The Justice Committee chair says the Treaty Principles Bill select committee process is “unusual, but still business as usual.”
National MP James Meager also acknowledged it was “just not practical” to be able to listen to everyone who wanted to make an oral submission, despite receiving thousands of requests.
Oral hearings began on Monday, with the committee set to listen to 80 hours of submissions in total after the Bill received an unprecedented number of written submissions.
David Seymour – who is in charge of the Bill – would be the first to make an oral submission this morning, in addition to the time allocated to submitters.
It was rare for a minister to submit on their own Bill, but Standing Orders allow for ministers to take part in the select committee process.
Recent practice, according to the Department for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, had been for a minister to be available to a select committee to “explain the considerations underlying a government bill and to otherwise facilitate the select committee’s consideration of the bill.”
A spokesperson for the ACT party said the minister was invited by the committee to make an oral submission.
Other submitters today included legal experts, academics and organisations such as the National Urban Maori Authority, Hobson’s Pledge and Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga.
RNZ understands there were at least 15,000 requests by submitters to make an oral submission, with the total number still being processed.
Meager said he didn’t know the latest figures when it came to the number of people who wanted to submit orally, but “if they are ballpark accurate – if you did the maths on those hours”, he said it would be something like “54 days of straight, 24 hour worth of hearings”.
“Now that’s just not practical and not feasible.”
Meager said it was not uncommon for select committees to decide their own procedures for how to select submissions to be heard, “when a select committee receives more submissions than it can physically or literally hear” and “there’s just no capacity or resource or humans to be able to hear from every single submitter that wants to.”
He said it came down to a range of factors such as the numbers that come in, how many had been processed, whether or not there was appetite around the table to have a range of views, or whether it was proportional to what the views were.
Meager said the committee had worked to ensure there was a broad range of views heard in the first sessions.
Every political party representative on the committee was able to put forward submitters they knew had made submissions, or whose submissions had been processed.
“They are a range of individuals and organisations from different backgrounds, a focus on youth, a focus on academics, a focus on individual submitters who don’t come from those backgrounds and who have made their views heard.”
He acknowledged not everyone would be able to have their say, but all written submissions were “read by someone at some point – by an official or a staffer – and all those views are taken into account”.
The oral submission process, he said, was supposed to help committee members “tease out some ideas, or to elaborate or to strengthen those views”.
In every Parliament and with every Bill considered, Meager explained, there was a “balance” between allowing every single person to have their say and letting Parliament “do its job”.
“Which is to consider information and evidence which is relevant to the proceedings, and to use that to work into what they do with the Bill at the end of it.
“Traditionally, the select committee is intended to assist legislators to scrutinise the legislation and to shape legislation.”
He acknowledged the process had “kind of evolved” into an opportunity for advocacy campaigns and submission campaigns.
“Parliament might need to change or might need to reassert its original role, because ultimately, what the committee needs to do, and what our rules allow us to do, is to focus on submissions that add to the deliberations of the committee or are relevant to its proceedings.”
He said his job was to try and make sure that every party was represented, and therefore most New Zealanders views were represented at the table.
“I think the right thing to do is to try and hear from a wide variety of views, but make sure that all of those views put forward are substantive and they’re from people who have a contribution to make, and aren’t necessarily from the form submission campaigns or the template campaigns.”
He said the select committee process for this Bill was extraordinary in the sense it was difficult to anticipate the resource required to respond to the volume of submissions.
“It is in a sense unusual, but still business as usual, because we can still treat the bill in its normal process.”
He didn’t like talking about “records or record numbers” because it put the focus in the wrong place, and people start treating Bills as though they were a “petition”.
What’s valuable, he said, was looking at the content and the substance and “trying to put your view forward to legislators as to whether or not they should pass it into law.”
The Treaty Principles Bill would “go down in the history books until the next one comes along, because history is constantly rewritten,” he said.
Meager believed the committee had worked constructively and was not expecting any particular “hiccups”.
By Lillian Hanly of rnz.co.nz
