A referendum must be held before the term is changed.
The Act Party’s proposal is to allow an extension of the term if the Opposition were given greater power to scrutinise the Government.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
The National and Act Party coalition agreement promised the Government would pass Act’s Constitution (Enabling a 4-Year Term) Amendment Bill through first reading in the first 15 months of the term. National’s deal with NZ First agreed to support legislation to a select committee enacting a binding referendum on a four-year term
Act’s bill was first put up as a members’ bill in the last Parliament. That bill would not have automatically extended the maximum length of that term to four years. Instead, it would have given the Governor General the ability to extend the term from three years to four if control over Parliament’s select committees was effectively handed over to the Opposition, allowing a far greater deal of scrutiny of the Government.
Currently, select committee membership is based on a party’s presence in the House, meaning that in practice the governing parties have a majority on most committees and control the agenda. This means, by extension, that much of the work scrutinising the Government and its legislation is controlled by the people Parliament is meant to be scrutinising.
New Zealand’s tightly whipped, unicameral parliament is a bit of an outlier in this sense, with other Westminster parliaments tending to allow greater freedom for MPs and more scrutiny of the Government.
ACT leader David Seymour proposed giving the Opposition greater power in return for the Government having a four-year term. Photo / Alyse Wright.
Act’s bill would change the formula for calculating select committee representation to what is used to divvy up questions during Question Time, where questions are apportioned based on a party’s proportion of non-executive MPs (simply, MPs who are not also members of the Government). In practice, this tends to give the opposition parties more questions than MPs from the Government.
The bill that will be unveiled by the Government is said to be very similar to Act’s original bill.
If approved at a referendum, the proposal could lead to the largest transfer of power back to the legislature in recent times, and would likely have flow-on effects on how Parliament functions and the type of candidates selected to be MPs.
Opposition MPs in control of select committees would have a good chance of having their amendments to a bill included in a select committee’s final report, which gets reported back to the House. This would give MPs a greater incentive to scrutinise legislation thoroughly and put up good ideas — or to use their newfound power to be obstructive and make life difficult for the Government.
Should the Government not like the Opposition-controlled committee’s changes, it would have the opportunity to resume control over the bill when it returns to the House.
Under the current system of effective Government control of committees, Government MPs have little incentive to probe legislation for weaknesses and put up potential fixes for fear of embarrassing the Government they hope one day to join by being elevated into ministerial office.
At Parliament’s worst (and it is not always at its worst), Government MPs are simply a conduit for the will of the legislation’s responsible minister
The system has some critics. Labour’s Duncan Webb told RNZ he was concerned that this would simply lead to “select committees obstructing the work of Government, rather than — pretty cooperatively, most of the time — progressing the work of Government”.
Opposition MPs would have to choose between making life difficult for the Government or working cooperatively. That might sound unlikely — politicians, after all, are not known for working cooperatively. However, cooperation is not unknown, even in the most fractious political systems. The Australian Senate, for example, has a habit of working in bipartisan fashion to refine legislation.
The changes would have an impact beyond legislation. Opposition majorities would make it more likely committees could start inquiries into Government policy, hauling officials before the committee more frequently.
The current Parliament has made moves in this direction, blocking out time for “scrutiny weeks”, far more lengthy investigations of the Budget in the middle of the year and the annual reviews of departments at the end of the year. Despite the increased time for scrutiny, in most instances, committees tend to be chaired by an MP from the Government who can disrupt the flow of questioning and can make it difficult for the opposition to get enough time questioning to get to the bottom of an issue.
Shifting control of committees to the opposition would give ministers and departmental chief executives nowhere to hide from difficult questions.
If the changes were to have their desired effect, backbenchers from both the Government and Opposition would have added incentive to up their performance both in terms of scrutinising legislation and the Government at large — addressing a complaint many have of MMP politics, which is that it has led to too many idle backbenchers.
Should the changes work, parties might change the type of people they select to be candidates, perhaps pivoting to prioritise expertise in scrutinising legislation and the Government. It might be too much to hope that MPs might spend more time doing their Parliamentary jobs and less time posting to social media about it — but we can dream.
The idea still faces an uphill battle.
New Zealanders have twice decided to keep the term at three years and voters tend to be reluctant to give up their ability to turf out a Government as regularly as possible. That said, New Zealanders seem to be open to change, a Research New Zealand poll from 2020 found 61% of voters backing a change.
