Giving the opposition more power on select committees is actually a pretty good idea. But is it enough of an extra accountability measure to make up for longer stretches between elections?
Fresh off announcing some, shall we say, underwhelmingly received changes to the law governing citizen’s arrests, justice minister Paul Goldsmith quickly got back in front of the media yesterday with another policy for us to chew over. Legislation enabling the government’s long-touted referendum on moving to a four-year parliamentary term will be introduced to parliament, and if passed this year could result in us all voting on the issue at the 2026 general election.
However, despite being a government bill, messaging on the issue is curiously lukewarm. All Goldsmith would commit to in his press release was:
“Both the National-Act and National-New Zealand First coalition agreements include supporting a bill to select committee. At this stage, no decisions have been made on whether this bill will proceed beyond this.”
The reason given for this caution is that “we want to hear what New Zealanders think during the select committee process”. Which is probably fair enough, given lingering memories of the 2016 flag referendum where the public got marched into voting on something they did not really care about and so ended up rejecting it largely out of spite. But you can’t help wondering if the government’s reticence also reflects the fact that the bill as it currently is written really is the Act Party’s baby. (Here’s David Seymour’s own earlier version of it, if you want to compare and contrast.) Perhaps National and NZ First aren’t minded to tie themselves too tightly to their frenemy’s ideas just at the moment.
Because, Act’s fingerprints make for a pretty complicated proposal. Under it, the standard term of parliament actually does not change from three years. However, the term will be changed to four years for any given parliament if, but only if, a particular precondition is met. Explaining what that precondition is requires a little bit of diving into parliamentary structure and processes.
Parliament has within it a number of “select committees”, which are smaller groups of MPs that focus on specific policy areas. As the bible on parliamentary practice – imaginatively titled Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand – puts it: “Through their detailed consideration of proposed laws, scrutiny of the government and its finances, and direct interaction with the public—among other activities—select committees play a central role in [parliament’s] discharge of its constitutional functions.”
However, the way that select committees currently are filled somewhat dulls their effectiveness. Parties get representation in line with their total number of MPs; a party with 10% of MPs will get around 10% of total select committee seats, etc. This fact means that the governing parties will often have a majority on a given select committee, because they by definition have a majority of all the MPs in parliament. And if a select committee has a majority of government MPs, its preparedness to scrutinise the government too closely understandably is constrained.
What Act proposes – and what the bill currently as written would make law – is that if, after an election, parliament as a whole agrees to fill select committees in a way that effectively gives the opposition a majority on most (if not all) of them, then that parliament can run for four years instead of three. The actual way of achieving this would be to exclude from the calculation of select committee places all MPs who hold office in the executive branch. As this will result in some 25 to 30 government MPs being discounted, there almost certainly will be more opposition MPs remaining than government ones and so opposition parties will get more select committee seats than governing parties.
The argument is that with MPs from opposition parties in the majority, a select committee will have an opposition MP as chair and can decide to operate in ways that scrutinise governmental actions more effectively. An opposition majority can, for example, decide to hold an inquiry into some issue that government MPs really wouldn’t want touched. It can call witnesses government MPs wouldn’t want heard. It can produce reports and recommendations where the committee majority say things that government MPs wouldn’t want said. And so on.
All of which is actually a pretty good idea, and there’s a lot to recommend it as a change in and of itself. But is it enough of a quid-pro-quo to give a parliament (and so the government that parliament gives its confidence to) an entire extra year before having to face the voters’ judgment?
First of all, note that the extra accountability provided by opposition-dominated select committees is to parliament, not to the voters. In particular, the recommendations of the Independent Electoral Review (of which I was a member) on improving our electoral processes so as to give voters better control over their elected representatives play no role in the government’s proposal. That’s despite the fact that our recommendation was that “Holding a referendum on the term of parliament should be considered as one part of our package of recommendations. Taken together, our recommendations aim to improve democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
Second, basing an extension of the parliamentary term purely on changes to parliamentary procedure seems somewhat risky. Even if opposition MPs get a majority on select committees, government MPs will still have a parliamentary majority as a whole. That then allows them to dictate a range of procedures that can impact on how a select committee operates. For example, if opposition-dominated select committees begin to become “too obstructive” in relation to legislation, then government MPs can vote to require that they report bills back more quickly (or, indeed, to skip the select committee stage altogether). Similarly, government MPs might vote to refuse to “take note” of a report from an opposition-dominated select committee, thereby removing the requirement that the government respond to any recommendations it contains.
All of which is to say that the bill’s sole currently proposed extra accountability measure may not be enough to make up for watering down the check that facing the voters imposes on government. So, what might be enough? Well, that’s a vexed question that the Justice Committee will have to work through once it puts the Treaty principles bill to bed – seriously, the MPs on that body really are being worked to the bone! Until then, you can always make do with Toby Manhire talking to himself about the issue.
