The Parliamentary Processes Behind The Missing Submissions Story

Phil
Smith, Editor: The House

Parliament
belatedly agreed unanimously
to allow all submissions on the Principles of the Treaty of
Waitangi Bill to be added to the parliamentary
record.

This followed a week or so of political
fighting after the governing party-controlled Justice
Committee reportedly opted to end considerations and send
the bill back to the House before its deadline, with many of
the more than 300,000 submissions still
unconsidered.

On Thursday, the ACT representative on
the committee, Todd Stephenson sought leave to move a motion
without notice or debate: “That the Justice Committee be
authorised to table and release or return submissions on the
Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, as if the bill
were still before the committee, after it has reported the
bill to the House.”

The (necessarily unanimous)
permission was given for the vote, which was agreed by all
parties.

A Q&A on the processes behind this
story

This is one of two news stories out of
Parliament this week that, while political, make more sense
with a little background on how Parliament
works.

RNZ’s The House sat down with the Clerk
of the House of Representatives, David
Wilson for that process understanding. David Wilson runs
Parliament’s Secretariat – the Office of the Clerk, and
quite literally wrote the book on how New Zealand’s
Parliament works.

Question: What is the normal
process when public submissions are sent in on a
bill?

David Wilson: When a committee
calls for submissions on a bill, it’s staff of the Office of
the Clerk, who provide secretaries to all of the committees,
who receive those submissions and process them.

And
what processing them means is checking them for a few things
– to make sure they comply with Parliament’s rules, and, if
a committee’s set any particular rules or requirements about
submissions, to check those as well. They’ll also look to
just make sure the submission is relevant to the thing that
it’s supposed to be about – they’re not always.

Then
they make them available to their committee’s members (the
MPs), and flag to the committee any submissions that might
need a decision made – so if it’s not relevant or if it
doesn’t follow those rules, to send it back, or to ask for
it to be changed, and returned.

Most of them are made
electronically – more than 95 percent. Paper ones are
scanned and then they are made available
online.

At some point the relevant ministry
tends to get involved and do some analysis on those because
your staff is actually not that large. I mean, there’s no
way that the two or three staff who are the secretariat for
a committee could go through hundreds of thousands of
submissions. So the ministry is brought in,
right?

David Wilson: Yeah,
so ministries or departments who have worked on developing
the policy behind a bill are almost always asked to then
give advice to the select committee on the bill; because
they know about it and they know how it works and what it’s
intended to do. And they’re in a good position to analyse
any submissions made on the bill for how they might fit in,
or propose changes. So they do that.

Normally, those
stages happen one, then the other. So, my staff receive all
the submissions, they check them for those things that I’ve
mentioned and then they go to the committee and to officials
so that officials can give advice on them.

That isn’t
the case where there is a vast number of submissions, more
than the staff can process in that time. So, many of those
steps could happen simultaneously.

Note: Where the
process is overwhelmed, the submissions may continue to be
processed by committee staff, analysed by the ministry, and
available to the MPs simultaneously. Not doing so would mean
the committee might need to wait months to have everything
processed and analysed before its deliberations could begin.
In a case like this one, where there were more than 300,000
submissions, that ultimately meant that the processing and
analysis was still underway when the committee voted to
finish its work and report the bill back to the House, with
a report on the committee’s hearings, opinions and
recommendations.

This week, the House voted to
allow the Justice Committee to continue processing
submissions even after its report returns to the House. How
will that work and who will do
that?

David Wilson: That’s
right. So, [normally] when a committee reports a bill to the
House, it’s finished with it. It can’t make any more
decisions about the bill.

Any correspondence or papers
it receives about the bill – it can’t deal with as part of
that bill anymore – it doesn’t have it. Committees can only
do work given to them by the House (about bills), and once
they give [one] back, they’re finished with it.

So the
resolution the House has made is that, even though, in the
case of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, there
are still a lot of submissions to deal with and there still
will be even once the report has been presented to the
House; the Justice Committee can continue to deal with them
as if it still had the bill. So it can make decisions about
whether they’re relevant, whether to return them, whether to
keep them and make them part of the record – which is, I
expect, what would happen with the vast majority of
them.

It also means that when my office publishes all
of those submissions online, they will be part of the record
of the bill. So that in the future, when people want to see
all of the submissions on the bill, they will all be in one
place and they will all be collected together under that
bill.

Because, otherwise, even if they were
published, they would be in some sort of weird addendum of
‘other stuff’?

David Wilson:
That’s right. And that’s not great and it’s not logical, or
easy for people to find it that way, even though it does
follow Parliament’s rules.

So, the outcome of
this would be that those extra submissions won’t be part of
the report on the bill that went back to the House, but they
will be part of the record of what the committee
received?

David Wilson:
They’d be part of the record and also part of the
analysis that the ministry officials did on the
bill.

The vast number of submissions on this
bill is unprecedented isn’t it? Every time the submissions
record has been broken, it seems to
double.

David Wilson: It is.
The previous record was 107,000. Now it’s about 330,000.
Before [that] it was something like 36,000, and before that
it was about 20,000, which all, at the time, seemed like
large numbers.

And it’s not like you’ve
suddenly got ten times as many people to deal with
them.

David Wilson: The same
committee secretariats are usually three people. In the case
of the Justice Committee it’s four people, because it’s a
committee with a big legislative workload anyway. But we’ve
allocated about another dozen staff from across the office
and temporary staff that were hired to help work on that.
And that’s, you know, 10-15 percent of our workforce, so
it’s quite a substantial number of people
involved.

*RNZ’s The House, with insights into
Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding
from Parliament’s Office of the
Clerk.

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