An OIA request on FYI has alerted me to an unpleasant quirk in Parliament's rules. Someone has asked Jenny Marcroft, who is Parliamentary Under-secretary for media and communications and fisheries, for information she holds about her hateful terf bill. The request will be refused, because Marcroft will play the hat game, and claim that any information she holds on the bill is held in her capacity as an MP, rather than her capacity as a Parliamentary Under-secretary. But it does raise the question: given her role, why was she allowed to advance the bill at all?
The short answer, given by McGee, is that "[a] Parliamentary Under-Secretary may introduce a member’s bill." In other words, it is "within the rules" (as members of the political class love to say).
But again, we can ask why? Because member's bills are meant to be for members, not the executive. And Parliamentary Under-secretaries are absolutely members of the executive. They're defined as such in the Cabinet Manual, and effectively recognised as such in various parts of Parliament's Standing Orders. For example, they are treated as members of the executive when allocating oral questions under Standing Order 391, and they do not count for support to immediately introduce a member's bill under Standing Order 288. If Standing Orders were consistent, they would also be excluded from entering member's bills into the ballot.
The answer is almost certainly historical. While Parliamentary Undersecretaries were always part of the system, they'd fallen into disuse in favour of Associate Ministers. They were revived comparatively recently thanks to MMP and its need to hand out official baubles as bribes to supporters, some of whom might not have the pull or experience to merit even an associate ministerial position. So John Key made Rimmer an undersecretary in 2014, and since then every coalition government has included them as a bribe to its minor partners and as training wheels for those who might one day be Ministers. The present regime includes a PUS from each party (Marcroft from NZ First and Simon Court from ACT), giving each of them a fat salary bump and a bunch of perks to rort - which will help keep everyone sweet and not wanting to rock the boat. And the rules have struggled to keep up - undersecretaries were excluded from the OIA until 2016, despite being members of the executive, simply because no-one had really thought of it.
This is another example of the rules failing to keep up with practice. And its something we should fix. While its far too late for it to go into the review of standing orders, hopefully the next government will bring a sessional order to remove this oddity.
