The justice select committee met yesterday to decide how it would approach oral hearings for the controversial bill that seeks to redefine the Treaty’s principles, given more than 300,000 people had made written submissions and the number of people wanting to make an oral submission was too high for the committee to handle.
In a press release yesterday, the committee confirmed it will hear 80 hours of oral submissions across four weeks. A full day of oral hearings will be held on January 27, with a further two hours being heard on January 30.
Submitters in the first week will be nominated by the members of the committee, which features politicians from all six of the parties in Parliament. It’s understood each party will be able to pick 25 submitters each.
The committee, chaired by National MP James Meager, has also decided to split into two subcommittees that will each hear 30 hours of submissions in February, with the remaining 20 hours being submitted before the entire committee.
One subcommittee is to feature Meager as chair, Green MP Tamatha Paul as deputy chair, Act’s Todd Stephenson, National’s Paulo Garcia and Labour’s Ginny Andersen and Tracey McLellan.
Labour MP Duncan Webb will chair one of the subcommittees. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The second features Labour’s Duncan Webb as chair, NZ First’s Jamie Arbuckle as deputy chair, Te Pāti Māori’s Tākuta Ferris and National MPs Cameron Brewer and Rima Nakhle.
A final number of written submitters, which topped 330,000 with a few days remaining before submissions closed, hadn’t yet been determined.
House of Representatives Clerk Dr David Wilson, whose office is responsible for processing the written submissions, said select committee staff would manually assess every submission to “ensure they are relevant, do not contain unparliamentary material or natural justice issues” before providing them to committee members.
“All available staff in the Office of the Clerk will be involved in this process,” Wilson said.
He acknowledged it would take longer and require more resources to process the submissions but committed to meeting the increase within his office’s current budget.
It was understood about a dozen people in Wilson’s office were involved in processing the submissions. His office could not provide an estimate of how long it would take to read all submissions.
The select committee’s meeting yesterday came on the same day as Hobson’s Pledge leader Don Brash called on members of his lobby group to consider cancelling their National Party membership over Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s repeated insistence the bill won’t progress past its second reading.
In an email to members, the former National leader referenced a video published online of Luxon at an airport telling a member of the public that he would “kill” and “spike” the bill. The video surfaced late last year.
Brash said the video proved “Christopher Luxon has no respect for his voters”, citing polling showing that most National voters supported passing the bill.
Brash asked his members whether holders of National Party memberships would be willing to cancel or discontinue their membership if Luxon didn’t allow a conscience vote on the bill.
Conscience votes allow MPs to vote individually rather than in a party bloc as they usually do.
“Would you be willing to cancel your membership in order to remind National who their voters are?” Brash asked.
“If we get enough support for this idea, we will launch a Boycott for the Bill campaign.”
A National spokesperson reiterated the party’s “long-held position” that the bill’s intention to hold a referendum on the Treaty’s principles was “divisive” and the party didn’t support the bill becoming law.
The spokesperson added that party members were welcome to make their own choices regarding membership.
Adam Pearse is a political reporter in the NZ Herald Press Gallery team, based at Parliament. He has worked for NZME since 2018, covering sport and health for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei before moving to the Herald in Auckland, covering Covid-19 and crime.
