Bipartisan support for constitutional change to Parliament

While political parties trade blistering attacks over the Treaty Principles Bill this week, new constitutional change of a different sort has bipartisan support.
After a decade of quiet work, spanning three governments and five Prime Ministers, the Parliament Bill was introduced to the House on September 5. The legislation seeks to consolidate existing laws about Parliament into a single act and make the legislature more independent from other branches of government.
“It’s an exciting time for constitutional trainspotters, because we are seeing parts of our constitution being consolidated and built in a way which better reflects the separation of powers which lies at the heart of our governmental system,” Victoria University of Wellington professor of public law Dean Knight told Newsroom.
“It’s the institutional recognition of Parliament and its infrastructure and apparatus as a single entity. You’re starting to see the gathering together of the important rules that make it work. You see an institution rightly shaping itself out as a really important and really independent institution within the constitutional frame.”
Knight welcomes the bill because it corrects issues which left Parliament vulnerable to misuse of executive power. Top of the list – “the sharp end of the separation of powers” – is funding.
At the start of the year, Newsroom reported the two entities which make up Parliament had each been asked to make 6.5 percent budget cuts as part of the Government’s overall savings initiative.
“The proposed budget reduction will diminish the service we can provide in support of our Parliament. I remain very concerned that the executive can effectively limit the work of the legislature by reducing its funding,” Clerk of the House David Wilson wrote in an email to staff, obtained by Newsroom.
Chief executive of the Parliamentary Service Rafael Gonzalez-Montero told his staff he had asked Speaker Gerry Brownlee to plead the agencies’ case with Finance Minister Nicola Willis. While Prime Minister Christopher Luxon dismissed the concerns of Wilson and of constitutional law experts like Knight as “disingenuous”, Willis ultimately caved and the Parliamentary Service and Office of the Clerk were not required to make any cuts.
One of the key changes in the Parliament Bill is that these agencies will no longer be funded by the government of the day through the Budget process, but rather receive their funding from Parliament through a similar process as independent offices like the Auditor-General and the Ombudsman.
“What an important change, because I think we saw the dangers and the risks of ministers holding the purse strings of the institution that ultimately is responsible for holding them to account,” Knight said.
Another significant change is to empower Parliament’s security team. At present, they have no more powers than private security officers hired to guard a mall or a club.
This meant security officers weren’t legally able to pull down protestors’ tents in the early hours of the 2022 Parliament occupation. Instead, they had to wait for police to arrive – and the officers who did come were unable to respond appropriately.
While the changes would have helped in that situation, they were actually first proposed well before the occupation, arising instead from a 2019 review of the precinct’s security.
The new rules would allow security officers to temporarily detain people, temporarily seize possessions and to deny entry to the precinct, among other powers.
“By my read, they’re giving parliamentary officers independent power for the first time – coercive power over their spaces,” Knight said. The new powers are similar to those given to court officers, which meant Parliament was now joining the executive and the judiciary in having its own officers of state, he said.
“I think we’re going to look at those and scrutinise those quite carefully in light of the occupation. My sense is there’s quite a lot of thought gone into them and they’re quite careful and limited in what they’re empowering. And obviously they’re also addressing the relationship between Parliament security and the police and that’s proper, but the devil is going to be in the detail about whether we’re comfortable with that.”
One big element missing from the bill is an independent office for costing political party policies. The idea was first brought up after the “fiscal hole” of the 2017 election but opposed by National until Willis took over as finance spokesperson in 2022. Later that year, Politik reported a Parliamentary Budget Office would be included in the Parliament Bill.
Instead, there’s no mention of it whatsoever. Leader of the House Chris Bishop also said the Government didn’t consider making Parliament subject to the Official Information Act, but that this and other issues could be considered through the select committee process.
It is a near certainty that the bill will pass, as it has the support of the Government and of the Labour Party. A spokesperson for Labour told Newsroom the party would support it through to the select committee and look for room for improvement there.
This isn’t a surprise, given a significant amount of the legislation was conceived under Labour.
In fact, it dates back to the John Key government, when it was first proposed by then-Attorney-General Chris Finlayson. Labour picked it up after the 2017 election, though most of the policy work was driven by the Parliamentary Service, the Office of the Clerk and the Speaker of the House. Trevor Mallard, in particular, championed it during the five years he was Speaker.
Many of the Regulatory Impact Statements released alongside the draft law are dated 2021 or 2022. In April 2022, the Labour Cabinet approved key policy decisions. An introduction date was set for November that year, but missed.
After the 2023 election, it was advanced by Bishop once more, who took it to Cabinet in May and won approval for introduction in July. Most of the policy decisions the new Government took reconfirmed those made by Labour.
The text finally saw the light of day on September 5, though a first reading isn’t expected for a few more weeks. Eventually, it will go through a select committee process. In July, Bishop was aiming for the law to be passed by May next year, but there was a month’s delay before it was introduced to Parliament so that deadline may now be in doubt.