a whole.
“The parliament is very, very slow to change, and it needs to change because we need to have a robust democracy here,” he said.
“We’ve got that, but we’ll lose that if we’re not careful.”
The Parliament Bill will come on top of the big changes in Standing Orders made last year, and together, they will mark the most substantial reforms we have seen in Parliament for a long time.
But if Sir Geoffrey got his way, the reforms would go further.
