A month has turned into six days, and six months have been compressed into one – the government is in a big hurry to pass the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill, which will repeal the oil and gas exploration ban.
It is a widely accepted fact that things take time. Fifteen minutes to drink a cup of tea; 20 seconds to wash your hands; 28 minutes to drive from A to B; 48 hours to enjoy a weekend. A year for the Earth to loop around the sun. Sure, these things can be done faster but the outcome will be shit. You’ll burn your throat, have germ-infested hands, increased speed limits which are likely to result in people getting squashed by hard edged lumps of steel and glass that weigh thousands of kilograms, endless drudgery and potentially exiting the Goldilocks zone that enables life.
In New Zealand, it takes months or years for bills to become law. Successive governments have found a way to speed it up: urgency. It’s a tradition for governments to use it, and oppositions to oppose it, only to use it themselves when they have the chance. Last November, then leader of the House Chris Hipkins called an urgency motion to get a whopping 24 bills passed or to first reading. It’s a pre-election trick Labour also pulled in 2020.
Yet it’s the current government that holds the records for speed. In March, it set records by passing more bills under urgency in its first 100 days than any other government since at least 1996. This did not pass quietly. They’ve since lightened their touch on the accelerator, but they’re still hooning. Last week, seven bills were accorded urgency. Among them was the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill, which, if passed, will reverse the ban on new oil and gas exploration off the Taranaki coast, as well as changes to petroleum exploration permits and mineral permits.
While it’s worth noting that the ban itself was rushed through by the Labour government in 2018, and it wasn’t something the party had campaigned on, the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill is not without controversy. Yesterday in Wellington, Shane Jones accidentally walked past people protesting this very bill. They yelled at him, calling him a climate extremist and a sell-out. All the opposition parties voted against the bill passing its first reading last week. Outside of parliament, more than 30,000 people have signed an open letter written by Greenpeace Aotearoa’s executive director Russel Norman, which reads, “We pledge to do everything we can to resist the oil and gas industry if the New Zealand government overturns the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration.”
According urgency to a bill means the government can speed up the legislative process. Having passed its first reading last Tuesday (coalition partners voted for, and the opposition against, as expected), the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill is now moving into a compressed select committee stage. The public has been given six days, until midnight tonight, to make submissions. By contrast, 40 days were given to make submissions on the Parliament Bill, 39 days for the Social Workers Registration Amendment Bill and 18 days for the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) (Customary Marine Title) Amendment Bill.
Just because they can hasten the process doesn’t mean they should. “It’s bad law making and they know it,” says Victoria University law professor Dean Knight, who specialises in public and government law. He thinks four days is simply not long enough. “It’s a meaningless opportunity that doesn’t do justice to the importance of the policy and legislation.”
Perhaps there is no more fitting time to consider the term “consultation” a portmanteau of con and insult. “Have your say,” reads the parliament website, but six days is hardly enough time to get the word out that submissions are open, let alone get people’s heads around a bill and write a response. The protest yesterday in Wellington was “hurriedly organised” and there, Oil Free Wellington spokesperson Michelle Ducat told RNZ that the short notice for submissions “diminishes our democracy”. To her, it sends a message, “It says, we’re not really interested in what the public have to say.” It is long enough, however, for the government to say it happened, and wear a thin cloak of democracy.
Once the government receives what is likely to be a low volume of submissions, the select committee will come up with recommended amendments based on submissions. Usually it would have six months to do so, but the government has promised to make the legislative changes by the end of the year, so the report for this bill is due in a month, on October 31. Such a short timeframe suggests the select committee doesn’t plan on recommending many amendments. In the debate after the first reading of the bill last week, Labour’s resources spokesperson Megan Woods suggested “a more appropriate report-back date” of March 17. Labour and Greens members put forward a motion that would change this date, but were voted down.
Shane Jones, minister of resources, said the reason for shortening time around the bill was to address the current gas supply issues and high prices. “It’s the view of the government that it’s essential this bill is enacted as soon as possible,” he said. However, the government’s own advice on the bill says no new gas fields are likely to be discovered and developed in the next 10 years, and that the bill won’t significantly bolster supplies from existing fields either. Woods said that there’s a 16-year lag between exploration and production of oil and gas permits in New Zealand, a lag that “the minister knows”.
It seems decisions around this bill have already been made, since it was promised in election campaigns and included in coalition agreements. But the legislative process exists for a reason. It allows scrutiny and fine-tuning. This often leads to legislation that is supported by more people, and therefore stands the test of time. Earlier this year The Spinoff spoke to Geoffrey Palmer, once part of a government that enacted remarkable, radical and rapid reforms, who said he was concerned about the increasing use of urgency and churn of laws. “We’ve gone from being the fastest lawmakers in the west to the fastest repealers in the west. And I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
Knight also laments that politicians have become “addicted” to expediting laws. “Our laws and democracy suffer when the parliamentary process is rushed,” he says.
Perhaps, if we took more time, made more compromises, and used legislative processes properly, there wouldn’t be policy bonfires at every changing of the guards. Perhaps the laws that political parties promise could endure. But at the moment, the legislative process isn’t one that’s being used to shape the bill, but simply a path from promise to policy, or from A to B.