Gerry Brownlee warned MPs this week to keep their amendments to a minimum. If only the same advice could be applied to ministers adding bills to the order paper.
By the time you’re reading this article, in a distant future where the internet has collapsed and the entire archive of The Spinoff has been ingrained in stone, this sitting week will probably still be going. With 23 bills being progressed, some of our MPs will sacrifice their weekend to sit in the debating chamber. Are all these bills even worth the trouble? That’s a question that even the coalition can’t agree on.
To get through the hefty workload, speaker Gerry Brownlee gave the House a stern reminder following Tuesday’s oral questions. Time in the House is best spent debating bills, not voting on amendments to them, Brownlee reminded the MPs – speaking to no one in particular, especially not the likes of Green MPs Lawrence Xu-Nan and Francisco Hernandez, who have been known to offer hundreds of amendments to a single bill.
“If the House is overwhelmed by amendments, it is likely that we will see some standing order changes,” Brownlee said. “I would not like to see [the] undoubted right of members to propose amendments curtailed.”
It was a warning, not a new speaker’s ruling, and the faces on the opposition side seemed to reply “good luck with that”. Despite opposition from the entire opposition, the third reading of the Antisocial Road Use Legislation Bill, an omnibus bill which brings tougher penalties to the likes of boy racers, fleeing drivers and siren blasters, passed that night without too much of a traffic jam.
Wednesday’s question time opened with a goodbye. After 31 years on the job, speaker’s assistant Roland Todd – who has served every speaker of the House since Douglas Kidd – is leaving the mad house. Among many other things, Todd’s job has involved managing protests in the precinct, keeping track of time and questions in the debating chamber, and keeping a cool head with the many personalities he’s worked with. Let’s hope he doesn’t see his old friends again too soon in his new gig as a part-time funeral home assistant.
Chris vs Chris brought the brouhaha to the House that afternoon. Pressed over the revelation that Ministry of Social Development staff performance targets are linked with the government’s emergency housing targets, Luxon declared his support, which saw him jeered by the opposition.
“How do you sleep?” Labour’s Megan Woods heckled.
“How out of touch can you be?” cried Chippy.
Following question time, the House passed the controversial Health and Safety At Work Amendment Bill, which will strip back workplace safety laws by requiring about 97% of New Zealand businesses to manage only “critical risks”. It’s the latest bill to divide the coalition, with implementation of it pushed out from November of this year to next April, which could give enough time for a new government to repeal the bill before it comes into effect.
NZ First leader Winston Peters started a will-he-won’t-he guessing game as to whether he would support the bill. The palaver almost had him resembling a Covid-era Vanessa Hudgens, who sparked outrage when she said “Yeah, people are going to die. Which is terrible, but… inevitable?”
One of the standout speeches was delivered by Labour MP Camilla Belich, who slammed the bill “that nobody asked for”. New Zealand needed better laws and regulations to avoid tragedies such as the Pike River disaster, but this bill would bring the opposite, she argued. “If one wants to look for an example of wasteful spending, look no further than the hundreds of hours spent on this terrible bill,” Belich said. “The reams and reams of paper spent writing and analysing the impacts of this bill, when this bill is a dead duck.”
Just before midnight, Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall spoke on the third reading of the Healthy Futures (Pae Ora) Amendment Bill. The bill purports to brings health service access to the forefront and introduces standardised health targets while dumping the health sector principles that called for equitable outcomes and engagement with Māori services and communities. It didn’t go unnoticed that the English name took priority in the bill’s title, with te reo Māori relegated to brackets.
The provisions “are an example of an ideological project that has absolutely nothing to do with healthcare, an effort to go into petty belittling of Māori, of making their language go second in the title of the bill, rather than first, as it was”, Verrall said. “It is unbelievable to me that we have spent 12 months in one way or another debating that, as if there weren’t more important things to do, like getting on with looking after people.”
Debates droned on through Thursday, but there was one full-circle moment for two members of the opposition in the third reading of the Regulatory Systems (Primary Industries) Amendment Bill, another omnibus bill designed as a red tape reducer, enacting multiple amendments across a number of primary industries laws. It makes redundant the Forests (West Coast Accord) Act 2000, which protects land in the West Coast from logging – what happens to that conservation land will depend upon whatever the new Conservation Amendment Act looks like.
During his speech, Green MP Steve Abel was goaded by members of NZ First to take a walk down memory lane and reflect on some “reckless characters” whose protest action prompted those protections at the turn of the 21st century. A group of demonstrators had chained themselves to helicopters to halt development on the land in 1999, but their efforts weren’t appreciated by all.
“There was one member of parliament at the time who said that the chap who was locked to the logging helicopter should have been left locked to the logging helicopter, and he should’ve been taken out and dropped in the Tasman ocean,” Abel said.
The chained protestor was Abel, and the former local MP who spoke those words, Damien O’Connor, was sitting only a few metres away behind a Labour Party bench.
“Hear, hear!” O’Connor cried.