This Standing Orders report and its recommendations reflect a huge amount of work over the past year. I pay tribute to the Speaker as the chairman of the Standing Orders Committee for his handling of this critically important exercise. I also acknowledge the officials Mary Harris and David Bagnall, especially, for their perceptive and tireless work in clarifying matters for committee members.
The recommendations that have emerged in the report are good enough, as far as they go. The report aims, as the Speaker puts it, to offer significant opportunities for improving how the House deals with its business. The Standing Orders review is a triennial exercise usually undertaken by each Parliament.
The report from this 49th Parliament has focused on promoting a constructive engagement through the Business Committee about how the time of the House is arranged. The aspiration is that members can scrutinise bills more effectively and debate matters that are important to them.
Under the committee's proposals there will be greater incentives for all political parties to negotiate in this way. The principal changes focus on this goal. There will be extra hours of House time without urgency, and with certain balances and safeguards.
The rules for raising matters subject to judicial decision will be revised. There will be more provision for cognate bills to be facilitated with broad agreement. There will be more flexibility for arranging the Committee of the whole House stage for bills, and for dealing with amendments. Motions that shorten the time for select committees to consider bills will be discouraged.
Members will be able to gain support for their own bills before they win the ballot. There will be strict compliance with the proper form of oath when members are sworn in.
The Green Party supports these recommendations. We shall be voting to adopt the recommendations contained in the report. We think they represent progress in refining the rules of procedure on which Parliament is run. That said, we are also of the view that an opportunity has been lost for reforming the institution more thoroughly than the recommendations in this report allow.
The Green Party submitted a number of recommendations to the committee—some 19 altogether. A number of our proposals were accepted, others were not, yet we appreciate the considerable lengths that the Standing Orders Committee has gone to in order to reflect our views in the report. This enabled the committee to submit the report as a unanimous view without any minority report. We believe that the report is stronger as a result.
I do not wish to relitigate here every one of the points we originally made. I shall confine myself to five issues that we still believe need to be seriously considered by the fiftieth Parliament. The first is the oath, the second concerns the prayer, the third concerns petitions, the fourth concerns denial of leave, and the fifth concerns standards of conduct.
The Greens were pleased that a majority of the Standing Orders Committee recorded the view that in the course of the fiftieth Parliament, the wording of the oath, or affirmation, should be subject to a review. We all have total recall of the difficulty some members face in taking the oath in its current form.
It is of course important that members take the oath in the precise form that the law requires. The Green Party believes, however, that the oath needs revision to reflect the broader society that New Zealand has become and the richer understanding of our historical roots that we have acquired in recent years.
I recognise that National and ACT recorded a minority view on this particular point. We appealed to them to understand that a conservative outlook on our national character does not preclude change to reflect an accurate historical identity. Let us at least review the oath in the course of the next year.
The same view applies to the prayer. In the Greens' view, the Speaker could constructively convene a panel of recognised authorities to consider ways in which the prayer could be broadened to reflect the multicultural society that New Zealand has become. Who could oppose that? The Christians among us would scarcely be disadvantaged. They have nothing to fear—this is not the Middle Ages. We can acknowledge our common spirituality without renouncing our religious convictions. To do otherwise is to demean ourselves.
Concerning petitions, we remain concerned at reports that petitions that have accumulated a huge number of signatures can be summarily dispatched to the void by an arbitrary decision of a committee. That is according committees, and especially their chairs, undue power. There need to be some guidelines that committees must observe in their decision making on this.
The fourth issue is denial of leave. We deplore the fact that any member of this House can exercise a sole veto on two things: the tabling of a document in the House and a personal explanation by an aggrieved member. Denial of such leave should be confined to representatives of each party, perhaps the leaders and the whips.
The fifth issue, and perhaps the most important, concerns the code of conduct of members. We have a problem and, like any addict, the first requirement is to acknowledge that the problem exists. The New Zealand Parliament is rated poorly by the public, yet we as parliamentarians are in denial.
To quote the committee's report: "Public attitudes to Parliament are often seen as negative, because the public rate parliamentarians poorly as a group. This negative perception needs to be put in context. We have a highly successful parliamentary democracy and should celebrate its strengths." The report then describes the strengths and merits of the select committee process. The issue is not the public involvement in the select committee process; the issue is the public perception of question time and general debate.
It is not the conduct of members in select committees that causes negative public rating in Parliament; it is almost solely the conduct of members during these two sessions. So it is illusory to think that we can improve the public regard of Parliament without moving purposefully to improve the conduct of the House during these sessions. That will require significant amendment to the Standing Orders.
The Greens proposed two amendments that would go some way towards improving question time. The first amendment would set a higher threshold of behaviour by members. A new Standing Order would make it clear that a particular standard of orderly conduct is required during question time and general debate. The Speaker would ensure that members conduct themselves in a manner that brings no disrepute to the House.
The second amendment would require the Speaker to name a member who persistently uses offensive or disorderly words. Neither of these proposals was accepted, and we in the Green Party regret this. Nothing gives the New Zealand Parliament more of a bad name than the schoolyard antics that are tolerated, and even justified, in the name of free and healthy vigorous debate. In particular, the clapping and cheering of each captain's loud performance should not be permitted. Interjections are one thing; clapping and cheering is another. It is not simply sportive; it is childish.
The final point is this. It is a self-delusion to believe that reviewing the Standing Orders by itself will solve our problems. It will not. Continual refinement and improvement of the technicalities of an institution will not resolve the fundamental nature of an institution if there is something fundamentally wrong.
Reviews of the Standing Orders are good and necessary, but something much bigger, something more creative, is required if we are to seek to ensure that parliamentary procedure and democratic integrity are properly aligned. For that, we need a larger vision. We need a different kind of review, and I shall have something to say about that in the adjournment debate tomorrow.
With these comments, the Green Party is pleased to commend the report of the Standing Orders Committee to the House.
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