It has long been a cliché whenever Parliament is seriously discussed that the real work is done in the Select Committees.
It is not anymore entirely true.
The Committees are becoming platforms for political protest.
One left-wing activist has recently widely circulated a document on how to “deluge” a Select Committee with submissions in opposition to an ACT-sponsored Bill.
Whether that is the reason is unclear, but the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) is understood to have received over 150,000 submissions on the Bill.
At the same time, the changes introduced this year to have the committees supposedly seriously scrutinise the performance of Government departments have not really delivered.
There are now mutterings around Parliament suggesting something needs to be done.
But what?
The most obvious answer, favoured by former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, is to enlarge Parliament so that the Executive no longer has the numbers to overpower the Committees.
That would make them more truly independent.
However, the immediate issue is the protests.
And there is no answer being offered for them.
The submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill are purely political and are really objections to what the submitters claim is its neo-liberal agenda.
The Bill itself is toothless, as Labour Justice spokesperson Duncan Webb has already explained in Parliament.
“This Act does not confer a legal right or impose a legal obligation on any person that is enforceable in a court of law,” he said.
“Do you know what that actually means?
“That means we’re spending all our time passing a law which isn’t a law.
“It doesn’t create any legal obligations.
“It is an utter waste of time.”
But a maker of left-wing TV documentaries, Bryan Bruce, doesn’t accept that argument.
He is the author of a document titled “How to deluge a Select Committee with submissions.”
It begins with an apocalyptic view of the Bill, which focuses on its promoter, ACT leader, David Seymour.
“We are witnessing the attempt by David Seymour’s ACT Party to Americanise our legal system through the introduction of his dull-sounding, but highly dangerous, Regulatory Standards Bill,” Bruce says.
“If passed, it will achieve what his defeated Treaty Principles Bill attempted to do – namely, undermine the Treaty – as well as diminish current Environmental and Health legislation, in order to make it easier for foreign investors to plunder our nation’s resources and exploit our people.
“At the same time, Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill will give any giant corporation that sets up shop here the power to sue any future government that wants to act in the public good by passing legislation that will affect their profits and future profits. By deeming private property rights over the public good, Seymour’s Bill will have a chilling effect on all future legislation.”
In fact, it does none of that since it can only issue a statement declaring whether a piece of legislation complies with the standards contained within the Bill.
As Webb has pointed out, there is no obligation on the part of the Government to comply with the statement.
Even a long-time promoter of Regulatory Standards legislation, the New Zealand Initiative fellow and former Treasury economist, Bryce Wilkinson, in an email to POLITIK, conceded the Bill was inconsequential because it had “no teeth”.
That is not enough to stop Bruce and his campaign.
He has supplied a 2300-word tip sheet with templates on how to oppose the Bill.
That says submitters should point out that Bill is viewed as a threat to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, potentially erasing its principles from law-making and undermining Māori-led progress.
It could empower David Seymour’s Ministry for Regulation to implement anti-Te Tiriti policies, even copying principles from the defeated Treaty Principles Bill.
In other suggestions for a submission, he says the Bill is stealthy and unconstitutional, introduced under urgency without Māori consultation, violating Treaty obligations of partnership and active protection. It’s seen as a deliberate attempt to alter New Zealand’s legal foundation without consent from Treaty partners.
And: “The Bill also risks the well-being of all New Zealanders and the environment by prioritising private property rights and corporate profits over public welfare.
“It could force compensation for businesses impacted by regulations like pollution prevention, effectively tethering the country to corporate desires.
“The Bill also threatens to weaken environmental protections, disproportionately affect minority groups, and centralise power, reducing democratic accountability.”
The problem facing the Committee is how to decide what submission to hear.
The FEC is one of Parliament’s busiest Committees with seven Bills before it, and it is also conducting two inquiries and is set to deliberate on its Banking Inquiry within a month.
So next week it is recalling its members from the July school holiday recess and will split into two groups to hold four full days of hearings on the Bill.
That will provide 30 hours of hearings time and each party will select submitters they wish to hear from within that timeframe.
But the inevitable problem is that each oral submission will be short. Probably five minutes.
It will not be a considered in-depth constitutional discussion about the point of the Bill and surely its most important aspect, that it has no teeth.
As to the vast bulk of the submissions, Wilkinson has proposed that the Clerk use AI to summarise them all and that the focus be on the quality of the submissions rather than the quantity.
But even Select Committees receiving a manageable number of submissions seem reluctant to engage in in-depth discussions with submitters. Most get five minutes to summarise their submission and answer questions.
The quick-fire approach to Committee deliberations is also evident in Scrutiny Week.
The House has just undertaken its second attempt at this, and though it is still in its early days, there are grumbles starting to emerge about the process.
One departmental CEO told POLITIK he was frustrated with the amount of work his department had put into preparing material for the Committee, only to find its members were not much interested in anything other than finding something they could turn into a quick press statement.
The amount of time given to some entities was surprising.
The Government and Administration Committee allowed one hour for the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, with half of that set aside to discuss its emergency management function.
That left half an hour to cover the DPMC’s all-of-government oversight role reflected in its administration of the Prime Minister’s performance targets for each Ministry and department.
In February, Australia’s Senate (whose committees perform the scrutiny function as ours) had its Finance & Public Administration Legislation Committee devote nearly three hours to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
The Committees in the Australian Parliament are backed up by a Committee Office, which supports all Senate committees and had 73 staff in 2016.
Its budget was $A8.5 million.
Our Committees do have staff, but the numbers are not on the Australian scale.
Critics, like Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Simon Upton, argue that one of the problems with our system, apart from the shortage of research staff serving the Committees, is the problem that Committee chairs regard themselves as being on the ladder that leads to Cabinet.
They thus have no incentive to antagonise the current Cabinet or the Prime Minister.
“In my view, it is impossible to significantly alter the incentives on Members under current arrangements and with a House of its current size,” said Upton in a submission on the Bill to allow for a referendum on a four-year Parliamentary term.
The former Prime Minister and constitutional lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, has been arguing for some time that one way of addressing Upton’s concerns would be to increase the number of MPs so that, arithmetically, the Executive could not outnumber the backbench.
At the same time, MPs might see a fulfilling political career as a Committee Chair without becoming a Cabinet Minister.
The case for more MPs is strong.
When MMP was introduced in 1996, each electorate MP served between 50 and 60,000 people.
Because the overall population has increased, MPs will, under this year’s new boundaries, serve just over 70,000 people.
Sir Geoffrey argues that the number of MPs needs to go up from its current 120 to at least 150.
Upton doesn’t agree.
“If there is dissatisfaction with the quality of law-making at present, I cannot see that a slight dilution of the Executive’s weight will make much difference,” he said.
“Party discipline and the promise of preferment would remain strong.”
Instead, he advocates a second Chamber.
But what both he and Palmer agree on is that the current system does not provide the depth of scrutiny that is needed.
The danger now is that if the Committees become the platforms for ongoing protest, their role will be even more subverted than what their lack of time to deal with issues has already done.
