Hence on Tuesday Act New Zealand Southland list MP Todd Stephenson got up to make his contribution to the Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement, in which he extolled how well things were going for the government.
This charade required ignoring the fact that a couple of hours earlier, Act leader David Seymour — already in trouble for two ill-considered decisions in the criminal justice sphere — had copped another pasting for his attempt to drive a Land Rover up the steps of Parliament the previous day.
Not well, that is, unless you were about to proclaim exactly the opposite.
"I am excited to be back in this House and I am excited to be speaking in support of the Prime Minister’s statement and of course giving our full-throated support to this government and Act’s contribution to it," Mr Stephenson trilled.
After acknowledging "that Kiwis are still doing it tough", Mr Stephenson spruiked Act’s concoction of deregulation and cost-cutting as being just the economic tonic that New Zealand needed to pick itself up again.
"I know that our ministers are going to be working very hard in the preparation of the next Budget because we’ve got to be very, very careful with taxpayers’ money."
After praising his party for starting a debate on "the place of the Treaty in modern New Zealand" — another Seymour-inflicted sledgehammer blow to the convivial facade of the coalition — Mr Stephenson sat down, having discharged his duty.
Far more cheerful was New Zealand First Taieri list MP Mark Patterson, who took his turn that evening.
"I have got great news for Nicola Willis. The cavalry is coming and, as usual, they’re coming over the hill wearing Red Bands," Mr Patterson huzzahed.
"This is going to be a massive year for the regional economies of New Zealand. The big growth engine primary sector is really starting to crank, and that is fantastic news for our rural communities."
And for Mr Patterson, both as a farmer himself but also as minister for rural communities. He went on to praise rising commodity prizes — not that the government’s policies will have done much in its 12 months or so in power to have contributed to that — and proclaimed that 2025 was going to the year of wool and water, specifically improving water storage and usage.
"We also are totally on board with the growth train with our colleagues over here at National, getting that back on track and we have been a key driver within this coalition. Fast-track was our initiative that we took on to coalition negotiation—those 149 projects plus the tsunami that are coming in now that it’s been opened up to wider entry."
Soon after, Southland National MP Joseph Mooney had the unenviable task of following Te Pati Maori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, and used her contribution as inspiration for a few paragraphs of his own.
"[She] made me think of the fact that for the first time, high-quality, structured literacy and numeracy resources are going to be provided in te reo Māori — for the first time in this country — by this government, and that is a very big thing," Mr Mooney said.
"Having worked in the court system and in prisons around New Zealand, I know from personal experience that up to 70-odd percent of people who go through that system have challenges reading and writing. If we can help get them the resources so that they are able to read and write ... that is going to make a dramatic difference in their lives. It’s obviously not the only thing, but it is a very big thing."
Many questions
Mr Mooney had, unexpectedly, been in the spotlight during Question Time earlier in the day.
Normally, given that he is not a minister, all Mr Mooney gets to do during QT is enjoy the theatre, but on this day Labour had decided to take the rare step of asking questions to the chairs of two select committees, as it is entitled to do.
Of three such questions, two were addressed to Mr Mooney as chairman of the social services and community select committee, and centred on the length of time being given to organisations presenting to it on two controversial Bills, the Social Security Amendment Bill and the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill — namely, five minutes.
Normal practice for committee hearings is for affected organisations and other major players to get 10 minutes to have their say and take questions, while individual submitters tend to get five minutes. All of them will have made written submissions, some of them quite extensive, beforehand, which all MPs on the committee will have read.
However, the Bill have received 3533 and 5342 submissions respectively. Now not all submitters wish to be heard in person, but if you give 5342 submitters 10 minutes apiece and make the committee work 16 hour days it would take about 28 days to get through them all, which simply is not practical.
Mr Mooney could not go into specifics of how the committee made its time allocation decisions — committee deliberations are confidential to the committee — but simple practicalities was the obvious answer.
His committee is not the only one flooded with submissions — which is good, the democratic process only works if the public are engaged by it and engage with it.
But the select committee process is meant to be about refining legislation, amending drafting errors, and ensuring any Bill can achieve its stated purpose.
While on principle, mass submissions purely on the grounds of opposition to the Bill are a useful gauge of public opinion, it can be asked whether a steady stream of people saying "we don’t like it" will make the draft submitted for second reading any better.
