Finance Minister Nicola Willis. Photo / Mark Mitchell
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.
OPINION
As a general rule of thumb, the longer a parliamentary recess, the more boring it tends to become.
One week is good. It gives everyone a chance to catch their breath. Two weeks is too long. As Leader of the House Chris Hipkins tried making them the norm in 2018, sitting in a four weeks on, two weeks off pattern to give MPs longer breaks with their families. He canned the idea in 2019. Four weeks on was too much (to say nothing of spending two weeks with nobody but your children).
Three weeks. Well, there’s a reason we don’t have many three-week recesses.
But that rule’s for the bin in the coming week, when Parliament’s select committees will meet for Parliament’s first ever scrutiny week, in which MPs will be able to give ministers a sustained grilling on the budget.
This isn’t entirely novel. Under the prior system, select committees still held estimates hearings in which MPs pore over the Budget, but these often lasted less than an hour. Once you subtract lengthy opening statements and patsy questions from Government MPs, the Opposition only gets a few minutes to prosecute its case. Good chairing was vital. It wasn’t uncommon for Opposition MPs to meltdown at being unable to prosecute a clear line.
The old system put a massive premium on which part of the Budget each party would choose to examine. The wrong topic could lead to a dead end, wasting that MP’s time. Too often this would mean MPs not using estimates to prod and poke a particularly interesting part of the Budget, but to rehearse weeks-old party press releases.
No longer.
MPs now have hours to grill ministers, in some cases doubling their time. Committees will be running all day, every day next week to get through it all.
The idea was borrowed from Australia during last term’s review of the Standing Orders (the rules of Parliament). The bipartisan review recommended scrutiny weeks for Budget estimates, and at the end of the year for departments’ annual reviews. Senate estimates hearings have been a feature of Australian politics for some time. One can only assume we’re calling them something different out of pride.
In practical terms, what this means is the Opposition has a chance to dominate the news cycle next week by relentlessly probing for holes in the Budget. Labour’s Health spokeswoman Ayesha Verrall will no doubt be looking to see whether any real effort was made to fund those 13 cancer drugs, or whether they were dropped without much of a fight (Treasury documents show the policy was costed up by officials back in December last year - but the trail goes dark after that).
Perhaps the most exciting clash will be on Wednesday morning, when the author of the Budget, Nicola Willis, appears before the Finance and Expenditure Committee. FEC, as it’s known in the building, typically has a party’s highest-ranking MPs and a deserved reputation for fireworks.
It usually meets in select committee room 2 of Bowen House, a room that was originally laid out to be a temporary home for the parliamentary debating chamber when Parliament House was undergoing refurbishment in the early 1990s. It’s obvious if you know what you’re looking for. Cast your eyes skyward and you can see the old public gallery, lights always on, ghostly empty, the glass barriers smeared in dust. Ruth Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets was delivered there (the famous photograph of her walking to the Budget reading with Prime Minister Jim Bolger is a giveaway - you wouldn’t take the Bowen tunnel to get from the Beehive to the chamber now).
The symbolism is powerful for both sides of the aisle. One will want to avoid it, the other will play it up.
The contest that might attract the most attention is not between Willis and Labour’s Barbara Edmonds, but between Willis and her old FEC colleague Chloe Swarbrick.
In the debating chamber, our tightly whipped MMP Parliament too often seems a charade, each vote preordained with binary simplicity.
But last term, Swarbrick and Willis exploited the opportunity provided by select committees to do something a little different. They furiously, forensically picked apart Labour’s Budgets and the Reserve Bank.
Swarbrick came from the left, Willis from the right. The critiques were unchoreographed, but often the same (house prices, inflation, services), the solutions were obviously very different (wealth tax, spending cuts). The effect was a brutal political pincer that squeezed Labour to the benefit of both National and the Greens. Both MPs were among the better-performing in Parliament, and had a good ability to marry a forensic investigation of whatever was before the committee with whatever political issue might be popular that day.
That truce is over. Now the pair go head to head. The contest is evenly matched. Swarbrick comes to the committee with the ideological coherence that is the privilege of minor parties. One of the strongest attacks on the current Budget (and the forecasts for the next two) is the level of public spending cuts required to fund income tax reduction and cost pressures in expensive departments like health.
Swarbrick has the benefit of coming to that contest backed by a 2023 revenue policy that was built around cutting income tax for most and allowing for public spending increases funded by a wealth tax.
The only real attack on this (though it is a powerful one) is whether you think wealth taxes raise the revenue advocates say they will, and are not themselves injurious to growth. Labour comes to the battle in a position of comparative weakness, having argued more or less since 2008 that the tax system is broken, yet whose only bright idea after six years in government was to terminally weaken one of the few parts of the tax system everyone agrees works pretty much perfectly: GST.
Willis, meanwhile, comes to the contest in a position of absolute dominance. She is easily one of the Government’s best performers. She wears the mantle of Finance Minister with relative ease, barely breaking a sweat in the House.
Labour’s Edmonds needs to find her feet. Subject matter experts occasionally struggle when they land their big portfolios. Non-experts like Michael Cullen, Grant Robertson, Bill English and now Willis have succeeded in the finance role (English, to be fair, had spent time at Treasury and Cullen had studied economic history).
The likes of Andrew Bayly (who held the weird Treasurer portfolio) and now Edmonds, despite having significant technical knowledge, can struggle to translate that into political attack. All is not lost for Edmonds, but it won’t be ideal if she gets squeezed out of the conversation next week. The pressure is on.
Whatever emerges from the first scrutiny week is likely to be swept out of the news cycle by a massive story, bubbling away for some years.
The Royal Commission on Abuse in Care has presented its findings to Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden. Its final report is due to be presented to the Governor-General by June 26 and sometime after that, it will be tabled in the House.
The final report will be earth-shattering - and earth-shattering for all sides of Parliament, even Labour, the party that established the Royal Commission back in its first 100 days in 2018. For the left, the report will open people’s eyes to horrors committed by the state against people it was charged with protecting and in our own lifetimes (the period under examination is 1950-1999). The right - particularly this Government, which has tended to downplay racial inequities - will have to reckon with the fact that abuse occurred on an almost industrial scale against Māori.
The other challenge is redress for the estimated 250,000 victims. Establishing a redress scheme was a key plank of the Royal Commission’s interim report, delivered in 2021. The former Government began work on such a scheme, but it was never finished. A paper delivered to the former Minister Andrew Little put the lifetime cost of a scheme anywhere between $160 million and a massive $29 billion - an extraordinary sum (although the interim report recommended contributions from the likes of churches to compensate for abuse in “faith-based institutions”. A more recent figure, floated by a lawyer representing victims of state care, said $500m might be needed for compensation alone.
The final cost, whatever it is, will be enormous. The Government will come under immense pressure to find some way of paying it at an incredibly fiscally restrained time.
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