Lies, Damn Lies And Parliamentary Debate

Phil
Smith, thehouse@rnz.co.nz

Analysis
– In New Zealand’s Parliament, both lying and accusing
others of lying have long been forbidden. A new ruling
appears to have undercut that. We outline Parliament’s
traditional approach, this week’s new interpretation of the
rules, and the almost immediate changes to debating
behaviour that resulted.

The problem of facts in
politics

Productive political debate is difficult, if
not impossible, without some agreed truth. In recent years,
that consensus over what constitutes reality has frayed
internationally, and in many places has arguably been
severed entirely.

This is not new. To varying extents,
there have always been politically differing ideas of truth.
For example, scholars believe that the conflicting versions
of the biblical creation stories in Genesis are the tellings
of groups with slightly differing philosophical and
political objectives.

In the West though, the extent
of deterioration of a shared reality is unusual in recent
history, and has worsened markedly over the last decade or
so.

A marker of this decay (in my experience), dates
back to the immediate aftermath of, I think, a 2012 US
presidential debate, when in a post-debate media “spin-room”
the former Republican contender Newt Gingrich rebutted a
journalist’s question with “I see your fact and I raise you
my belief”.

At the time I watched slack-jawed, but
such an insolent disregarding of reality as being irrelevant
is now neither unusual nor shocking.

New Zealand is
not as affected by this political disease as many places,
but the international slide towards defending alternative
realities affects everyone. It would be surprising if it had
not had an impact on how New Zealand politicians think and
argue. It may even have influenced a recent shift in the
rules.

Parliament rules: Truth and lies

This
is the second story from The House in two weeks on
Parliament’s rules and
small rulings about those rules by the Speaker. It might
appear to be an overabundance of inconsequential Parliament
geekery. But Parliament’s rules and how they are interpreted
can have a significant impact.

Small shifts in
interpretation can alter the tenor of debate and how MPs
treat each other. It could be argued that this, in turn,
impacts their and our behaviour externally. Sometimes for
the better, sometimes not. MPs are highly tuned to these
small changes and adjust quickly.

Parliament has rules
about telling lies. It also has decades of collected
interpretation of those rules, as various Speakers have
fought the good fight against disorder.

Broadly, the
rules say mistakes are understandable but should be
corrected as soon as possible. Differences of opinion or
interpretation are matters for debate. But intentional lies
are one of Parliament’s biggest no-no’s, described as
“misleading the House”. Doing so without self-correction is
considered a contempt, and (if a formal complaint is
accepted by the Speaker), may be dealt with by the
Privileges Committee.

Lies are taken seriously because
debate is pointless if MPs make things up. This is
especially true of government ministers, who are responsible
to Parliament. Parliament’s oversight of government relies
on MPs abiding by a slightly archaic honour code built on
gentlemanly conduct: truth, honesty, decency and so
on.

While lying is disallowed, so is claiming another
MP is lying, even by implication. That would question their
honour. Pistols at dawn and all that. Any such claims have
to be made formally, not in debate.

All that
background became relevant on Tuesday, when Winston Peters
complained about Chris Hipkins’ description of tobacco tax
changes. The complaint led to a
to-and-fro:

Winston Peters: “Point of
order, Mr Speaker. We have sat here for month after month
after month while those members have repeated that lie in
this House. I am seeking to correct
it…”

Chris Hipkins: “Point of
order, Mr Speaker. Last week you ejected a member and named
them for saying that they were struggling to find members
with a backbone. How is accusing other members of repeatedly
lying in the House any different?”

Gerry
Brownlee: “Well, it is quite different in my head.
One was directed very personally at members of Parliament.
The other was a question about repeating a lie. Now, if
you’re taking a point of order on that, then… the member
knows that there is a remedy by way of the Standing Orders
to have that corrected. [i.e. making a written
complaint]…”

Chris Hipkins: “Point
of order, Mr Speaker. It has never been the case that where
a member has called another member or group of members liars
that they have to raise a privilege complaint to have the
Speaker do something about.”

Gerry Brownlee:
“No, no. Sorry. You’re pushing it too far. To
suggest that there is something out there that is a lie and
is being repeated is not an allegation against any
individual member or group of members.”

A change of
tack

Because of the previously mentioned honour code,
usually, any use of the word “lie” is dynamite in the House.
Using it has long been asking for trouble, usually a demand
from the Speaker to withdraw and apologise. Brownlee’s
ruling may have surprised MPs. It is definitely contrary to
the norm, for example Speaker’s Ruling 48/3 says:

“The
offence of calling another member a liar, or implying that
another member of the House is a liar, is an offence against
the House not an offence against the other person; it is an
offence against the dignity of the House and the assumption
that its members behave truthfully and honourably. For the
Chair to allow that accusation to go unchecked would not be
an injustice to the member accused but an injustice to the
whole House.”

Among the Speakers’ Rulings on
‘allegations of misleading’ and dealing with offensive
claims of improper conduct (pages 47-49), are rulings
banning euphemisms for lie or liar; and (despite the
Speaker’s ruling on Tuesday), noting that it is just as bad
to apply an offensive term to members of a party, or a
government, as to an individual (55/1).

The change in
behaviour was very fast. Just a few minutes later, Leader of
the Opposition, Chris Hipkins tested the Speaker’s new
interpretation by interjecting “nah, it’s just a lie”, when
Winston Peters was talking about the iReX ferry project. It
led to another short interchange with the Speaker, and in
response, Winston Peters put in his own two cents worth,
illustrating another reason why accusations of inaccuracy
are not encouraged.

“I am happy to refute that
allegation that what I’m questioning is based on a lie,
because we can itemise-with particularity, to the last
cent-the $471 million they spent before we even got the
job.”

Trying to decide the truth on the fly is
impractical unless someone were to fund a vast team of fact
checkers to adjudicate.

That brings us to where this
led. A new allowance for claims of mendacity. I can’t tell
whether or not it’s a good thing. It’s possible it will
become a rhetorical arms-race of claim and counter-claim,
muddying the waters of reality ever further.

Playing
to the ref

In sport they say ‘play to the ref’, so on
Wednesday, having digested the Speaker’s new approach to
such accusations, Labour’s Shadow Leader of the House Kieran
McAnulty stood to speak in the General Debate – a debate
over which the Speaker typically presides. McAnulty led in
gently, with euphemism.

“They think that they can say
that ‘black is white’ and people will believe them. They
think that they can say that they ‘are going to make things
better’, when actually, what have they done? They’ve made it
worse. They think they can claim to have built 7000 houses.
That’s what Christopher Luxon said in the House on numerous
occasions-in the House, where you are bound by truth. How
many have they built? Forty-five.”

But that was just
the pre-game warm-up. Remember that under the traditional
interpretation of the rules, presenting evidence doesn’t
matter – you still can’t claim a lie. Neither by an
individual MP or a group. McAnulty continued:

“Now,
there’s one thing that New Zealanders hate, and that is a
lie. If you were to extend that further, there’s only one
thing worse, and that is a repeated lie. And there have been
repeated lies after repeated lies after repeated
lies.

“What is interesting is that they think New
Zealanders are thick, that they can stand there and tell
them that the last Government wasted money over Covid…
They think New Zealanders are so dumb that they won’t
remember: at the time, they voted for it. They supported it.
In fact, I have a quote here from Paul Goldsmith: ‘We
obviously back this and how this money is spent. We support
the Government. We encourage them to go further.’ That’s
what they said.”

Speeches in the General Debate are
generally given more leeway, but even so, that was unusual.
I wouldn’t be surprised if McAnulty had a few arguments up
his sleeve, expecting to be interrupted from the chair, or
told to sit down. He was not.

A couple of speeches
later his colleague Ginny Andersen spoke. Her topic was the
same – National support for even more Covid spending – but
she avoided the dreaded L word. Possibly her speech was a
less aggressive backup, in case McAnulty’s speech had been
cut short. Andersen tested out a variety of euphemisms,
which are also often disallowed. It almost felt like a focus
group of one – just for the Speaker – to see what could now
be gotten away with.

She successfully tested
“selective memory”, the idea that “for National, history is
something to be rewritten”, “political amnesia” and
“hypocrisy”. All of them were allowed. Claims of hypocrisy
have been disallowed previously, even when aimed against
unnamed members of the public.

These General Debate
speeches were akin to a sportsperson testing the very limits
of the rules to feel how far they could go. Of course, where
that line is can change markedly depending on who is the
ref, which is why ‘play to the ref’ is a common tactic in
the first place.

I suspect that, over time, as
Parliament’s own referees settle into the role and possibly
feel a little annoyance and frustration at one thing or
another, each Speaker begins to imprint their own ideas on
the role, and the institution. Usually only a little, in
different ways from each other, and probably for many
different reasons. The ways they do that are usually
unpredictable, but they are always interesting, and they can
have unexpected flow-ons which might be good, or not. It can
take time to tell.

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