Rats And Mice To Sort Out: Parliament’s Tiny Laws

Phil
Smith, Editor: The House

The bills
Parliament considers that are heavily reported by the media
are generally the most contentious, the most impactful or
the most far-reaching, with special emphasis on the most
contentious.

Bills that generate little animosity get
little attention. Bills that will have scant impact receive
scant love. And bills with a geographical reach that is
negligible, get about that much coverage. As a result, it is
easy to assume that all the things Parliament does are big
and important.

But sometimes Parliament manages the
triple-whammy – a bill that everyone agrees on, which has
negligible impact, and is also incredibly specific. So let’s
break with tradition look at it.

This is especially
true of two less common types of law: the unusual ‘local
bills’ and the rare, and highly specific ‘private bills’.
These bills can be brought to the House for debate by any MP
and each has a very specific impact. Local bills have a
geographically specific impact, while private bills deal
with a specific thing, an organisation, group, trust,
charity, church, or even a specific person.

The topics
can be so unlikely that they might be accidentally mistaken
for a lacklustre political spoof. On Wednesday for example,
the House spent more than an hour on third reading speeches
for a bill with an encompassing name – the Auckland Harbour
Board and Takapuna Borough Council Empowering Act Amendment
Bill, but that affected just one single building.

It
was not riveting stuff. The MP in charge was National’s
Simon Watts, who-whether intended ironically or not-rather
grandly announced, “This is a moment we have all been
waiting for”.

The bill had an admirable purpose –
fixing an issue with the ongoing costs and rental income for
a community asset; but why did such a local issue need to be
debated and passed by the House?

It was a fault of
history. As always, history has a lot to answer
for.

Heritage drafting meets modern needs

The
background for many modern local and private bills is very
similar – fixing problems caused by historic legal
drafting.

Local organisations (including local
government ones), are sometimes brought into being,
empowered, or had constitutions enacted under specific
legislation, written and passed by Parliament just for them.
That includes many things like clubs, churches, amenities,
and charities. Even patches of land or parks. That kind of
empowering legislation used to be more common many decades
ago, but does still happen.

Unfortunately drafters are
not prophetic seers, and the very specific rules and
purposes included in these old laws inevitably cause issues
over time. Now, when such an organisation wants to act
outside its early restrictions they need Parliament to amend
the original law.

Let’s consider this week’s example.
The 1923 Harbour Board etcetera law in question included
stipulations for the use of a waterside property. Community
activities like swimming and watersports were allowed but
private gain was specifically outlawed. Just three years
later, it became the Takapuna Boating Club but has since
fallen into disrepair because it isn’t able to raise money,
for example from a café, to help cover maintenance
costs.

And so a new bill was required to carefully
loosen those constraints. As Simon Watts noted during the
debate: “It is important that while we preserve the
community purpose, we don’t pass a law that ends up being
too restrictive in the future, meaning that another North
Shore MP in a hundred years from now will have to come back
and lament on the old laws that we’re doing right
now.”

That may all seem bizarrely specific and
trivial, but it is, sadly, not unusual. Many local (and
especially private) bills only exist to fix archaic
legislation. In doing so they offer MPs a debate that is
refreshingly amicable and without the usual layers of import
and consequence. With so little at stake Parliament can be
almost fun.

Debating everything and very
little

This debate had MPs reminiscing about beach
days, eulogising Sir Peter Blake and talking of plans to
play Mahjong at the club. Simon Watts revealed his caucus
referred to the bill as the “Takapuna Ice Cream Bill”.
Cameron Brewer suggested the bill’s sponsor would get a
weekend ticker tape parade through Takapuna’s shopping
thoroughfare.

There were many oddities, but the
highlight may have been ACT MP Simon Court enthusing like an
awestruck fan over a dreamy possibility. “I would suggest to
the member Mr Steve Abel, who spoke before, that on top of
mahjong, there might even be a venue where he might be able
to play some of his famous songs that he composed when he
was a famous New Zealand folk singer.”

In the
Speaker’s chair, National’s Barbara Kuriger chortled, “One
never knows where one’s endorsements might come
from”.

The slightly breathless nature of the debate
was helped along by the fact that National Party MPs seemed
keen to make it last as long as possible, because they
weren’t in favour of some member’s bills due to be debated
afterwards. Governing party MPs get very little exercise in
extemporising in the House about so very little. For
example, Cameron Brewer’s speech seemed to dawdle over every
topic he could think of vaguely connected with the locality,
including ice cream, cafés, local magazines and long-past
America’s Cups. He was not alone in the approach. When he
finally concluded, Labour’s Phil Twyford took the next call:
“Well, the member Cameron Brewer did well to remain on his
feet for nine minutes and 48 seconds, but it came at a
terrible human cost. Those of us in the House this afternoon
– we’re the living evidence of
that.”

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