Leader Of The House: Juggling A Jigsaw Puzzle

Phil
Smith
Editor: The House

National Party MP
Louise Upston has quite a few full-time jobs. She is MP for
Taupo – her “first and most important job”, in the
parliamentary context.

She is also Minister of Social
Development and Employment, Minister for Tourism and
Hospitality, for Disability Issues, for Child Poverty
Reduction, and for the Community and Voluntary Sector. All
big jobs. Recently she has added yet another huge role, a
role at the core of parliament – Leader of the
House.

Leader of the House (LOTH) is a cabinet
position typically given to senior MPs. Recent holders have
been Gerry Brownlee, Simon Bridges, Chris Hipkins, Grant
Robertson, Chris Bishop and now, Louise Upston.

As the
new arrival in a storied list with a huge amount of
influence on the functioning of Parliament, we sat down with
Louise Upston to get her take on the role of Leader of the
House. All quotes are from Upston herself.

The
legislative jigsaw puzzler

“The overall job is making
sure that the Government’s legislative program, the laws we
want to pass, are progressed through the parliamentary
term,” Upston said. “So that is the overall job. So that
takes quite a lot of planning and scheduling. I’ve described
it in the last couple of weeks as a jigsaw puzzle where
you’re trying to fit all the pieces of the jigsaw into the
plan, except you’ve got twice as many parts of the puzzle as
there is room.”

I suggest this may be why the House
sits a lot more often that it used to.

“I think people
would be shocked to realise, in a normal week there is only
13 hours available to progress legislation, [once] you take
out Question Time, take out the General Debate, which are
functions of the normal week. Also, in a House sitting
block, you’ll have a Members’ Day. So that is even fewer
hours available for government legislation. And that’s why
we have been sitting extra hours.”

“There’s a myth
about urgency that I think is really important to put on the
record. Much of the urgency that we use, is just to get
overtime, to get extra hours, and that is to progress the
legislation that the Government and the parties in the
coalition campaigned on in the election that we
won.”

The LOTH is the Government’s master of
everything that happens in the debating chamber, overarching
the work of the whips, ministers and backbench
MPs.

This is all the LOTHs’ purview “because,
basically what happens in the House either enables or
prevents us getting through our legislative
program.”

That includes such details as how long
governing-party backbenchers can speak on bills, which this
term has often been barely any time at
all.

Parliament’s agenda & schedule

Part
of the business of House management is the Order Paper, the
order in which business is considered and bills are
debated.

“Again, that is challenging. So you want to
have sufficient legislation on the Order Paper, reflecting
the likelihood of when things will come up. But again, like
I was describing in terms of that puzzle; all of a sudden
something happens and you’ve got to have something that goes
to the top of the tree. Or something might be in select
committee. You’re expecting it to come back at a certain
date, but they’ve hit something gnarly and so the select
committee chair requests from the Business Committee an
extension to the report-back [deadline].”

Select
Committee extensions are quite common and can disrupt a
carefully laid plan.

“So all of a sudden, your
pipeline for what you were going to put into the House on a
particular date is different. So you’ve got to have enough
legislation on the order paper to have that
flexibility.”

Planning ahead for a return to
power

“One of the things that I’m thinking about at
the moment is ‘how do I ensure the pipeline of [future]
legislation is ready to go so that you don’t have a
situation at the end of a term of Parliament when there’s
insufficient on the Order Paper [for the next
term]?'”

“We have to have first readings to get
[bills] into select committee, to start the submission
process and have the submissions back in, so that when the
next Parliament starts, there’s work for the select
committees to progress and that will then come back into the
House.”

“So I’m not just thinking about the next two
months. I’m thinking about the next six, eight, nine months,
to ensure that there’s a pipeline of legislation. And I can
promise you, there are no shortage of options. It is just
which order those bills are in that
list.”

Cross-party diplomacy: In the
Chamber

In Parliament, political foes can be more
cooperative than you might expect, including in the debating
chamber.

“Often there’s a lot of kind of behind the
scenes work in terms of working across the House,” Upston
said. “You know, where there is legislation that is agreed
by all parties or agreed by the major opposition and the
government members. You’d like to see that there’s a bit
more progress with those that kind of makes sense.”

A
common scene in the debating chamber is quiet conversations
occurring between MPs from parties that are political foes.
Political foes can be surprisingly chummy, but these chats
are often backchannel parleys featuring party whips, the
Leader or Shadow Leader of the House. They need to make sure
the correct MPs are rostered in the chamber at the correct
time – maybe to debate a specialist topic. That planning is
helped by everyone agreeing how long everything is likely to
take. A cooperative agreement that some current debate will
reliably finish by the dinner break can be helpful to
everyone planning what happens next.

“Having spent
three years as a whip is a really helpful role for the
Leader of the House. When you’re in Opposition, you
understand the Government wants to get through certain
legislation, and there are just logistics that make life
easier, and the Whip’s job is to manage their teams, manage
their MPs. So you don’t really want to cause chaos if you
can do things in an orderly manner by working across the
chamber. That’s what you do.”

Cross-party diplomacy:
Business Committee

Cooperation is also common in
select committees and other MPs groups, including the
Business Committee, which specifically exists to organise
and pre-agree what happens in the chamber. The Leader of the
House is key to its function.

“The Speaker chairs the
Business Committee, and it operates on what we call ‘near
unanimity’, which is, you know, pretty much nearly everybody
has to agree.”

I suggest to Upston that, in practice,
a minor party or two might safely be ignored under ‘near
unanimity’, but she disagrees.

“In this Parliament
where the numbers of each party are higher-so if you had a
party that had one MP or two MPs out of the 120, that’s not
a big number. But when you start getting a party that’s 8
percent, 10 percent, 12 percent, it is much more challenging
to then have a Business Committee decision that excludes a
larger minority party.”

So how is agreement achieved?
Are tit-for-tat deals made?

“I don’t like the term
deal, because that kind of implies games. I think it’s just
getting to points of agreement. So I tend to not put things
on the agenda if [they aren’t ] likely to get agreement. So,
why provoke an argument, why provoke
unnecessarily?”

“So, for example, you might have a
minister that is seeking bills to be combined. I expect the
minister to talk to the Opposition parties and to sound them
out and convince them that it’s a good idea. If they can’t
convince them, it’s not going on the Business Committee
agenda because we’ll get, it’ll, you know, be defeated, and
I just don’t think that that is useful in terms of the way
the Business Committee operates.”

Upston gives a
softer example of decision sharing.

“There are special
debates that are now part of the functioning of the House.
We might then have, you know, four options for two debate
[spots]. And we might then say, okay, well, which one is
your priority, which one is our priority, and reach
agreement that way.”

A lot of the discussion occurs
outside the Business Committee meeting. There are a lot of
informal bilaterals (to borrow diplomatic
parlance).

“Yes, so there was a procedural issue that
was happening in the House recently, that I would then ring
my counterpart, [Labour MP and Shadow leader of the House
Kieran McAnulty], and say, ‘this is what’s coming. This is
why. I don’t want you to be surprised. It’s important that
you know what’s happening. There’s nothing mysterious in
this. You know, we’re not playing games. I’m ringing you to
give you a heads up’. And I think that’s where in terms of
the functioning of the House. It is really important to do
that as much as possible.”

Cross-party diplomacy:
Inside the coalition

The same occurs within a
coalition. History shows that Leaders of the House
overseeing a coalition have to expend time and energy (in
quantities dependent on the personalities involved), making
sure their own coalition partners remain on board with ‘the
plan’. Legislative timetables can shift if a coalition party
gets last-minute jitters about a bill.

I ask Upston if
she does intra-coalition diplomacy as
well.

“Absolutely. So, as we look at the runway to the
end of this Parliament, the amount of time available isn’t
great.”

Upston’s eyes widen slightly at this point,
like she has a mental image of an oncoming train.

“So
we have to do a bit of prioritisation. So, of course, that
is with all three parties in the coalition, saying, ‘right,
what are the ones that I must do on your list, what are the
ones that are less important?’ We’re going through that
process at the moment.”

Parliament’s rules: Advocate,
counsel and jury

The Leader of the House also tends
to feature highly as an advocate wherever Parliament’s rules
are decided, ruled on or judged against and are typically on
the Standing Orders Committee, which suggests changes to
Parliament’s rules. Likewise, they sit on the Privileges
Committee, which is the disciplinary committee that
recommends punishments for serious breaches of Parliament’s
most sacrosanct rules.

They are also the predominant
advocate for their own party and government, in arguments
inside the House about the interpretation of the
rules.

“So the whips have a responsibility within the
team, for what we’re doing and how we’re behaving, but the
Leader of the House and the Shadow Leader of the House [are]
then – ‘how is the House performing?’

“During Question
Time is often when it happens – the speaker may make a
decision, or there might be a member or minister that’s
behaving in a way that you don’t think is within the rules,
and so you’ll take a Point of Order to challenge
it.

“I think one of the things [you notice], having
been in Parliament for a few years now, is each Speaker is
different, and their tolerance for challenge is
different.

“I’m not the sort of person who sees
[Points of Order] as a good delaying tactic. But where it is
important to get the House back on track – absolutely. It’s
something that has to be done.”

Cabinet Legislation
Committee

Before all of the scheduling of debates and
getting legislation agreed, it first has to be suggested by
ministers, agreed in principle by cabinet, developed by
ministries, written by the Parliamentary Counsel Office and
agreed by Cabinet. That whole process is overseen by the
Cabinet Legislation Subcommittee chaired by the LOTH. They
make sure the legislation developed and written is what
Cabinet asked for. I asked Upston how that
works.

“Yes, earlier in the legislative process,
there’s a Cabinet Paper with policy decisions, and it is
really important that the bill that we introduce matches the
policy intent that we have agreed. So in many cases,
legislation that comes to that committee is just a kind of
pass-through. But on the odd occasion, it gets paused there.
It needs to go back for more detailed work.

“And
sometimes there’s just expectation management. A practice
that I have introduced is-I don’t like Cabinet Papers with
‘dates of introduction’, ‘dates of report back’, commitments
of when it will be passed and enacted. Because it’s too much
expectation – and that’s my job. That’s my job to manage all
of the moving parts.

“So [instead], bills have a
priority. And so that can be included in the Cabinet Paper
because that indicates: is it likely to be passed before the
election? Is it likely to be introduced before the
election?

“But at the end of the day, it’s about
managing expectations. And I don’t want to be in a position
where an agency is working to a timeline that is actually
not going to happen in reality.”

I ask whether bills
can turn up at the committee that have turned out to be much
more difficult to draft than expected, that have more moving
parts than imagined.

“Yes, and in most cases, that’s
picked up earlier when it’s gone to a cabinet [subject
sub-committee]. Usually there’s comments at that stage. If
it gets to the ‘lege [legislation] committee and the
drafting has been incredibly complex-my preference is that
we don’t introduce bills that we know have substantive
issues still to resolve. Sometimes you have to in the
interests of efficiency. But I think one of the lessons is
to go slow at the start, do the policy work, do the
drafting, get it right so that when it goes to select
committee; yes, there is room for improvement, but you’re
not dealing with fundamental policy issues at the select
committee, because that then creates a whole bunch of other
quality challenges and potential for delay.”

I suggest
to Upston that bills with remaining, unresolved issues might
also create more opportunities for opposition
politics.

“Oh, absolutely. So it is way better to do
the policy work at the start, get the bill as near right as
possible when it’s introduced, and then the select committee
process should be polishing, rather than doing fundamental
changes.”

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