One of the major themes of this regime has been its contempt for democracy and the parliamentary process. The statistics on this were laid bare recently in the Clerk of the House's submission on the triennial Review of Standing Orders, where they detailed just how much the regime (ab)uses urgency and extended sittings to ram its agenda through. But one of the other issues they highlighted was the constant skipping or truncation of select committee consideration. Parliament has decided that bills should generally receive six months' consideration by select committee, and has procedural safeguards in place to protect that, requiring a long debate on any move to reduce consideration below six months. Despite this, only 44% of bills get full consideration, 22% get between 4 and 6 months, 13% get less time, and 20% are never considered at all.
The Clerk proposes stopping this trend by strengthening procedural safeguards. Meanwhile, national has found a new way of bypassing them and undermining the parliamentary process. Last Thursday, the House passed the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill through its first reading. The bill makes a number of significant changes to National's corrupt Muldoonist fast-track regime, including strengthening ministerial powers to dictate outcomes while removing the right to submit on or challenge decisions in court. Its significant legislation and deserves significant scrutiny (not least to avoid repeating the process we're going through now, where major legislation is getting major amendments within a year because the government rushed it in the first place) - and at the first reading debate RMA minister Chris Bishop gave the impression that it would be, asking for no special instruction to committee, meaning the default six-month consideration would apply.
Despite that, just a few days later, Catherine Wedd, the chair of the Environment Committee advertised that there would only be 11 days allowed for submissions, and that she expected the committee to report the bill back early so it could be passed by christmas.
[Interlude: You should submit on this bill. You have until Monday. Submissions are open here, and there are submission guides here and here. You know the drill. Go and bury them. Don't let them say no-one cared. And don't let the opposition think they can leave it in place.]
Wedd has been questoned in parliament about this twice this week, and after trying to hide behind a standing order which does not grant her the power she says it does, she claimed that there had been no collusion with any ministers or ministerial advisers over the changed deadline. Which is obvious bullshit - firstly because select committee chairs don't make this kind of decision from nowhere, and secondly because Bishop clearly planned it all along: at first reading he simply said "I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill", without the usual "for a period of six months" (or "four months and one day" or whatever). So this is another planned assault on our democratic process and on the right of Aotearoans to have a say in our own laws.
Unfortunately during that questioning Speaker Brownlee said outright that this was a "loophole" - that it was "within the rules", as the politicians like to say - and that he had raised it with the business committee:
yesterday I spoke at the Business Committee, and, whether we like it or not, this is best described as a gap or a loophole in our Standing Orders. There is a problem with that, it is the Standing Orders Committee that will need to consider it, and I have said I will put it on the agenda for that committee to review.Meanwhile, while he's "reviewing", rather than putting his foot down over a clear misleading of the House, we've had three bills reported back early today: the Patents Amendment Bill (two months early), the Retail Payment System (Ban on Merchant Surcharges) Amendment Bill (two months early), and the Land Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill (No 2) (one month early). National seems to be using that loophole for everything they can. In the process, they have turned the Ministers who advanced those bills and suggested they would receive real consideration into liars and put them in the position of having misled the House (which BTW is how to deal with this: a complaint against Bishop for misleading the House, because the smirking fuck obviously did so).
The select committee process exists for good reason - not just to improve legislation, but also to legitimate it, by ensuring we can have a say and be heard. It helps us believe that government in this country is something that happens by consent, rather than being a naked exercise of power, and that legislation is somehow well-considered and rational (in some sense of the word), rather than being a poorly-drafted corrupt joke. It is essential to trust in government. Guillotining the process destroys all that. It destroys that trust. It directly undermines the legitimacy of parliament and the state. Which you'd think a bunch of people whose power rests on that legitimacy might worry about. But hey, whatever it takes to meet this quarter's KPIs, right?
This can be fixed: parliament can and should pass a sessional order to plug the loophole and prevent select committees from truncating consideration periods unless explicitly granted permission by the House. If the regime refuses to do so, it tells us everything we need to know about their intentions towards our democracy, and everything we need to know about how we should treat them and their bullshit rubberstamp "parliament" in future.
